I was intrigued to hear recently that World Rugby is trialling a slightly smaller rugby ball for the women’s game – a size 4.5 instead of the usual size 5. The reason: women’s hands are on average 10-15% smaller than men’s, so it could be argued that women players need a smaller ball.
The ball they are trying out is the same weight but 3% smaller than the men’s ball – maybe the mathematically inclined amongst my readers will be able to tell me why the ball is only 3% smaller, rather than 10-15% smaller?
Opinions on the new ball are divided. Some players welcome it and think the experiment is overdue. Others feel that because the ball is smaller, there is less surface area for them to kick accurately. Youth teams have reported positively enough on the smaller ball that it is now being tried out at an elite level.
It made me think about the fact that there is still no such thing (at least no widely available thing) as a slightly smaller piano keyboard for people with smaller hands. I’ve read that these smaller keyboards do exist, but in all my encounters with concert hall pianos, I have never been offered a smaller keyboard as an alternative. I’ve read that there wouldn’t even have to be a whole different piano – apparently a technician could easily remove the standard keyboard from the instrument and slot in a smaller one instead. But I’ve never seen one.
It crossed my mind this morning that at this point, when I’ve been playing the standard size keyboard for a very long time, I might almost resent being given the chance to swap to a keyboard adapted to my smaller hand. I can’t quite articulate why I think I might feel this way – I suppose it is a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where a prisoner develops feelings of loyalty and positivity towards their captor.
Susan
Good afternoon.
I followed the rugby story in the news this week and was perplexed by this. The BBC commentary seemed to suggest that the smaller ball was popular with younger players but the older generation of players used to playing with a size 5 were reluctant to change. Not aware of any adjustment being necessary in either football or cricket.
I was intrigued by the suggestion of using of reduced keyboard size to suit smaller hands. This interests me because I cannot stretch beyond a 9th. There is so much music where this is a problem for me.
In my opinion, I think that a smaller keyboard would be even more problematic for a clumsy pianist like me. It would be so much more difficult to hit the notes cleanly and think there is an element of spatial awareness when approaching a keyboard. Sight reading with a reduced key size would be interesting?
The argument does feel to me like the wrong answer to having small hands. I am not convinced that keyboard size has ever been debated as you suggest. When you look at the classical keyboard repertoire, so much of it was actually written for female pianists going back as far as JSB and especially Scarlatti whose sonatas were written for Princess Maria Barbara. Many of the great piano composers like Haydn, Beethoven and Shostakovich wrote for women without making any concessions. I have the “Three morceaux” by Lili Boulanger in my collection and I think she must have had big hands. The only other work by a female composer that I have is a Louise Farrenc piece which does not involve much stretching. The clips of Martha Argerich last week that I listened to showed that no concession to keyboard size was necessary. I am not aware of any composer writing music for women with small hands and men with big hands. Any difference is just down to taste with someone like Cecile Chaminade composing from a welcome, feminine perspective
If you wanted to make piano playing easier, I would have thought that adjusting the action of the piano would be a better option. There is sometimes a sense that you have a wrestle with modern grand pianos whenever I have been lucky enough to have a go. A few years ago David Owen Norris did a presentation on fortepianos in the Turner Sims that I had to unfortunately miss because of a clash with football. This would have been fascinating as it was a mixture of music and technology. I have always perceived that the old fortepianos would have been easier to play. There is an old Broadwood in the National Trust property at The Vyne , near Basingstoke which I was allowed to have a go on and have dabbled on another at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton. Both had a really light action but the sound both produced seemed compromised to my ears. It would have been fascinating to hear D O-N’s explanation of this.
Just wondered if adjusting the action of a piano was more practical that smaller key sizes which could be a bit disorientating ?
It is always interesting watching pianists perform and how some seem to make playing effortless where as others seem to be in some kind of wrestling contest with the instrument. I wondered if you had ever seen the Japanese pianist Hiromi whose strength, especially the power in her arms and wrists, it really quite staggering ? From a physical perspective of performing, the only pianist I feel has come close to the experience of watching her is the Cuban Chucho Valdes.
I am a bit adverse to big technique composers like Liszt where virtuosity and stamina are the components which are lauded however, I must admit that I am fascinated by Harlem Stride pianists who had masses of technique and hands which must have been like shovels. I think Fats Waller was supposed to be able to stretch to an 11th.
