Tiny Hands

[pandylover18]

Hi everyone,
 I'm new to the piano forum. I've read it many times before deciding to make my own account and post. So here I am! Anyways, I have extremely tiny hands. As a pianist, this is a HUGE disadvantage when I play. I can only play up to 7ths; maybe an octave in my left hand if I really stretch it. I'm wondering if anyone else has this issue? If so, how do you deal with it? Any advice? Thanks! I really appreciate it.

[sirpazhan]

I remember my piano teacher, she had tiny hands,, but would play Scriabin and Liszt etudes.. its been about 15 years since my last lesson and I still get amazed thinking about it. Although her hands were small, she had amazing dexterity and speed.. she'd 'roll' the big chords so fast that nobody would be able to tell that each note was being played individually.  when doing scales and octaves up and down the keyboard, her hands would open and close (5th to 1st fingers) like a camera shutter,,  its all about technique, hand speed and accuracy,, focus on rolling your chords to reach the octaves. or using your 2nd finger (index) and carrying it over your 1st (thumb) to hit large chords. etc, you can find a lot of information and tutorials on this subject online.  Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.. try to highlight your strengths,, stay away from pieces with enormous stretches and jumps.. ie: scriabin 8no12 or la Campanella etc etc.. those type of pieces will work against you.  - and just keep practicing.

[johnnybarkshop]

sirpazan has given you some good advice.

I once met the famous Bach player, Roslyn Tureck.  She had the tiniest hands I've ever seen; yet she could play all the Bach "48" as well as, wait for it, Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto!  Good luck and keep working.

[pandylover18]

sirpazhan: my teacher has also recommended rolling the long chords before, and it helped. thanks for your advice!
johnnybarkshop: thanks! good luck to you too.

[amelialw]

Yup, that's me too! My R.H can barely span an octave and my L.H can just span an octave. My stretch was smaller a few years back.

  Okay advice: Practice plenty of solid chords and broken octaves. For solid chord; play the first note followed by the other 3 quickly. You can roll or play large chords the way I play solid chords...see what works better for you/ makes more sense...that's what I do when it comes to playing pieces like Liszt Transcendental Etude no.3; there's this passage at the 3rd page with huge chords.

  At times you just need to build it up too, so start with pieces with few octaves& wide jumps and slowly climb up the ladder, it's possible

[pandylover18]

amelialw: it's nice to know i'm not the only one on this forum with tiny hands!  thanks for your advice, i'll work on it!

[outin]

  Okay advice: Practice plenty of solid chords and broken octaves. For solid chord; play the first note followed by the other 3 quickly. You can roll or play large chords the way I play solid chords...see what works better for you/ makes more sense...

I was getting a little better with my RH octaves but also started having pinky pain from streching. So I have decided I need to learn to break the octaves also where possible. It's difficult  though to make it sound convincing on my upright. Chords are slightly easier than octaves for me, but everything with more than an octave I need to learn to fake anyway...

[pandylover18]

outin: same here! my pinky starts to hurt after a while of stretching.

[outin]

outin: same here! my pinky starts to hurt after a while of stretching.

Better not do it much then...you don't want to damage anything.
Do you have a teacher? My teacher has smallish hands also and she shows me solutions to avoid streching.

[piano6888]

For smaller hands, maybe try rolling the notes or maybe just playing the melody note.
For example, Middle C and upper C, try just playing the upper C. or roll the middle C and upper C by playing middle C with the thumb and then moving your hand about a whole step up to get to the upper C (with your pinky- 5th finger) while you release the thumb from the middle C.  This is just one suggestion though, I'm sure there are other solutions but this is just one of them I can think of off the top of my head. Hope this helps.

[amelialw]

Better not do it much then...you don't want to damage anything.
Do you have a teacher? My teacher has smallish hands also and she shows me solutions to avoid streching.

it's not about avoiding stretches; it's about working out ways of getting around it...you shouldn't avoid because then your stretch will remain the same& as we grow older it becomes tougher. Just do it bit by bit; it takes a long time but be patient

[outin]

it's not about avoiding stretches; it's about working out ways of getting around it...you shouldn't avoid because then your stretch will remain the same& as we grow older it becomes tougher. Just do it bit by bit; it takes a long time but be patient

I am talking about constant overstreching when playing.
Besides some of us are already older

[louispodesta]

pandylover18:

I hope this makes your day.  It definitely will not meet with agreement from those on this website who have seen it before.

Enclosed is the link to my original post on Piano Street.   It states that my research has shown me that most of the pianists who composed, performed, and taught in the 19th century, rolled most of their chords.   This was done almost always in the left hand, and very often in the right hand.

Claude Debussy rolled practically every single chord and most always played broken octaves.  There are his own piano roll recordings that prove this.

