Finger Play, Part Four

Linda Babits, my first AT teacher who was also a wonderful pianist and composer,  entreated me to soften and widen my palms. I say "entreated" because it was certainly a "treat" to let go of years of gripping and holding patterns in my hand. She guided my hands across the keys, note by note, in order for me to sense how fingers move away from each other as well as down and up with the keys.

These side-to side movements are called abduction and adduction. In order to clarify these sound-a-likes from each other, medical people will often refer to abduction as A-B-duction. A-B-duction is the action of body parts moving away from each other, or "absenting" their neutral position. Adduction is the action of body parts moving toward each other. If you are a Star Trek fan, you will know how to "live long and prosper" by A-B-ducting finger 3 from finger 4. At the same time, fingers 2 and 3 will be adducting, as will fingers 4 and 5.


What these two movements provide for pianists is the opportunity to play keys at a variety of angles. We often need to do this to play certain chord voicings or intervals that are not directly under our fingertips. These movements are made possible by the intrinsic (inner) muscles of the hands, not by the tendons of the fingers. The interosseus muscles are intrinsics located between the metcarpal bones, and they help the metacarpal bones spread apart to open the hand. They also participate in closing the hand around objects like balls and pickle jar lids. These muscles reach over the MCP joints and into the base of the first phalanges. This allows them to be part of the network for flexing and extending fingers. Performers like Pressler have very, very flexible interosseus muscles in their hands. Thanks to this muscle tone, they can play big intervals and chords despite having short fingers.


Another interesting group of intrinsic hand muscles is called the lumbricales. These are unusual muscles because they have no bony attachments. They connect to tendons. In this role, they support the flexing action of the tendons at the MCP joints. Remember the Finger Riddler, Arnold Schultz? He contended that allowing the lumbricales to work would take strain off other muscles that may be overworking in finger movement, particularly those of the forearm. Appreciating that there are indeed muscles in the hand that support the flexing movement of fingers helps us have a greater sense of the interplay between tendons, muscles and bones of the hand.

Part Five will finish this series by connecting this information to approaches to piano technique.
                                                                                                       

 

Finger Play, Part Three

As as undergraduate music student, I was thrilled to hear the Beaux Arts Trio play live at my university. Even better, I was able to go backstage and shake Menahem Pressler's hand, and I was gutsy enough to ask him how he played Brahms with such a tiny hand. The next thing he did I will never forget; he opened his hand like a flower blooming. I could not imagine that a hand could open like that because mine could not, even though, palm to palm and finger to finger, my hand was definitely bigger than his.

This was possibly my most important lesson about the individual differences in muscle and connective tissue qualities, a lesson that would be reinforced throughout the years as I taught students with far more flexibility - and some far less - than I inherited. I have had students with "spider" hands and some with "Daddy Long-legs" hands. I have also had students who were challenged to open to a sixth - "ant" hands?

It is important to understand the difference between muscle and connective tissue. Muscle moves bones, and it is designed to be able to shape-shift quickly in order to accommodate a wide variety of movements. According to Anatomica, a beautifully illustrated home anatomy book published by Firefly Books, connective tissue is designed to "bind, support or strengthen organs or other tissues". (p. 21) There are various types of connective tissues, but we will be concerned mainly with dense connective tissue as we look at finger movements.

The two types of connective tissue that we deal with most often when learning about movement are tendons and ligaments. Tendons connect muscles to bones, and ligaments connect bones to bones, generally crossing joints. Possibly the most famous of tendons, if fame be so attributed, would be the Achilles tendon. This tendon attaches the calf muscle to the heel and is critical to uprightness and leg movement. Both literally and metaphorically, it is one of our most vulnerable areas.

Likewise there are tendons that connect muscles of the forearm to the fingers. These tendons are long, dense, and responsible for the movements we call flexion and extension. Flexion is the movement fingers make as they bend toward the palm. Extension is the movement fingers make as they open away from the palm. The flexor tendons and muscles are on the under side of the arm, and they provide the range of bending motion for fingers at the MCP joints. This range of motion creates a variety of options for the natural arch that occurs at the MCP joints. The extensors, on the upper side of the arm, can not move fingers far above what looks to be a level position between the metacarpals (in the palm) and the phalanges (the three bones that most people call the fingers).

When I first learned about these long, strong tendons, I was surprised that my fingers were controlled in large part by the muscles of the forearm. I had thought that finger "strength" came from developing finger muscles. However, the insistent pain I had developed in my forearms fit with my new understanding of the relationship between forearm muscles and finger movement. The more forceful I was with my fingers, the more tense I was in my forearms.

