Hand independance is really hand dependance

[opus10no2]

Something I have considered recently, along with HS and HT practice, is that piano music isn't written for 2 hands as much as it is written for 10 fingers.

Sight-reading, memorising, it's all done in the brain as a 10 finger whole.

I saw an Andsnes documentary a while ago, and he could play the Rach 3 marvelously, but when asked to demonstrate some passages, he wanted to play some sections hands seperately, and had difficulty doing so!

It is almost like asking of oneself to only play the notes in a piece played with fingers 345, 12, or any other division.

Any other thoughts on this concept?

[quasimodo]

I kind of agree.
Especially with some pieces with specific rhytmic patterns, for example Ginastera's Danza Argentina N.1 or Prokofiev's precipitato in the 7th sonata. No way to learn it hands separately.
Currently I learn a Ravel's piece (A la maniere de... Borodine) and that one as well is totally emphasizing hand dependance.

[counterpoint]

I agree too.

You can learn hands separately, but that's something factitious, something that doesn't correspondent with the way music is composed. Even pieces like Bach Inventions are not composed as two independent voices, but as two dependent voices.

There are some avantgarde pieces, which create the illusion of independence.

[opus10no2]

In piano playing, the only practical reason the hands are divided is that they can simultaneously cover different registers.
They cover different textures and figurations, but however unique their action is from the other hand, it is the brain coordinating them both which is one of the main difficulties.

I'm very interested in pieces with the hands close together, weaving together a counterpoint and texture. The hands can do one of 2 thing - they can work together to form something, or work seperately and do individual things - but still this should be thought of as a 10 finger whole.

I'm obsessed with HS pieces too, they offer an incredible rigorous challenge for the fingers, and expand overall playing ability.

The notorious Chang book however does state that HS practice in HT pieces is beneficial, and I'd agree for some reasons, but overall - HT - the 10 finger whole - is how we play and memorise practically.


Improvisation is an interesting area with regards to the 10 finger ideology.
One CANNOT invent 2 seperate concentrated lines of music at once, and so if 2 hands are doing seperate things, one must be improvising, and the other must be doing a preformed figuration of some sort.

While one cannot invent 2 seperate melodies at once, one can still improvise a canon or even a basic fugue.
What I mean is - the ability to invent one melody, and superimpose another on top or underneath it is perfectly possible.

With some skill the themes can also be inverted, modified, and transposed.

See, the idea that these things are independant is an illusion, it is really 'automatic dependancy'.

In the case of improvising a fugue-like piece, it is about entrusting a musical invention to the motor-function part of the brain, turning a tune into a finger sequence.

[mike_lang]

I usually practice HS so that I can have a better handle on the texture, but lately I've been experimenting with something new.  Starting with a Bach fugue, I am using fingerings from 0 to 9 - 0123456789, rather than 5432112345.  From this point, having artificially and eventually mentally eliminated the division between hands, I practice voices separately, rather than hands separately.  I'll have to get back to you on how this works, but in principle should work and so far it seems to be.

...

Besides this, there is another [practical] application - if you want to remember a phone number, put your hands on CDEFG and CDEFG the octave above.  Play the phone number with your fingers (0-9) and it will be in your tactile, visual, and aural memories...

[opus10no2]

I have to add...

As Bach said - 'playing music is just about hitting the right notes and the right time'

I explained on the previous post about how sequences of finger motions can be learnt and ingrained into the motor cortex memory, so that for example, on the simplest level - one can play a scale up and down the left hand while making up a melody with the right hand.

Actually solo-hand piano music is the same, it's 5 finger music, and the only major difference is the leaping around to create texture, with the span being limited to the span of one hand.

Just as it is possible to entrust a sequence of almost subconcious notes to one hand and freely play with the other, it is possible to do the same with fingers.
Ie, a few fingers of the 5 play a preconcieved pattern while others do something different.
In Wittgenstein's exercises for left hand(imo the best exercise book around for actually expanding figuration repertoire), he shows fingerings for 3rds using only 2 3 or 4 fingers, allowing the other 1 2 or 3 fingers to do something unique on top of that.

