One Finger Practice

I had heard about one finger practice before and didn't appreciate its full potential. Here are some of the benefits I notice. 1. Evenness - It is much easier to get even tone when playing with the same finger. You can get the right aural image and then try to match it with the normal fingering. 2. The Bigger Musical line - To play passage work well you need to sense the underlying musical shape. In many passages one finger plays all the notes of this underlying shape. In Beethoven or Mozart the shape is most often a scale or arpeggio. If you play the underlying shape the structure becomes intelligible. I am sure you can expand on this with two fingers and so forth. Some Examples: 1. The triplet to sixteenth note arpeggios in Waldstein mvt.1 - Those two note gestures of d#e-ba. The ba may be played with different fingers. This helps you notice the mirror symmetry of melodic line. 2. The sixteenth note triplet arpeggios in the Waldstein mvt.3 - Play the (efed)(d#edc) line with the pinky alone. 3. Chopin Sonata 3 mvt.1 - the episode near the beginning where the opening gesture is sequenced. Play the top voice with the pinkies. 4. Mozart "Coronation" Concerto mvt.1- left hand triplets the pattern of fourths with the second finger and the chromatic line at the end of the exposition with the thumbs. Any thoughts?

"1. Evenness - It is much easier to get even tone when playing with the same finger. You can get the right aural image and then try to match it with the normal fingering." I couldn't really agree on this point. I think one finger makes it very hard to play with musical shape and a sense of long line. The only big musical issue is with interval sizes. Using one finger can make you take a little longer and create the sense of "difficulty" with which a singer would cover a big interval. This can then be carried into the sound image and will hopefully stop big intervals being rushed when they are as physically easy to cover as any other. "2. The Bigger Musical line - To play passage work well you need to sense the underlying musical shape. In many passages one finger plays all the notes of this underlying shape. In Beethoven or Mozart the shape is most often a scale or arpeggio. If you play the underlying shape the structure becomes intelligible." Again, I'm not sure if I personally agree. If anything, too much of this practise would be more likely to interfere with a sense of the bigger phrase. You could argue the same issue about physically FEELING the distance of every individual interval, but not so much with the big line. I think it's largely good for mental awareness of the notes. By going slow with one finger, you have to have a far greater mental understanding of what notes you are playing as well as the intervals. Arguably, playing with one finger is little more than a preparatory exercise for pure mental practise in which the notes are only thought about. It's a way of having something immediately tangible to be doing. If you ask a young student to just "think" about something, they'll likely sit there blankly and do nothing useful. But get them to play it very slowly with one finger and they are effectively doing mental practise- and you can see very easily whether they doing it well or whether they are simply flinging a finger around. Even a piece that can be played very accurately can suddenly seem unfamiliar. To play accurately this way requires extensive visualisation, that prepares the student for pure mental work. Not that I want to rule out anything else altogether, but it's very much the mental issues that I personally use this practise method for. I think there are far easier ways to work on musical shaping, but this is one of the best things I know of to introduce students to the idea of truly understanding the construction of music- rather than merely learning physical movements. That ought to spill across into musicality in the long-run, but I'd never be expecting anything terribly musically profound during the actual procedure of doing the one finger practise. "2. The sixteenth note triplet arpeggios in the Waldstein mvt.3 - Play the (efed)(d#edc) line with the pinky alone. " To be honest, I wouldn't really categorise this as one finger practise. It's not about the fact it's played by a single finger, surely. but more about the fact that there's a line that is implied in those particular notes? I think the fact that the fifth happens to play it is largely incidental compared to the musical issue. You could get many situations where a line is implied in a comparable fashion but where it would be played with different fingers. It certainly makes sense to me to think about the musical that the 5th happens to play, but if anything I'd actually be inclined to practise that line with a different fingering and physical legato- to prepare the kind of sound that the 5th will than go on to do on its own. What I'd personally speak of as being "one-finger practise" would involve playing EVERY note of the arpeggiations with one finger in a very slow tempo indeed.

