Some Thoughts on Fingering

As a keyboard player - I play organ and harpsichord as well as piano - I find fingering a fascinating aspect of the study of our repertoire. The right finger in the right place can make a seemingly unplayable passage perfectly manageable. So many of us tend to keep practicing a passage over and over with - perhaps - a less-than-ideal fingering; in fact, a little bit more time spent looking for a better solution is usually much more efficient - and more fun. But more interesting than the practicality of a good fingering is the difference a fingering makes to the way a piece sounds. For many keyboard players - perhaps especially organists - this may sound rather outlandish. Surely on most organs the way you press the key down has no influence whatsoever on the sound - you could play it with your nose or your big toe if that were convenient! And yet, I've so often seen (and heard!) how, even on a rather mediocre organ with electric action, a different fingering will make a world of difference. The most obvious example is to play a scale with the kind of 'paired' fingering so often found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scores instead of 'modern' fingering.