I'm interested in the idea of improvising patterns in this way - making up a pattern(in close proximity, of course) of notes with a couple upper fingers, then transfering this pattern to the lower or middle fingers and improvising around it - a great challenge to be sure! but one that can enriches ones own grasp of what is possible with the instrument.

Now to the other element in Bach's quote - time.
Other than sequences of fingers and notes, there is the issue of time/rhythm.

This is an issue which dogs many a pianist - especially in the form of playing different rhythms in either hand.
In reality(except in really radical music, which requires entirely different consideration) both of these rhythms have in common one thing - the pulse.
They are related in a kind of rhythmic counterpoint, and react with and off eachother.

The big challenge improvisers have to deal with is keeping a rhythmic ostinato in one hand and freely using the other without losing rhythmic coordination.
As with before, the fingers can each be thought of in the same way too.

Consider playing a drum kit score - the bass being one finger, snare another, and the cymbal/hi-hat or whatever else in other fingers. It will reveal just how the fingers can all work together with a common pulse and do unique rhythms by themselves.

A practical exercise like before - tap 1 2 3 4 with the middle finger, keep a pulse. Then introduce a 2 bar rhythm with the thumb at the same time - once this rhythm has cycled once(or however many times you are comfortable with) immedietly transfer it to the 5th finger and simultaniously commence a new rhythm with the thumb, all with the same pulse.
At the end of every cycle keep doing the same, adding new to the preconcieved.

After an exercise like this, one should be able to have complete rhythmic freedom with their fingers.....not saying it's easy though 

[elevateme_returns]

fast bits in ondine and scarbo are hard separate handed. especially the middle of scarbo, couple minutes before 1st climax

[ted]

opus10no2:

This is truly a deep and most interesting consideration. However, as with all posts on forums, I have to be very careful to restrict my comments to those things I know something about. I am not very good at learning and playing other people's pieces so I shall leave that aspect and how it relates to the conjecture to other people who know better. 

As far as creative playing and improvisation are concerned, yes, it seems to me that I function with ten fingers and two hands as one unit. And yet, both during the act and afterwards, when I listen to the recorded results, I am keenly aware of multi-tiered and simultaneous ideas evolving, coming and going of their own accord. I cannot use the word "counterpoint", strictly speaking,  because it is not just a matter of melodic strands - it can be, but that is just a small subset of the effect. Moreover, it wasn't until I was relatively old that I acquired the knack of abandoning conscious direction enough to let this happen. More gifted people no doubt achieve it in their youth.

Part of the joy of improvisation for me is picking up on "unintentional" inner voices and phrasal relationships produced from within these patterns or "finger cells" and using them as the raw material for the next idea.  In this aspect I part company from the classical ideal of smoothness. Perfect smoothness contains no internal counterpoint. I find roughness much more interesting. Linear smoothness does have its place, and we should be able to produce it, but as an aesthetic principle it holds no interest for me any more.

Concomitant with this topic, I also find myself crossing hands much more often these days - using either hand, any finger, for anything, anywhere at any time - perhaps sharing a phrase or idea. Increasingly often, I let the hands and fingers "think for themselves".

To summarise then, yes, the more I allow both hands and all fingers free rein to function as a unit, the more they produce independent streams of ideas - counterpoint, polyrhythms, poly-everything. I don't yet understand why or what is going on, but I know that this is indeed the case.

[rc]

Could this be an issue of musical vs hand thinking?

For example, sometimes improvising or sightreading, there's a line and it so happens that you have to continue the melody in the other hand...  Where on the fly you don't have time to think of hands or fingers at all, just the musical idea.  Which is a matter of progress, a beginner won't be able to handle much, but with experience the subconscious can handle details like hands and fingers.