1. Of course playing with one finger can help you get an image of even tone. Each finger has a different degree of development and sometimes we do have a sufficiently robust mental image to the amount of activity necessary. 2. The whole point I was making is that it is difficult to make a one finger line sing and this is a problem because the underlying melodic shape of a passage is often played with one finger. So the whole passage becomes unmusical because the foundation is under-developed. 3. I think you are again completely misunderstanding my point. Not every written note is part of the bigger musical line. There are in music. You have to sense the higher levels of the hierarchy that hold together longer time units. One pianist, I forget the name, said that interpretation is a form of PRIORITIZATION. 4. Of course there is a line implied. The fifth plays the notes of that line. It is a simple sequence of a shape. I said you could also expand this idea to include more than one finger. It is just that a lot of the time one finger DOES control the line and it helps clarify the division of musical labor. 5. You can go back and forth with physical legato and one finger practice. Sure. But you still have to get the right effect with the one finger. That is where the WORK lies. The POINT is - each one gives useful mental images that can be transferred to the performance situation. 6. I cannot imagine any possible gain from that last thing you suggested. The purpose of this kind of practice is to DISTINGUISH between musical roles, not to just play every note as if they were equally important. 7. You do not develop an understanding of a piece of music by THINKING of EVERY NOTE. That is absurd. You develop an understanding by identifying the basic shapes and gestures and voice registers and the processes of transformation and balance. It doesn't help at all to think of every note at an agonizingly slow pace. (It DOES of course help to think of how to get from one note to another.) Actors do not develop an understanding of their roles by thinking of every letter. They think in beats and meaningful units that are to physical gesture and cadence. 8. The purpose of these practice methods is to help things. A lot depends on the natural musical instincts of a student. You aren't going to make a class of philosophy students brilliant by showing them the skeleton of an argument but you will help them see things more clearly. 9. Ideally the pattern of physical gesture mirrors the pattern of musical gesture. That is how the body connects with music. That is what people try to achieve through practice. Movement is patterned and hierarchical. So is music. I think it is because of this that a focus on the physical CAN improve musicianship.

"3. I think you are again completely misunderstanding my point. Not every written note is part of the bigger musical line. There are in music. You have to sense the higher levels of the hierarchy that hold together longer time units. One pianist, I forget the name, said that interpretation is a form of PRIORITIZATION. " Okay, perhaps I misunderstood your point. You're referring just to specific situations where a particular finger is the only one involved in playing a particular musical line? I thought from this that you were referring to practising normal passages with one finger: ? If the idea is to improve the conception of sound from this (rather than the conception of what the notes are) I can't say I'm personally convinced. "5. You can go back and forth with physical legato and one finger practice. Sure. But you still have to get the right effect with the one finger. That is where the WORK lies. The POINT is - each one gives useful mental images that can be transferred to the performance situation." I think I see what you mean, but surely it needs to retain some of the physical context of the others notes? For example, I could see much value in using various fingers to play the melody line of op. 25 no. 1 (minus accompaniment) for musical practise on intentions in sound. However, I wouldn't personally see any value in playing it using the 5th finger alone, outside of the context of the accompaniment and physical positions. A suitable fifth finger action is so dependent on the physical context of the surrounding notes, that I think there's a limit to what can be learned from playing the fifth finger alone. It would strike me as needlessly difficult to make any musical line out of it- and I don't believe the movements would have much in common with those that will take place when the accompaniment is reinstated. "I cannot imagine any possible gain from that last thing you suggested. The purpose of this kind of practice is to DISTINGUISH between musical roles, not to just play every note as if they were equally important." It's for mental practise. For knowing the notes inside out, independently of physical habit. I haven't previously encountered any reference to one finger practise outside of this approach. "You do not develop an understanding of a piece of music by THINKING of EVERY NOTE. That is absurd." ? I see no reason not to make this one part of a balance whole. "Actors do not develop an understanding of their roles by thinking of every letter. They think in beats and meaningful units that are to physical gesture and cadence. " But they understand every syllable. ANY individual note can be the one of that produces the tension of a minor ninth, say. The greatest masters tend to know the seemingly insignificant notes as well as the melody lines. You don't hear great pianists rewriting Beethoven's accompaniment figures on the grounds that "it's basically just a load of C major anyway" say. "9. Ideally the pattern of physical gesture mirrors the pattern of musical gesture. That is how the body connects with music. That is what people try to achieve through practice. Movement is patterned and hierarchical. So is music. I think it is because of this that a focus on the physical CAN improve musicianship." I see the wider point, but I don't quite follow on the idea of practising the 5th finger outside of the context of other movements. It strikes me as a little like a hurdler trying to practise jumping over hurdles without getting the run up. Even if you can do it, it's a spectacularly different movement to the one you'd use in the final product. I'm not saying there's zero to be learned from that, but I am struggling to see the value in disconnecting the 5th finger entirely. Personally, I'd say it makes more sense to practise the musical line with as many fingers as you like and then to try to recreate that when putting the 5th into the context of the other notes and movements. When looking to develop the image for sound, the last thing I'd want is to be hampered by an absence of physical legato. Training the ear with one-finger practise would be rather unlikely to train it in fluidity or long lines. The easiest way to train the ear is to make it EASY to control the sound- not even harder. Alternatively, if it's about controlling the movement then it makes more sense in a closer context- not as isolated pokes.

