Small Hands

I never noticed my hands were small. That is until I tried to play a 9th, and had to learn how to jump, roll, and drop.

No I'm not talking about dog tricks. I'm talking about the piano.

Apparently my short stature is accompanied by proportionally small hands, the span of which stops at an octave, with my left (on lucky days) maybe reaching a ninth. For the non piano people, an octave are two keys that have 6 keys between them. So playing 2 A's or B's is playing an octave or an 8th. A 9th is going to the 9th key, a 10th to the 10th key and so on.

Many of those male composers had big hands, with their compositions often including 4 fingered chords (pressing 4 fingers at the same time) that span octaves, ninth's , and tenth's. Case in point: Beethoven. His moonlight sonata has some seriously difficult 4 fingered combinations, which is one of the reasons I don't want to learn it yet until I figure out how adjust my fingering so I can play it. Others include Liszt, Rachmaninov, who had very big hands, and there's a very funny youtube video on that below, along with many others. I like Bach because his pieces are all small hand friendly.

Even "Liz on top of the world" was a challenge having several ninths. However, I was able to manage it by jumping between the keys quickly and in one case by moving my left up and playing that extra note with it instead of with my right as most people do. However, I found out that I'm not alone, and there many piano forums with threads dedicated to people figuring out how to deal with small hands on a piano, and there are even pianos built with smaller keys. However, I wouldn't like that because then you can only play on your own keyboard and not anywhere else. The main solutions seems to be jumping if keys are consecutive, or if they are simultaneous dropping a key from the chord, or rolling between them quickly.

Cheers.