Also, a rarely heard composer, by the name of Rachmaninoff, whose reach was a 12th, hardly ever played block chord octaves, and he rolled all of his tenths.

Josef Hoffmans' hands were so small that he had the Steinway piano factory make a special piano for him with thinner width keys.   Anton Rubinstein, and Leopold Godowsky also had small hands.

Further, a little tip I learned from the late pianist Earl Wild:  If you cant' reach a particualr note in a chord the way it is written, then redistribute the notes between the two hands.  Everybody in the 19th century did this.

A perfect piece to try this out on is the famous Rachmaninoff C# Minor Prelude.  With two exceptions, the chords in the right and left hand are identical once they are re-distributed.

In Rachmaninoff's Ampico recordings of this piece, he is rolling every single chord and most of the octaves.

A section of the Taubman Tapes is called the "Walking Hand."  It teaches you not to stretch out your hand to reach a key but to move your arm laterally to position yourself over that key.  In most cases, it is the smallest of distances when it invloves the entire arm.

Finally, here is the link to my video.  And remember, never let anyone tell you that it is inappropriate to roll a particular chord because it does not appear that way in the printed score.

[nyiregyhazi]

In Rachmaninoff's Ampico recordings of this piece, he is rolling every single chord and most of the octaves.

That is a woeful document. Listen to his acoustic recordings of the work. He didn't play it anything like the dubious piano roll sounds. I'm all for spread chords and subtle rolling, but not for misrepresenting reality based on poorly captured piano rolls that produce poor musical results. Real recordings always warrant greater trust than piano rolls- and he certainly doesn't spread "every chord", or play in the lumpy way the roll comes across.

Also, why the hell do you think Rachmaninoff took the trouble to write those chords in such a particular way? I'm typically in favour of redistribution. However, you've picked a spectacularly bad example in which it runs completely contrary to what the composer was clearly looking for. When the style of notation is quite so significantly specific (in a way that is unnecessary for the sake of  accurately notating the notes) it's not acceptable to casually overrule it. He is clearly making a very specific instruction for how the chords are to be distributed between hands- not merely writing notes in the most convenient way to get them on them stave, in a way that reasonably leaves it up to the pianist to decide how to distribute them.

It's all very well to want to rebel against the small-minded ways in which so many see things, but you still need to apply common sense.

[louispodesta]

I could be wrong, but it seems that this pianist with very small hands is re-distrbuting the notes in the C# Minor Prelude.

[nyiregyhazi]

I could be wrong, but it seems that this pianist with very small hands is re-distrbuting the notes in the C# Minor Prelude.

firstly, the angle tells us almost nothing. Although when it starts getting closer you can clearly see his thumbs going in and out in the way required to finger it as written. Occam's razor demands that we assume the obvious in cases of doubt. Not that we leap to the bizarre assumption that he's redistributing chords when we can barely see but not when we have a clear view. If he is, he's as wrong to do do as he is to play the first section so excessively loud. that's not Hofman on good form.

Secondly what have small hands got to do with this? you think Hofman couldn't take an octave? So how the hell does he get around the fuller chords that also involve an octave? There's no benefit to a small hand from redistributing that which is easy anyway and then having to get around far bigger stretches that cannot be faked. A pianist who cannot take an octave simply isn't going to have access to that piece, so it's no use using cheats (that compromise Rachmaninoff's voice leading) and then finding the rest of the piece cannot be accessed at all.


This is about the worst example anyone could possibly choose in which to advise casual redistributions- which can neither be justified technically nor musically.

[pianoman53]

Omg n. You really only join when you can bash someone, don't you? To join a discussion just to say that someone is wrong... Please stop trolling, it's getting old.

[nyiregyhazi]

Omg n. You really only join when you can bash someone, don't you? To join a discussion just to say that someone is wrong... Please stop trolling, it's getting old.

when someone gives a reasonable representation of Rachmaninoff, I have nothing to add. when they grossly misrepresent him, it requires response. you appear to have confused pertinent disagreement with trolling. perhaps you'd like the forum to be flooded by posts merely saying I agree, but I prefer to post when I have something different to say rather than when I have nothing to add.There's only one person trolling here, so please avoid posting unless you have something to say about the topic rather than about myself.

[pianoman53]

Since you have nothing to say about anything, but just write whenever you can say that someone is wrong, I don't think that's only about not agreeing. To run into any thread just to say "no, you're wrong" is kind of trolling, no? Go play with your legion piano, and feel important somewhere else. Pff, clown.

To go back to the topic: if you can only reach a 7: you might have some problems ahead. How old are you, if you don't mind?
The thing I can come up with is to first practice in such a speed so that you can feel whats possible to reach. Some chords you can either roll or skip notes, but if you play repeated octaves, that obviously won't work.
Otherwise you might want to look into forte piano or harpsichord, even though that might be the last way out.