Ian, you might be interested to have a look at the Pask Piano website, https://paskpiano.org/ . It describes the situation facing people with smaller hands (most of whom are female) and the efforts to make smaller keyboards available for them. Keen as I am on this kind of project, I sense it would be very difficult to swap back and forth between a ‘normal’ piano and a piano with a narrower keyboard. There would, for example, be little point in having a smaller keyboard at home if you had to play a bigger keyboard every time you went out and played a different piano. Equally, if you had a standard keyboard at home and were suddenly offered a small keyboard by a go-ahead concert hall, it would be tricky to adapt quickly enough. There were some concert pianists, such as Josef Hofmann, who commissioned special pianos with narrower keyboards, but they had to arrange to travel with those pianos, and did not play the resident pianos in concert halls. The whole situation is very complicated!
Not all the Harlem stride players had big hands, though some were huge – notably Art Tatum could reach a 12th, with very flexible joints, and Luckey Roberts could span a 14th, despite only being 4’10” tall.
Teddy Wilson could only reach some 10ths, and mastered the art of rolling the left hand 10ths. OK, he wasn’t strictly a stride player, but he was strongly influenced by them and used a lot of left hand tenths.
More recently and germane to this discussion, Stephanie Trick, one of the top modern stride players, can’t reach all tenths, and uses similar techniques as Teddy Wilson.
She plays the full stride repertoire, including all of Fats’ stuff, flawlessly with her relatively small hands. Perhaps she doesn’t have the raw power of a Dick Hyman or Brian Holland, but she makes up for it with her wonderful technique and musicality.
Of course, sometimes she employs/deploys her husband (Paolo Alderighi) in stride duets, so the left hand spans become less of an issue.
As an alternative, there’s a bloke on Youtube who has been using a home-made extension for his little finger to good effect for several years now…it’s a lot cheaper than replacing the keys, though I’m sure it takes practice to get used to it. It would be interesting if it could be made using proper medical prosthetic techniques…
Thank you Iain for mentioning Stephanie Trick. I confess I hadn’t heard of her, but have just enjoyed and admired her playing on YouTube. Excellent!
Iain
Thanks for your reply .
I had no idea that Lucky Roberts was small. It is fascinating to see just how far some of these musicians were capable of stretching with their hands. There was a story that Earl Hines had surgery to cut and extend the skin between his fingers to increase his reach but I am not sure if this is not an urban myth.
I am particularly fond of Earl Hines as he was the pianist who made me want to learn to play jazz. He marked the point at which jazz piano started to deviate from the Harlem Stride School. The duet with Louis Armstrong on “Weather bird” is one of the greatest jazz recordings of all time and marked the first time the form of a composition was jettisoned as part of the improvisation.
The other weird fact about the Harlem Stride Pianists was their propensity to play in difficult keys with loads of sharps. There is a quote where Fats Waller taunted a rival by asking what key he was struggling in.
The four pre-Bud jazz pianists I enjoy most are Jelly Roll Morton, Earl Hines, Jess Stacy and Teddy Wilson. However, I am fascinated by the Harlem Stride school who included the likes of Jack the Bear, a pianist who never made any recordings but who was celebrated in a Duke Ellington composition. There are so many musicians in this style who never got to the studio.
Wilson was involved in musical education with John Mehegan who wrote a series of books in the 1960s to teach jazz piano. There is a collection of solo piano recordings he made in the 1930s with a view to helping students learn jazz piano. He is most renowned for his work with Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday but he was also an active member of the American communist party.
I have never heard of Stephanie Trick but Mary Lou Williams is one of my jazz heroes. I particularly like her writing for Andy Kirk’s band which was totally original. I am always perplexed with the orchestration of the opening theme on Big Jim Blues. There is a clarinet and trumpet but I think there might be another reed in there. She was about 25 years ahead of her time splitting the band up from just trumpets, trombones and reeds. It is a foretaste of Gil Evans. Probably the only ever 14-bar blues ever recorded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DxO2BXY9-Y&list=RD9DxO2BXY9-Y&start_radio=1
This is probably the track where MLW’s piano playing is at the fore:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40XFx4GRl8M&list=RD9DxO2BXY9-Y&index=9
Cheers
Ian
Two thoughts. String players live all the time with semitones of different physical sizes as they move higher up the strings – and many of them seem to play in tune. And Plate 360 in Joszef Gat’s wonderful book ‘The Technique of Piano Playing’ shows a case with five interchangeable piano keyboards of different sizes. Gat says that you don’t need a piano technician to change from one keyboard in the set to another. Anybody can easily learn to do it. Gat says that in addition to different key widths, the keyboards are designed to have different degrees of key resistance so that the narrowest keyboard also has the lightest touch. Such a great idea!
