Natural Fingering – A Topographical Approach

“The black keys belong essentially to the three longest fingers” CPE Bach “Please do not think that I am so naïve as to ignore the logic of the circle around which our scales are built and the center of which is C. I merely stress that the theory of piano playing which deals with the hand and its physiology is distinct from the theory of music.” Heinrich Neuhaus The art of fingering is a huge subject, not least if studied historically. While many professional players stress the importance of good fingering we often find fingering suggestions offered by renowned editions to be clumsy, odd or simply out of place. New York pianist and teacher Jon Verbalis book Natural Fingering is a rich resource on the subject of piano fingering. Verbalis delves into fingering techniques focusing on a topographical approach, and how they relate to the ideas found in F. Chopin´s un-finished Piano Method (Projet de Méthode). Thomas Fielden appears to be the first to have introduced the term “
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