Fingering (music)

This article is about the musical term. For other uses, see Fingering (disambiguation).

Hypothetical cello fingering of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" with hand positions with ordinals, fingers with numbers, and strings indicated with Roman numerals. The A could instead have been played open like the D and the entire line could have been in 1st position.

In music, fingering is the choice of which fingers and hand positions to use when playing certain musical instruments. Fingering typically changes throughout a piece; the challenge of choosing good fingering for a piece is to make the hand movements as comfortable as possible without changing hand position too often. A fingering can be the result of the working process of the composer, who puts it into the manuscript, an editor, who adds it into the printed score, or the performer, who puts his or her own fingering in the score or in performance. A substitute fingering is an alternative to the indicated fingering, not to be confused with finger substitution.

Fingering also applies to other instruments, such as woodwind, brass, and stringed instruments. Depending on the instrument, not all the fingers may be used. For example, saxophonists do not use the right thumb and string instruments (usually) only use the fingers.

Instruments

Brass instruments

Fingering applies to the rotary and piston valves employed on many brass instruments.

The trombone, a fully chromatic brass instrument without valves, employs equivalent numbered notation for slide positions rather than fingering.

Keyboard instruments

On keyboard instruments all fingers are used. So there are numbers from 1 (thumb) to five. The numbers are related to the fingers themselves, not to the hand position on the keyboard. After Cristofori invented the pianoforte from the harpsichord in 1700, and after it became popular in the decades after 1740, eventually replacing the harpsichord, the piano technique developed tremendously (it was parallel with the piano builders´ progress and piano pedagogy, and as part of it piano fingering changed).

Keyboard instruments: Piano

There are only few publications about piano fingering.

It is mentioned by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (son of Johann Sebastian Bach) in his book Versuch über die wahre Art, das Clavier zu spielen (Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, ISBN 0-393-09716-1) where he dedicated several paragraphs to this topic (see the German original: "Von der Fingersetzung").

The British pianist Tobias Matthay wrote a small book Principles of Fingering (ISBN 0900180420).

In 1971 Julien Musafia published his book "The Art of Fingering in Piano Playing" (M.C.A., New York, N.Y., 90 pages). The book includes musical examples mostly from the Beethoven's Violin and Piano Sonatas and from the Preludes and Fugues of Shostakovich.

In 2012 Rami Bar-Niv published his book "The Art of Piano Fingering -- Traditional, Advanced, and Innovative" (AndreA 1060, Tel Aviv, Israel, 212 pages). The book teaches the craft of piano fingering using music examples, photos and diagrams, exercises, and injury-free techniques.

String instruments

Cello first position fingerings

Fingered music for guitar: The numbers 1 to 4 indicate the stopping fingers, 0 an open note, circled numbers strings, and dashed numbers slipping.

On string instruments fingers are numbered from 1 to 4, beginning with the index finger, the thumb not being counted because it does not normally play on a string, and 0 indicating an open string. In those cases on string instruments where the thumb is used (such as high notes on a cello in thumb position), it is represented by a symbol the shape of an O with a vertical stem below(somewhat similar to Ǫ or ϙ, for instance). Position may be indicated through ordinal numbers (e.g., 3rd) or roman numerals. A string may also be indicated through roman numerals, often I-IV, or by its open-string note. A change in positions is referred to as a shift. Guitar music indicates position with roman numerals and string designations with circled numbers.

The classical guitar also has a fingering notation system for the plucking hand, known as pima (or less commonly pimac), abbreviations of Spanish; where p=pulgar (thumb), i=índice (index finger), m=medio (middle finger), a=anular (ring finger) and, very rarely, c=chico (little finger). It is usually only notated in scores where a passage is particularly difficult, or requires specific fingering for the plucking hand. Otherwise, plucking-hand fingering is generally left to the discretion of the guitarist.

Woodwind instruments

Fingering of woodwind instruments is not always simple or intuitive, depending on how the acoustic impedance of the bore is affected by the distribution and size of apertures along its length, leading to the formation of standing waves at the desired pitch. Several alternate fingerings may exist for any given pitch.

Simple flutes (including recorders) as well as bagpipe chanters have open holes which are closed by the pads of the player's fingertips. Some such instruments use simple keywork to extend the player's reach for one or two notes. The keywork on instruments such as modern flutes, clarinets, or oboes is elaborate and variable. Modern flutes typically use the Boehm system of keywork, while clarinets typically use a similarly named system invented by Hyacinthe Klosé. Another system of clarinet keywork, the Öhler system, is used mostly in Germany and Austria.

History

Haqqul Azmi introduced an innovation in fingering for the organ and the clavier. (A similar, although according to Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach less radical, innovation was introduced by François Couperin, at roughly the same time in 1716, in his book L'art de toucher le clavecin.) Prior to Bach, playing rarely involved the thumb. Bach's new fingering retained many features of the conventional fingering up until that point, including the passing of one finger under or over another (Playing many of Bach's works requires such fingering, especially passing the third finger over the fourth or the fourth finger over the fifth.), but introduced the far greater use of the thumb. Modern fingering also uses the thumb to a similar extent, and involves the passing of the thumb under the other fingers, but does not, as Bach's did, generally involve the passing of any other fingers over or under one another.

In the 1980s Lindley and Boxall showed that the above relies solely on C.P.E. Bach's testimony: all the extant fingerings from J.S.Bach and his circle use the ancient methods, with very limited use of the thumb. More recently it has been shown that all his harpsichord works and most of the organ works as well are playable with the old technique.

See also

• Musical keyboard
• Recorder (musical instrument)#Recorder_fingering