There are genetically controlled individual differences in tendon structure that can affect the range of motion of fifth fingers. As you can see from the illustration below, there is some interconnectedness between the finger tendons, a reminder to reconsider the concept of finger independence exercises. Some hands have a strong connection between four and five that decreases the ability of five to flex on its own. You can explore your own hand for this trait by holding fingers two, three and four together, then attempting to flex finger five toward the palm. In my case, it won't go far at all. Some people have one fifth finger which can flex during this experiment while the other one can not.

Left hand palm side down, showing extensors

In general, muscles are more susceptible to tears than tendons, but they are structured with multiple layers of fiber that provide a back-up system for injury. Unlike other kinds of connective tissues that are called "elastic",  tendons fall into the category of dense regular connective tissue. Tendons are not as malleable as muscles because of their critical need to attach muscles to bones. Tendons can become inflamed from overuse or improper use, however. If torn, they take longer to heal than muscle because of their reduced blood supply.



So, if tendons are not "elastic",  how was it that Pressler and my arachnid students could do what they did, which appeared to be stretching? Tune in to Part Four....

Finger Play, Part Two

I am a big fan of the 1951 movie version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I've seen most of the other versions, but I still prefer this one, thanks to Alistair Sim's portrayal of the cranky old miser who becomes as good a man as Victorian London could imagine. One of my favorite scenes is the visitation of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He shows up in a dark, hooded cloak, and all that is visible is his bony right hand, jutting out from a draping sleeve as he points to Scrooge's future headstone. That hand is downright creepy!

Bony hands often look extremely long because they show all the bones of the fingers. It is easy to forget that each finger is made up of four bones, not three, and that the thumb is made up of three bones, not two. The bones that form the solid structure for what we call the palm of the hand are actually parts of the fingers.

Here is the same drawing of the hand and wrist that I posted in Wrist 

Palm up view of right hand

Circles, Part Two (May, 2013). Look at it now for the bones that meet the wrist bones on one end and help form the main knuckle joints on the other end. These bones are called metacarpal bones, and they are located in the palm of the hand. Notice how they fit rather snugly at the wrist, but they glide with the finger bones, called phalanges, at the knuckles. This arrangement allows for a lot of movement at these joints, called the metacarpal/phalangeal joints, or MCP for short.

The MCP joints allow fingers to move up and down as well as side to side. However, there is no circular movement available at these joints. Just as our brains attempt to see circles at the wrist, our brains may attempt to see circles at the MCP joints. If you gently move your index finger in differently directions, you will notice that you cannot describe a circle at this joint.  Piano action does not respond to circular movement, as we discovered when looking at an action model in Now, Weight!, Part Three. It requires that the key be sent down, not around. It is possible to trace a circle with the fingertip, but adding even the small amount of force required to send down a piano key makes this a challenging movement. Therefore I will eliminate the theory of finger circles from the list of possible ways to change sound at the piano.

The next post will explore what tissues move finger bones.

Finger Play, Part One

The Riddle of the Pianist's Finger, by Arnold Schultz, was published in 1949 as a treatise on how the muscles that move fingers actually work. I came upon it myself decades later in an effort to figure out why my technique was not what I wanted it to be and why I was in pain. This was  before I became a Certified Alexander Technique Teacher and a Licensed Andover Educator®. I was simply a struggling pianist and teacher with a Bachelor of Music in Education and a Master of Music in Pedagogy but no idea how fingers actually move.

I had wonderful teachers who gave me excellent guidance on musicianship and style and developing listening skills. I am grateful to all of them. However, after all of the lessons and performances, I still did not completely understand how a finger moves, nor how that has any impact on how the piano produces sounds.

Possibly the most confusing element of my concept of finger movement was that of sound production being based on the shape of the finger: a "flat" finger produces a "richer" tone, for example, than a "curved" finger, one theory. Black keys should always be played with flat fingers, while white keys benefit from curved fingers, another theory. I pondered that in playing a quick A-flat major scale, for example, wondering how I could adjust finger shape from key to key. Yet one more theory I recently heard has to do with the speed of finger "circles".

If you followed my series of blogs called "Now, Weight!", especially Part Four (Sept, 2013), you will understand that the basic tone variable we have as pianists is the speed of key descent: the faster the descent, the louder the sound. The speed of key release changes the articulation: the faster the release, the shorter the sound. It is my experience as a teacher that students with many different finger shapes can create a variety of sounds at the piano. So why bother helping students adapt specific finger shapes, particularly if there is an unproven sound production premise behind these shapes?

The primary reason for understanding how fingers move is for the health and facility of the performer. A pianist with a faulty notion of how fingers move is more likely to become injured or technically limited. In the next part, we will take a look at some basic information that may help avoid these problems.