1. The purpose of one finger practice is to improve a conception of EVEN sound. There are other techniques that improve conception of different aspects of sound - playing a left hand part with both hands for example. 2. Note my pervasive use of the word HIERARCHY. Musical lines can contain other lines or motivic units. None of these are unimportant. However we tend to lose sight of the big picture and this helps remedy that problem. Also accompaniments and small ornamental gestures serve textural purposes. Hierarchically they are SUBSUMED by the larger musical line but they aren't rendered unimportant. In the statements of the rondo theme Beethoven uses three different textures for sound structural reasons. 3. "I think I see what you mean, but surely it needs to retain some of the physical context of the others notes? For example, I could see much value in using various fingers to play the melody line of op. 25 no. 1 (minus accompaniment) for musical practise on intentions in sound. However, I wouldn't personally see any value in playing it using the 5th finger alone, outside of the context of the accompaniment and physical positions." I get your reservation but I do not think that is at all a problem. Here are two points. First of all - these normal physical positions often put you in a rut and ingrain bad physical habits. So even if this form of practice DIDN'T resemble the final movements much, it would still help. Second- we are trying to develop a technique that serves POLYPHONY. Our conception of the hand needs to suit this. The hand is a collection of hinge joints that can be positioned flexibly. Cant we use rotation and other subtle adjustments to execute both roles of the hand as best as we can?? 4. You make mental practice sound like meaningless rote work. Genuine musical understanding can lead to a total grasp of all the details without this strain. Thinking about DESIGN and GESTURE does help tremendously Thinking about NOTES doesn't. 5. By the way Beethoven uses the same sixteenth note triplet arpeggio figuration as an accompaniment in the recap of the G major Piano Concerto and there it has a line that directly matches the violins. In that situation the voice should be subdued but the phrasing ought to take its bearings from the line. In the Waldstein it is not an accompaniment so it would require more prominence.

