The Arpicembalo, Small Hands, and Very Soft Cats

Arpicembalo

In or perhaps around 1700, the Paduan-turned-Venetian Bartolomeo Cristofori invented a harpsichord-like instrument that could play loud and soft. He called it Arpicembalo. Scipione Maffei, who interviewed Cristofori in 1711 described it as a “gravicembalo col piano e forte,” the harpsichord with soft and loud, and did his best to promote this new invention. Eventually, it was the soft and loud aspect of the instrument that finally gave it its permanent name, the pianoforte.

By the turn of the 18th century, the pianoforte was well established in many aristocratic or affluent households while also being the fastest-changing, most redesigned instrument in history. Over a century and a half, the keyboard octave grew from 125 mm to 170, until it settled on 165 mm in a modern Steinway, while between 1790 and 1983 the touch-weight necessary to play an audible middle C changed from 31 g to 84 g. Everything about its design became bigger.

However, the modern piano was not designed for the small.

Hands, Repertoire, and Success

The piano was not designed for most women’s, children’s, or even a fair number of men’s bodies.

It was not designed to fit or help those with small hands who cannot reach a 10th, and yet the 10th is the required stretch for playing the majority of the Romantic, Modern, or Contemporary repertoire, the majority of the repertoire that made the piano the king of the instruments for centuries. Virtually all bravura pieces that have awed audiences for the past two centuries also include large spans, fast octaves, and wide chords.

For those who still want to attempt playing the repertoire, it is an act of undaunted courage and incredible, shrewd persistence to devise ways to make it work; but the work is hard and dangerous, with mistakes that can end a career.

A study in Hand Spans

On a practical, life-lived level, is not hard to assume that most women will have smaller hand spans than men. In most occupations, this is not an issue but in piano playing it truly matters. How much does it matter? Quite a lot, once you take a look at the numbers.

In 2015, Rhonda and Robin Boyle, together with Erika Booker set out to find out what this hand span difference is and how it affects outcomes within the profession. They measured 473 adult pianists and contrasted them with 216 non-pianist university students and 49 children, tracking gender distribution as well. Here are some of their findings.

In their study, the difference between the smallest and the biggest hand in the adult piano-playing population is about “4.4 inches (11.2 cm),.. close to the width of five white keys on the standard piano keyboard.”

“The arithmetic mean, the median and the quartiles all indicate a difference of about 1 inch (2.5 cm) in favour of males. This difference is slightly more than the width of one white piano key. …’
“The smallest male span of 7.8 inches (19.7 cm) is close to the female average value of 7.9 inches (20.1 cm) meaning that close to 100% of males surveyed have hands bigger than the average female.”

Career Success

Boyle, Boyle, and Booker also looked at whether hand size correlates with career success.

They defined success as:

International, meaning “Long-standing solo performing career, including in major concert venues around the world, covering a wide range of repertoire; Internationally acclaimed recordings covering a wide range of repertoire; Prize-winner in major international piano competition(s).”
National, meaning: “Long-standing professional performing career in their home country, either as a soloist, accompanist or chamber musician; Nationally acclaimed recordings; Prize-winner in significant national competition(s).”
Regional, meaning: “The piano forming an important aspect of their adult lives, for example, as teachers, occasional performers (for example, in community fund-raising concerts) and/or as keen amateur recreational pianists, or The piano being part of their lives in the past, having learnt as a child or teenager but no longer playing regularly.”

Their findings showed that:

“Internationally acclaimed pianists tend to have bigger hands than the Nationally acclaimed, who in turn have bigger hands than the remaining ‘Regional/Amateur’ pianists.”
“Every acclaimed pianist in the International group has a right 1-5 span of 8.5 inches (21.6 cm) or more.”

Repertoire

Size truly matters, in terms of professional achievement, because it is connected to the type of repertoire one can play. Boyle, Boyle, and Booker found that the International careers pianists tended to play repertoire from the Romantics to the Contemporary which in general requires a larger hand reach, while those of National acclaim specialize in Baroque and Classical, requiring a smaller stretch.

Competitions

These findings may also explain why women competitors at high-level events are very few, and why there are even fewer female pianist winners. The statistics range between 0% at the Rubinstein and 23% at the Cleveland International Piano Competition.

When specific repertoire is involved, such as at specialized, composer competitions, e.g. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, the number of female winners is between 31% and 74%.

Since the average size of women’s hands is the men’s smallest, it is hard not to attribute these numbers to the difference in span.