[nyiregyhazi]

Since you have nothing to say about anything, but just write whenever you can say that someone is wrong, I don't think that's only about not agreeing. To run into any thread just to say "no, you're wrong" is kind of trolling, no? Go play with your legion piano, and feel important somewhere else. Pff, clown.

To go back to the topic: if you can only reach a 7: you might have some problems ahead. How old are you, if you don't mind?
The thing I can come up with is to first practice in such a speed so that you can feel whats possible to reach. Some chords you can either roll or skip notes, but if you play repeated octaves, that obviously won't work.
Otherwise you might want to look into forte piano or harpsichord, even though that might be the last way out.

If you want a world where nobody is allowed to disagree about musically important issues, tough. this is an open forum. by posting, people accept that others may make counterpoints. What IS trolling is responding to on topic posts with ad hominem comments that are entirely about a person and have nothing do with the topic. I'm not going to make any further comment on this tedious issue, which has nothing to do with pianism.

[louispodesta]

Two things that Earl Wild points out in his Memoir are:  1) Rachmaninoff's reach was a 12th, and having heard him in performance over 100 times, he rarely if ever saw him play a block chord octave, and he never played a 10th in unison, and 2)  Wild states that it was common normal practice for pianists in early 20th century to re-distribute notes in chords and that Hoffman did it extensively.  Why else would the Steinway Company make him a special piano with narrower width white keys, if he didn't have problems with his small hands?

Finally, thank you pianoman53 for accurately pointing out that there is no place for "bullying" on Piano Street.   If one is of that persuasion, then Piano World is the place for you.  They live for it on that website.

[nyiregyhazi]

Two things that Earl Wild points out in his Memoir are:  1) Rachmaninoff's reach was a 12th, and having heard heard him in performance over 100 times, he rarely if ever saw him play a block chord octave, and he never played a 10th in unison, and 2)  Wild states that it was common normal practice for pianists in early 20th century to re-distriybute notes in chords and that Hoffman did it extensively.  Why else would the Steinway Company make him a special piano with narrower width white keys, if he didn't have problems with his small hands?

?


I've heard Rachmaninoff play plenty of octaves together. Hyperbole is silly.

regarding Hofman, look at his hands on the first c sharp. his 5th is way past it, with 3 and 4 on the low note. he had the special piano not because he could barely reach an octave at all. it looks like he almost certainly would have had a 10th available. and none of this supports randomised speculation that he would have redistributed simple chords that are far easier to stretch than those he stretches with ease later in the work. There's no coherent logic here. none of these points proves anything about the specific scenario you selected, so please stick to the specific situation. nobody argued that Hofman or Rachmaninoff never redistributed. the issue is whether they did it in the example you chose and chiefly how it evidently spoils the musical effect requested.

Incidentally I tried playing the chords as you describe. it sounds monotonous and bland- making a boring homogenised sound that kills the interesting voicing that Rachmaninoff's evidently deliberate notation provides. it's HARDER to produce the voicing if you redistribute.


PS I redistribute like crazy in general. that doesn't mean I don't engage my brain before doing so. artists like Rachmaninoff did it for MUSICAL reasons, not because they thought it was cool to be a maverick and that they should therefore do it in any old place where they realised it was possible. it's Rachmaninoff's distribution of those chords that illustrates a true maverick- not someone  taking the very same notes and turning them into a dull clump of sound by throwing out his novel distribution between the hands (so as to eradicate the specific style of sound that his creative distribution produces). Rachmaninoff realised how much more boring it sounds with the more obvious fingering and it's a pity that you prefer to turn something remarkable into something dull, under the misapprehension that you're being creative.

[pianoman53]

Aaand you have yet to answer the actual topic.  Congratz, you entered trollville exclusive. Don't start with your bull that this is an open forum, because we all know that. Just because it's open doesn't mean you have to act like an ass in everything you write.

[nyiregyhazi]

Aaand you have yet to answer the actual topic.  Congratz, you entered trollville exclusive. Don't start with your bull that this is an open forum, because we all know that. Just because it's open doesn't mean you have to act like an ass in everything you write.

I

The Prelude is part of the topic. I don't recall either you being appointed sheriff or laws being passed to say that replies are only permitted to the first post and not to topical offshoots. in reference to the small hand issue, I'm afraid that the Rachmaninoff Prelude simply isn't going to happen without an octave- as there's no possibility of getting by the climax with spreads or redistributions. other pieces can be cheated, but the poster's either going to need to learn how to expand to an octave or give up on a lot of repertoire. for many pieces, an octave is the bare minimum. most music can be got around if you have that, but the bulk of romantic music cannot be faked without an octave span.

I'm not getting involved with your off topic personal insults, btw. I'll just report the trolling to the moderators and ignore any future nonsense, in favour of topical issues.

[pianoman53]

It's an open forum, I can day what I want.