Playing music on your own instrument is a transitory experience, one in which higher levels of the heart and mind are accessed. While this higher-level experience may be so subtle as to be missed by many beginning musicians, struggling as they are with their chosen instruments, struggling with rules and limitations, struggling to understand the notes or sounds and training the fingers and breath to respond accurately, trust those of us that have been there when we tell you that if you keep at it for long enough and desire it, you too shall hear the subtle music within the sounds your instrument makes.
In the case of the notation system described below, the subtle music I heard was an issue regarding how my brain and body’s nervous system worked, with respect to the dynamic process of reading the notes then pressing the keys, that showed me an inefficiency in the mass-disseminated, and or common, fingering notation used in musical score.
A couple of years ago I purchased one of the least expensive electronic pianos a major music company manufactured, a Yamaha CLP-115. This wasn’t my first piano, but that’s another story. The CLP-115 has weighted keys that feel much like an acoustic piano, they are the same standardized size and shape as those of the great piano builders’ artistic era of the early 20th century, with the same number of keys, 88 I believe. At some point, this new electronic instrument fostered an interest in Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, and the lessons he left for so many of the past and present keyboard greats among us.
While learning to play Invention 1, there was Bach, either in all his full glory or at least some of it, teaching me as I learned. Expressing gratitude outwardly has always been a difficult thing for me, everyday we are given many great gifts of love from others and forget to give them our thanks, taking those gifts for granted, but any day is a good day to begin. Therefore, I’ve named this fingering notation after J.S.Bach. Perhaps others will find it as useful as I do.
Also while learning Invention 1, a problem that both irritated and intrigued me when I was a young piano post-student reappeared. One of the difficulties of playing any given piece is how best to finger the keyboard, or which finger to use on each note, so that all the notes can be strung together in a coherent and intended way when played at increased speeds. Everyone’s hand is a slightly different shape, some with thick fingers, others with thin, some long, some short, to say nothing of other biometric differences, etc., so piano fingering is ultimately the pianist’s individual responsibility to assign.
This is not an easy task, and every Bach admirer has their own thoughts on the subject, and all those thoughts are also Bach inspired, for this form of inspiration is something that we invoke when playing another’s song, even though we might not notice it when first starting out.
In what follows I’ll make use of some graphics to show you how I came to devise the Bach-inspired Graphical Fingering Notation System, and additionally I will present you with the notation as I have used it on the complete score of Invention 2. I have attempted a simple Internet search for any similar music-notation system: if such a system exists anywhere, I haven’t previously seen it.
Please note that what follows has a few very large images, so if you’re on dial-up instead of broadband, be forewarned!
Vector-based Graphical Piano Fingering Notation (more…)
