 I grew up as the king of bad fingering. I can remember teachers and adjudicators criticizing my fingering all the way through my younger years. They diligently tried to instill in me good technic and logical fingering. But, the technic and fingering I used worked, so it was a tough sell to get me to unlearn one way and try to do it another. I used proper fingering in the basics such as scales, but everything else was somewhat of a free-for-all.
I think my own problem was made worse from playing jazz and improvising. If I’m improvising a technical lick or phrase, I’m improvising the fingering as well. The fingering usually worked, but wasn’t efficient. It is so easy to allow yourself to practice with and use a bad technic and not even realize the limitations it causes. When I’m working with a student, I talk less about fingering and more about efficiency of technic. My advanced students know that I could care less what fingering they use unless it is inefficient. Our hands are different. Not only in size, but in what feels natural and is tension-free. While my students know they have flexibility in choosing a fingering that works and is comfortable for them, they know what I’m looking for is efficiency. We talk about avoiding “acrobatics.” Acrobatics cause inefficiency and likely affect the expression of the passage at best and at worst, the accuracy and consistency. We often have to do acrobatics as we play. Liszt and Rachmaninoff filled their music with acrobatics at times, but not everything is an acrobatic and it is important to recognize when something doesn’t require acrobatics and can be performed efficiently. Just as important, we must do acrobatics consistently and with as much efficiency as possible. Consistent and efficient fingering takes advantage of the wonderful skill each of our brains is equipped to do and that is muscle memory. It is that wonderful phenomena of learning a passage properly and never really thinking about it again--the hands just do their thing. Why such bad fingering? Let’s change the question. Why not use the most efficient and effective way to play a technical passage and enable our muscle memory to help us learn things and be able to play them over and over accurately and expressively? Alexander Scriabin wrote this beautiful short piece when he was only 16 years old. The piece is filled with deep emotion and a gypsy-like expressive and weeping melody. Another performance that makes Evgeny Kissin one of my favorite pianists.
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