FINGERING

'Fingering' is the choice of which fingers and hand positions to use when playing a musical instrument. For example, when playing the piano, chords or melodies can often be played with a variety of different assignments of fingers to played keys. Fingering, in this context, is the choice of which finger to use for which key, for each note. Fingering typically changes throughout a piece; the challenge of choosing good fingering for a piece is to make the hand movements as comfortable as possible without changing hand position too often.
Fingering also applies to other instruments, such as woodwind instruments and stringed instruments.
Small numbers are often written next to selected notes on musical scores as a 'fingering guide', with the numbers 1 to 5 representing the fingers of the appropriate hand, with the thumb being counted as 1, counting outward toward the little finger of each hand. Bach was a famous fingerer.
Johann Sebastian Bach introduced an innovation in fingering for the organ and the clavier. (A similar, although according Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach less radical, innovation was introduced by François Couperin, at roughly the same time in 1717, in his book ''L'art de toucher le clavecin''.) Prior to Bach, playing rarely involved the thumb. Bach's new fingering retained many features of the conventional fingering up until that point, including the passing of one finger under or over another (Playing many of Bach's works requires such fingering, especially passing the third finger over the fourth or the fourth finger over the fifth.), but introduced the far greater use of the thumb. Modern fingering also uses the thumb to a similar extent, and involves the passing of the thumb under the other fingers, but does not, as Bach's did, generally involve the passing of any other fingers over or under one another.^[1]

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References

1. J.S. Bach, Volume 1, Schweitzer, Newman, Albert Schweitzer, , , Courier Dover Publications, , ISBN 0486216314

See also

★ Bis key