<![CDATA[A Teacher’s Challenge: Navigating Piano music with Awkward fingerings]]>I often wonder why our music mentor community does not openly share a collective frustration with editors who permeate piano compositions with impossible fingerings. These sources of disarray can be Masterworks by Scarlatti, Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, et al, tarnished with “un-pianistic” maneuvers that beg for labor intensive revisions. Often a preponderance of these Internet driven editions, (not having Urtext purity), will be saturated with editor imposed fingerings and phrase marks that seem to be snatched from a bottomless pit of aimless choices. In particular, a plethora of these, residing at ISMLP will promise wee hour teacher escapades of finger assigned nullifications, or blank page fill-ins with phrase marks, fingerings, and dynamics.

With more contemporary works, the composer, without a shadow editor, might personally assign his/her fingerings, phrasing dynamics into the score– unless an editor is hired by a publisher in an outsourcing effort. (I’m unfamiliar with publishing contracts as pertains to “new” music so I cannot with certainty attach responsibility to the composer when a score is ridden with landmines.) My euphemism is an “un-pianistic” landscape.

In this same cosmos, the labeling of music as Intermediate or Advanced by either the composer or publisher can be just as misleading as a trail of measures without direction. (Literally!)

RE: My encounter with a re-fingering challenge!
During the past month, I took the plunge of learning a work requested by a student that derived from a medley of Scottish framed character pieces.

Upon my first reading, I found the 3-page composition, “Heriot Water” to be charming and worth a deeper probe in the interests of growing a composition in partnership with a pupil. As teachers, we want to have a sense of adventurism, exploring new repertoire, not just the time-honored Classics that we’ve been raised on. Therefore, we should welcome a student giving impetus to a new, refreshing musical journey.

And so through my initial period of discovery, reading through Donald Thomson’s “Heriot Water” from his medley, A Borders Suite, I found a charming character piece with emblematic syncopated Scottish rhythms. And while a spread of measures were relentless finger trappers, I devised maneuvers that could “free up glitchy passages” by rotations, wrist spring forwards, and revised fingerings. I even felt relaxed enough to contact the composer on Facebook, pointing to a particular measure that was troubling as pertained to holding down a bass note through a stream of tenor sixteenths. He was congenial and receptive to my feedback, promising to get back soon enough.

Problems arose, however in my exploration of The Silvery Tay from the composer’s Scottish Waters medley. In this particular composition there are long strands of arpeggiated figures in the bass that require fingering revisions along with treble range alterations. From my perspective as a teacher, these amends were in the interests of phrase shaping, contouring and injury prevention. This last item is a red flag for potential strain or stress on the hands.

Due to copyright limitations, I cannot embed the referenced music in this posting with its original fingering, but I will share a video of what changes I made on the first page, that became more prevalent as I moved along to page 2 (the jig like interlude) and to p. 3 where the theme returns in a chordal setting. (The bass on the last page is largely a revisit of what appears on p. 1 until the final four measures)

The music itself is engaging and worth the time spent re-landscaping the fingering. But when one sees a questionable LEVEL assessment in conjunction with the challenges that are inherently in the score, a teacher must give credible thought to assigning it to a particular pupil. (The video attached is a slow tempo probing of fingering that I prepared for my student)

The composer, Donald Thomson has made most of my suggested fingering adjustments in “The Silvery Tay.” These revisions can be found in the Online version, and will eventually appear in the printed edition.


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