Injury

Hand size also explains why being a woman is considered a risk factor for injury at the piano. The reality in every single conservatory and top music program in the world is that pianists practice/play/rehearse between 4-8 hours a day, many times taking fewer than ideal numbers of breaks between playing sessions. If even 20% of that time is spent practicing something in an extended hand position, being at 100% of possible stretch will create much more damage than playing at 70-80% of one’s possible range. Given the same amount of time and the same repertoire, those with smaller hands will be courting injury while those with bigger hands will just have a pleasant workout.

I have touched upon some of the issues connected to learning how to play an instrument that does not fit one’s size in a previous blog. However, here I would like to offer a small but perhaps career-saving remedy to those who have small hands and big love for 19th through 21st-century music.

I have recorded a short video demonstrating a hand-opening exercise, but before you jump to playing it, please wait a little bit and read on, it will make a big difference in how you understand it. Plus, there will be cats…

Cats

There are fewer than a handful of animals included in the Tai Chi Classic, The Mental Elucidation of the Thirteen Postures, but the CAT is mentioned TWICE!

In a clear victory over all the other fauna that could have been given as an example, the cat gets two lines:

“One’s spirit is like a cat seizing a rat.”
“Step like a cat walking.”

Why not the hawk or the rabbit, which do get a mention right after the first sentence?

Or even the aforementioned rat??

As with so many of the lines in the Classics, there are many aspects of practice and ways of being signaled within these sentences. The cat comes in as an example of relaxed but available movement, alertness, naturalness, body unification, mind/intent-body unification, coordination, efficiency, and softness.

Paws

If you have ever observed a cat going about its business, checking out various corners of various territories, you may have noticed that it does not have any extraneous movements, can change direction very quickly, and does not have any stiffness, unless injured. The cat is quick and agile when in motion, and soft when at rest.

If you happen to have a tabby of your own, you probably have been subjected to a repeated ritual of soft paws pushing and pulling against your body (or your covers), but have you ever noticed how much bigger their paws get when they knead or stretch? Where does all this paw space come from?

The Tai Chi explanation would be that the cat knows how to open and close its paws without pushing or contracting. The cat knows how to be soft. The cat knows how to be relaxed while doing it.

Open

Without spending too much time on the etymology of the word ‘open,’ it is important to notice that it carries several implications: 1) space increase, e.g., there was less of and after opening there is more; 2) that which is now open allows a different experience to manifest, e.g. you can now see, feel, hear, etc. something you could not before.

Consider, for instance, opening a door:

1) the space that is available once you open the door is greater than before;

2 ) the barrier between what is outside of and inside of the door disappears, allowing you to step through and have a different experience.

The physical act of opening a door is usually very easy and simple, turn the nob or handle and gently step through. Unless it malfuncitons in some sort of way or it is designed to be heavy, opening of a door is not difficult.

To open something is to exert only enough energy to obtain the desired outcome.

Push

Contrast that with pushing. To push means to constantly exert effort, from the beginning to the middle and all the way through to the end of an action. If opening something is a complete and finite action, pushing is constant.

In language, there are several phrases that illustrate this: many are ‘pushing through the pain,’ physical or emotional, overriding thus a primary health mechanism; one can find oneself ‘pushing a project through’ perhaps against opposition or even one’s desire to see it completed; sometimes, we all have to push through the crowd; and occasionally we feel like we are ‘pushing a boulder up the hill,’ an acknowledgment of the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra. As punishment by Hades for cheating death twice, he was forced to push a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down once it almost reached the top.

Pushing is a constant exertion of effort.

Opening has the advantage of minimizing effort and maximizing results, therefore conserving energy; pushing has the disadvantage of maximizing effort and constantly expending energy.

Tai Chi

In Tai Chi, there is very little time spent on pushing with the arms, and it is done only in the context of its martial application. If there is a push, it is at the end of a movement, at the last moment, and for as short as possible a time while still being effective. In this context, the perception of the opponent is that of being pushed but the inner perception of the person executing the move is of a release.

The external result is a push but the internal action is a letting go.

Nonetheless, in Tai Chi for health and meditation, most practice is spent on opening: the body with all its muscles, ligaments, tendons, joints, and fascia; the mind, with its emotions, perceptions, and thinking; and if the practitioner is interested, the spirit, with its connections and experiences that defy short explanations or enumeration.