"1. The purpose of one finger practice is to improve a conception of EVEN sound. There are other techniques that improve conception of different aspects of sound - playing a left hand part with both hands for example." Where did you hear the idea from? Not that I'm suggesting that anything that's less than standard is necessarily a bad thing, but this is not something I've personally encountered in reference to one finger practise. I've only ever encountered it as a means to check whether you truly know the individual notes (and the intervals between them) outside of physical habit- not for educating musical shaping. The whole reason why people advise things like two hands is to make it easier to control advanced musical shape- not to make it extremely difficult. Why would you train your ear in the hardest possible situation to produce the big musical shapes that you would want? I find this plain bizarre, personally. The thread that runs behind the concept of musical practise methods is that the physical means are unimportant- only the sound that you become accustomed to matters. When the ear is accustomed to the intent, you try to come as close as possible to realising that ideal within the actual technical requirements. How on earth would ultra-even one finger practise provide an ultimate musical ideal to strive towards? I don't see that it fits the fundamental logic of these approaches. These approaches are traditionally about the EASIEST way to get the ear accustomed to what you want in a context where it would normally be difficult to go straight into a musically polished rendition. To make it to execute and hear a profoundly musical line or phrase is to defeat the whole point. "Note my pervasive use of the word HIERARCHY. Musical lines can contain other lines or motivic units. None of these are unimportant. However we tend to lose sight of the big picture and this helps remedy that problem. Also accompaniments and small ornamental gestures serve textural purposes. Hierarchically they are SUBSUMED by the larger musical line but they aren't rendered unimportant. In the statements of the rondo theme Beethoven uses three different textures for sound structural reasons." I don't disagree with any of what you say. My point was specifically that this line is defined by context- not by the fact it happens to occur in the fifth finger. "The hand is a collection of hinge joints that can be positioned flexibly. Cant we use rotation and other subtle adjustments to execute both roles of the hand as best as we can??" But that's my point- what could be more conducive to undue tension than playing a series of non-legato fifth finger notes? There's nothing to rotate from without the preceding note! It's their context among other notes that most easily improves use of the mechanism. Other than preliminary work to secure a stable 5th, I cannot see any reason to play the 5th alone. I'd be more inclined to exaggerate voicing eg. play the 5th forte and the other notes ppp. Or play the fifth tenuto and every other note staccato. These approaches educate in a way that still relates to the actual context- not the rarity of playing a fifth finger out of any meaningful surroundings. "You make mental practice sound like meaningless rote work. Genuine musical understanding can lead to a total grasp of all the details without this strain." What strain? What rote work? It's a simple test as to whether you actually know what the next note is, independently of mere physical habit. Excessive dependence on habit is exactly where holes in understanding occur- when people know the movements but NOT the actual construction of the music. It's to inject the understanding that rote work fails to provide! I apologise if this sounds rude, but I suspect that you're missing the point of one finger practise. I've only ever encountered it used to educate (and indeed to test) knowledge of the specific make-up and construction of musical writing- not in a bid to create a musical ideal to aspire to. I think using one-finger is about the worst possible way to create the ultimate musical phrase. If a student were playing a Chopin Nocturne, the only time I'd even consider advising one finger would be to educate the perception of a wide interval. However, if I asked them to play a whole phrase with one finger, that's about the last thing that would give them a conception of a long vocal line.

I'm going to throw one idea out there. I don't really have an opinion on the one-finger idea per se. However, I think it does have something going for it insofar as the author has an intention. Practicing with intention counts for a lot. If someone else is skeptical of the benefit, well okay. But if the author thinks he's fostering a sense of musical line, . If he's thinking about it and going for something, then his practicing is directed, and it can't help but go somewhere. My wife was under the weather and found videos about healing meditation. Later, she felt better. She wasn't sure if she could ascribe it to the meditation. I said, what do you care! If you feel better, then it worked! Yay for that. Jai Jeffryes NYC

If someone else is skeptical of the benefit, well okay. But if the author thinks he's fostering a sense of musical line, . If he's thinking about it and going for something, then his practicing is directed, and it can't help but go somewhere. Fair point. I'm just wondering whether there isn't a quicker and more direct means. If it's about training the ear, surely the tradition of making something physically easier (with a simpler fingering or even two hands) is the quickest way to instill the sound-image? If it's about acquiring the means of executing the ideal sound in the end product- surely the real difficulty is in distinguishing those particular notes ? If something helps than you can't really argue, but I'm not convinced the poster's ideas about one-fingered practise reflect the regular purpose of the method. Personally, I'd make a clear distinction between practising the intended sound of a musical line (whether the final product requires that to be played in the same finger or among many) and one-fingered practise of that which would not normally be played with one finger. It strikes me that two very different issues are being muddled into one here.

