Hand Position

I just want to say that I am not feeling very enthused about the "ball" imagery that is employed frequently to teach correct piano hand posture. The result among my students is an overly stiff hand with fingers that are much too curved. Additionally, the students bend their wrists so that their and forearm are literally forming and inverted V. Even when I model the correct way, it doesn't achieve the result that I want.

Music for Little Mozart's uses the idea of holding a bubble to achieve a good hand position. The idea being that if you hold the bubble too tightly, it will pop; if the bubble is held too loosely, it will float away. Most of my kids object to this method, saying that touching a bubble whatsoever will make it pop. (It is called pretending, kids!)

One of my little students was playing a piece today that used fingers 2 & 3 for the left hand. I suggested that she pretend that her hands were dinosaur claws when she played. She giggled at the idea and like magic, she played the entire piece with an acceptable hand position. For her, pretending to be a dinosaur made more sense than holding a ball.

Another method introduced in piano pedagogy class involved placing your hands on your knees and observing how the knee naturally curves the hands. I like this idea, but my students have difficulty transporting the feeling from the knees to the keyboard.

I know that hand position is important, and the habits that are acquired at the beginning of study will likely affect the future years of study. But part of me wonders if some of this trouble with hand positioning in young pianists will remedy itself naturally as the student grows up and their hands grow with them. It would be sad for a student to quit lessons because of a their inability to model specifically what the teacher wants right when the teacher wants it. I am still working on balancing this issue in my own teaching!