Returning to the cat and its incredibly flexible and spacious paws, the spreading that they demonstrate is only possible because they open to the greatest extent available without pushing. Once it has had enough opening, all the cat needs to do in order to return the paws to their usual size is to just… let go. It is not a contraction or a pulling inwards, it simply lets go of its extension with the same naturalness as closing a door that was open. And the whole cat remains soft throughout.

For the Pianist

In the context of the human body, to open a joint means to articulate the joint in accordance with its design.

To push a joint means to articulate the joint PAST its design, or on a plane of motion that it is not meant to cover.

Consider, for instance, trying to move the knee joint from side to side when its design is to move forward and back; you can get some tiny bit of motion out of it but that will be very swiftly followed by an injury.

Palm

Within the anatomy of the hand, there are joints in the 1) fingers and 2) in the palm, at the a) metacarpals and b) small bones arranged in two rows close to the wrist.

The palm, the area between the places where the fingers attach to the hand and the wrist, is the most frequently underutilized surface of the hand, many times ignored by pianists with hands of all sizes. However, while those who won the genetic lottery and have big hands can afford to ignore it, those with smaller hands cannot.

Located between the forearm and the fingers, the palm is the communicator, the area that allows information to pass through from the forearm to the fingertips. It is the part that is designed to move inwards and outwards.

The palm is a place that can give not only a little bit more span but, most importantly, a sense of ease when keeping the hand in an extended stretch for a long time. It is this ease that will most likely prevent injuries and will impart a sense of freedom of movement to the fingers.

For small hands, the most frequently used action to open the hand is by stretching the fingers forward. However, this not not beneficial for the hand because it engages the tendons in a forward movement while also requiring them to move up and down in order to move the keys. The two actions are at cross purposes and predispose to injury.

In small hands, reaching for a wider span creates the tendency to push the fingertips forward in order to get more extension. However, the more efficient approach is to open the palm instead, allowing the tissue in between the bones to expand to its uncontracted, natural size. If there is a desire for more reach, it will not be found in the pushing of the fingertips outward and then trying to become comfortable.

Instead of pushing the fingertips forward, opening the palm sideways from its center will allow them to move up and down with ease.

For a healthy, injury-free hand, the extension of the palm will bring the finger to the key in a comfortable position. This holds true for those with significant webbing as well. They can get more space by allowing the palm to open, instead of pushing the fingers apart.

Just like the cat whose body stays soft and whose paws just spread from their center to the periphery without strain, so should the exploration of the pianist’s hand be. Soft and without pushing.

If you wish to give this a try:

Spend some time lightly massaging the palm with the sole purpose of bringing your feeling awareness to this area. Take your time. Touch softly.
Spend some time massaging the top of the hand. Feel how it feels. Find out what is hard and what is soft, what is bone and what is soft tissue. Do not forget the space between the thumb and the second finger. Do not forget the edges or the place where the hand meets the wrist. There are bones there, there are tiny joints. Can you find them? Can you feel them?
Once you are clear on what is hard and what is soft and where the joints are, gently allow your palm to spread open; notice whether your fingers are pushing outward or they are just following the opening of the palm. If they are pushing forward, let go and allow them to be a little bit softer. Take a break.
Now move your attention to the top of the hand. Allow the top of the hand to open, without pushing. Take a break.
Now pay a little bit more attention to the small bones close to the wrist and their joints. It may be easier to feel them from the top of the hand or from the palm. Try and find out. Allow that area to open, without pushing. TAKE A BREAK!
Once you have a clear perception of the whole palm, open from the center outward, like a cat’s paw, maintaining a bit of softness in the palm. Do not push the fingertips forward. Take a break.
Do not push just to get a little bit of extra reach. Allow the tissue to relax instead.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you are currently injured, and are under a healthcare professional’s monitoring, please check with them before you try this. If they give their OK, spend time only on lightly massaging and moving the tissues around, clarifying your feeling awareness of what is hard and what is soft. If your condition is aggravated by movement of the tissues, DO NOT DO THIS EXERCISE. Wait until the symptoms disappear. Please do yourself a huge favor and do not push your recovery.

Lightly massaging means exerting as much pressure on the tissues as you would on your eyelids. Yes, that lightly!

A second note:

There are those who are advocating for smaller keyboard designs, with octaves of 160 mm or even smaller. The keys are narrower, allowing those with small and smaller hands to be more comfortable. You can find out more at https://paskpiano.org

If you thought you are the only one with this issue, you are not, as you will see from the ample testimonials on this website.