1. Of course you sound rude but that alone is not the problem. The real frustrating thing is that you do not take the trouble read carefully and understand precisely what is being said. You should think more, edit more, write less. 2. Please make this distinction. A lot of times the basic musical line in a more complex passage is played by one finger. The passage cannot be played well if the one finger does not play musically. PERIOD. So it is entirely worthwhile to WORK to produce musical lines with one finger. IT also helps to isolate out the line and separate it from the ornamental material. As far as SOUND IMAGE goes - One finger helps with EVEN tone, not the perfect cantabile. I never said anything else. These processes work in both directions. Also it helps you make more subtle distinctions in effort because you are working with the same mechanism repeatedly. I believe the idea is from Earl Wild. Feuchtwanger maybe. Glenn Gould's teacher definitely encouraged the one finger practice of scales but I do not know exactly why. Who cares. 3. It is obviously torturous rote work to memorize a piece of music note by note. It doesn't help in the least to think of music that way. If I miss a detail, say I miss a note in a chord, I correct myself by thinking of the chord as FULLER. If I get a rhythm or expressive marking wrong I have missed the quality of gesture. That is how to think of detail. 4. Regarding the post by Mr.Jeffryes - Of course intention is a key element of musicianship. But here I am interested in how one finger practice clarifies musical texture and helps the student focus on the musical line that might be hidden. How far this goes depends on the musicianship and discretion of the student. 5. By rotation I mean what happens between the lower fingers and the fifth fingers, not how the fifth finger gets from note to note. 6. I never ever suggested that which finger plays a line is fundamentally important in the Waldstein example. It doesn't even play a legato line in that case. But there has to be a musical line in terms of dynamic level and timing. 7. Not all musical shapes should be practiced by one finger! But in many passages they are played by one finger, so it seems worthwhile to develop the capacity to play musical lines with one finger. 8. Sometimes adding difficulties in practice helps make things easier in the final product. Transposition for example or Cortot's suggestion for Op.25 no.1 to play the melody notes an octave higher.

"2. Please make this distinction. A lot of times the basic musical line in a more complex passage is played by one finger. The passage cannot be played well if the one finger does not play musically. PERIOD. So it is entirely worthwhile to WORK to produce musical lines with one finger. IT also helps to isolate out the line and separate it from the ornamental material. " I have not overlooked those. In fact, I've already responded in much detail to those issues. I stated most specifically that my problem is that the PHYSICAL CONTEXT is stunningly different. You spoke of the sound image, but the tradition is to find ways of making the ultimate musical intent easy to execute at once. Only then, do you go typically on to find the means. Traditionally this is the type of situation where a person would instil the intent by using a different fingering- to make it very easy to achieve and hear an ideal. Then they would attempt the more difficult undertaking of realising that ideal with the same finger playing every note of the line. The best quality ear-training is initially done independently of fingering- not in a way that makes it hard to control the sound. "As far as SOUND IMAGE goes - One finger helps with EVEN tone, not the perfect cantabile. I never said anything else." But this is what baffles me. If I wanted to train a sound image of an even tone, I'd go to my digital piano and turn off all dynamic variety and then play a phrase. The results are hideous though. It does nothing for my sound image to hear perfectly even tone. Traditionally sound image practise is done in whatever way make it easiest to hear the ideal MUSICAL execution. The only way to make those notes into a true line is to give them their own musical shape. When pianists try to reveal such thing in masterclasses, they often play such a line outside of the other notes. They never give a damn which fingers are used- because it's about the sound first! They use whichever fingers they can to most easily put the sound of the line in a student's ear- and then let the student find the means. There's simply no reason to be constrained by fingering, if that risks compromising the quality of the initial sound image. "Glenn Gould's teacher definitely encouraged the one finger practice of scales but I do not know exactly why. Who cares. " Well, I certainly do. Seeing as this is what you made the thread about, I'm rather surprised that you don't. It's an extraordinarily good introduction to truly thorough mental practise. "3. It is obviously torturous rote work to memorize a piece of music note by note. It doesn't help in the least to think of music that way. If I miss a detail, say I miss a note in a chord, I correct myself by thinking of the chord as FULLER." And if that note is part of a specific voice leading? It's not about fuller or thinner. I'm no pedant, but Beethoven's mere "harmonic fillers" are never any such thing. There are some composers where notes arguably do just fill the texture, but in many composers you simply cannot know details too well. If you cannot play a line slowly with one finger- you simply cannot truly say that you know the make up the music. You've just learned some movements instead. This has been a huge realisation for me. This style of practise exposes just poorly I actually know many of the pieces that I think I "know". "But here I am interested in how one finger practice clarifies musical texture and helps the student focus on the musical line that might be hidden. How far this goes depends on the musicianship and discretion of the student. " But this is my point- it's nothing to do with the one finger practise that you defined in the first point of your first post. It just happens that the notes that go into that line are all played with the fifth. In cases where they were not- I presume you would play the fingers that normally land on the notes? So it's not about the single-finger but about practising a line, yes?