Books › Grove's dictionary of music and musicians, 1904 › scan 61
Scan 61
Grove's dictionary of music and musicians, 1904
16 lines. Read by computer on 6 September 2026. Printed page 44. See the scan on archive.org.
1would appear to have been no idea of establishing rules for fingering; nor could this have been otherwise, for from the time of the earliest organs, the keys of which were from three to six inches wide, and were struck with the closed fist, down to about the year 1480, when, although narrower, the octave still measured about two inches more than on the modern keyboard, any attempt at fingering in the modern sense must have been out of the question. The earliest marked fingering of which we have any knowledge is that given by Ammerbach in his Orgel oder Instrument Tabulatur (Leipzig, 1571). This, like all the fingering in use then and for long afterwards, is characterised by the almost complete avoidance of the use of the thumb and little finger, the former being only occasionally marked in the left hand, and the latter never employed except in playing intervals of not less than a fourth in the same hand. Ammerbach's fingering for the scale is as follows, the thumbs being marked 0 and the fingers with the first three numerals:—
3Right Hand.
4Left Hand.
6This kind of fingering, stiff and awkward as it appears to us, remained in use for upwards of a century, and is even found as late as 1718, in the third edition of an anonymous work entitled Kurzer jedoch gründlicher Wegweiser, etc. Two causes probably contributed to retard the introduction of a more complete system. In the first place, the organ and clavichord not being tuned upon the system of equal temperament, music for these instruments was only written in the simplest keys, with the black keys but rarely used; and in the second place the keyboards of the earlier organs were usually placed so high above the seat of the player that the elbows were of necessity considerably lower than the fingers. The consequence of the hands being held in this position, and of the black keys being but seldom required, would be that the three long fingers, stretched out horizontally, would be chiefly used, while the thumb and little finger, being too short to reach the keys without difficulty, would simply hang down below the level of the keyboard.
8But although this was the usual method of the time, it is highly probable that various experiments, tending in the direction of the use of the thumb, were made from time to time by different players. Thus Praetorius says (Symtagma Musicum, 1619), 'Many think it a matter of great importance, and despise such organists as do not use this or that particular fingering, which in my opinion is not worth the talk; for let a player run up or down with either first, middle, or third finger, aye, even with his nose if that could help him, provided everything is done clearly, correctly, and gracefully, it does not much matter how or in what manner it is accomplished.' One of the boldest of these experimenters was Couperin, who in his work, L'art de toucher le clavecin (Paris, 1717), gives numerous examples of the employment of the thumb. He uses it, however, in a very unmethodical way; for instance, he would use it on the first note of an ascending scale, but not again throughout the octave; he employs it for a change of fingers on a single note, and for extensions, but in passing it under the fingers he only makes use of the first finger, except in two cases, in one of which the second finger of the left hand is passed over the thumb, and in the other the thumb is passed under the third finger, in the very unpractical fashion shown in the last bar of the following example, which is an extract from a composition of his entitled 'Le Moucheron,' and will serve to give a general idea of his fingering.
10About this time also the thumb first came into use in England. Purcell gives a rule for it in the instructions for fingering in his Choice Collection of Lessons for the Harpsichord, published about 1700, but he employs it in a very tentative manner, using it only once throughout a scale of two octaves. His scale is as follows:—
12Right Hand (thumb numbered 1).
13Left Hand (thumb numbered 5).
15Contemporary with Couperin we find Sebastian Bach, to whose genius fingering owes its most striking development, since in his hands it became transformed from a chaos of unpractical rules to a perfect system, which has endured in its essential parts to the present day. Bach adopted the then newly invented system of equal temperament for the tuning of the clavichord, and was therefore enabled to write in every key; thus the black keys were in continual use, and this fact, together with the great complexity of his music, rendered the adoption of an entirely new system of fingering inevitable,
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