Great idea indeed, Rob! I look forward to the day when I actually see one of these keyboards. I wonder where the five interchangeable keyboards were photographed?
With a little help from Deep Seek. Otto Goldhammer’s interchangeable keyboards led to the Donison-Steinbuhler (DS) standard (1990s) with keyboards in 6-inch and 5.5-inch octave spans, which has been adopted by some universities and competitions. The two systems share the same idea: scaling the keyboard to the hand.
Goldhammer: interchangeable sizes were the core idea. The Goldhammer keyboard was explicitly designed as a system where keyboards of different sizes could be exchanged on the same piano, to adapt “for children’s hands”. Swapping took less than a minute. No online source lists a specific set of five numerical sizes.
Because the Goldhammer design created so much extra playing space between the black keys, the overall Mensur (scale) could be reduced. Each white key could be narrowed by 1 mm, making an octave 8 mm smaller and a tenth 10 mm smaller. This reduces hand strain for smaller hands.
Otto Goldhammer’s 1954 patent (US2885921) is entirely about the geometry of the keys—the vertical fronts on black keys, the extended lengths, the widened rear gaps. It makes playing easier for thick fingers. It makes large chords easier. It does not patent or enumerate a series of different octave spans.
It seems obvious to me that there could be valuable developments here which would make life easier for many and perhaps for all of us. Gat was certainly enthusiastic about the keyboards he had played on.
Thank you Rob for doing this research. I’m sure you are right that there could be valuable developments which would make life easier for many of us pianists. I still have never laid eyes on any of these keyboards!
Thank you Rob for doing this research. I’m sure you’re right that there are valuable developments which would make life easier for many of us pianists. I’ve still to lay eyes on any of these keyboards though!
Turning the subject on its’ head, I have been reading about and listening to the piano music of William Baines on line. I had never heard of him until last year and the fact that he has been described as heavily influenced by Scriabin makes his music interesting to me.
It seems odd that someone who resided in York could be influenced by Scriabin and not fall under the thrall of pastoralism and folk which seems to be the “got to” influence for so many British composers around the turn of the last century, This made him quite interesting to me but I note that his reputation often notes this plus the facts that he tragically died young at 22 and also that he had exceptionally large hands which ensured that his music was extremely difficult for other people to perform.
Wondered if anyone else was familiar with his music? It is strange to think that Scriabin’s influence could reach as far as York. My understanding was that Scriabin was not really appreciated in the UK by the 1920s. I am quite fascinated by Baines.
I had never heard of William Baines, but have looked him up and he sounds very interesting. How sad to fall ill within a couple of weeks of being conscripted into the Army in the last months of World War 1 and never to recover!
Susan
I do find it fascinating that so much music of genuine quality remains obscure. I was aware that there was a backlash against Scriabin in the UK during the 1920s as his music was considered too sensual. Just wondered if this had an effect on Baines’ reputation?
There is a Youtube clip of a Prelude by Baines with a copy of the score which requires a reach of two octaves in the bass. I really like the music of his I have heard but I am really partial to piano composers who write with colour. I really like Syzmanowski who I always feels would be in the middle of a Venn diagram which included Debussy, Scriabin and Bartok. I love the “walking on egg shells” approach to harmony where the chords are on the verge of being dissonant such as you find in Ravel.
Baines appears to have produced a lot of piano music between 1917-22 and succumbed to an infection that stemmed from his service in World War One. It is sad that he died just as his reputation started to gather momentum. There are allegedly 150-odd piano compositions so think that most of his work is still unrecorded. Musicroom has some of his sheet music available on their site I also like the fact that a composer like Baines could exist in a provincial city like York, more celebrated these days for the Minster and wealth of museums and other historical sites including it’s Roman and Viking archaeology. Never associated York with music.
Cheers
Ian