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Piano Player
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Playing the piano is an asymetric ambidexterity. For both hands are maneuvering similarly, yet the tactic for each hand to perform an identical passage is quite different. The relative facility produced by the combined forces of thumb, pointer, and center figure in one hand points up and in the other, down. This can make the same passage played easily with the left exceedingly difficult in the right. Or of course, the reverse; a certain compositional technique is even produced by the approximate inversion of a passage for the second hand, creating ease of play, beauty, and contrapuntal development in a singular gesture. The experience of playing the piano is significantly shaped by this, both technically and poetically. Formal pieces are not always written with ease of play in mind, and even deceptively-simple looking passages can catch an experienced hand unaware if one is not paying attention. That's why they're deceptive. Yet for improvisational sessions by performers of any level, spontaneous brilliance become more accessible to any piano player if one simply lets each hand do what falls naturally to it. A personal example is that I, perhaps out of laze, have always avoided practicing the multi-accidental scales commencing on the fourth finger. So when improvising new works in such keys, I add the fifth finger a sixteenth beat (or whatever) early, thereby stabilizing my hand. However, as musicality is the primary consideration, I use this far more often with the left than with the right. For whatever reason, my improvisational style employes such scales far more often in the left hand than the right. Thus the asymetry; now the ambidexterity. The word suggests an equality of the hands that simply does not exist, especially when faced with surprise complexities. Reality does not have a horizontal flip we can employ when what would be convenient for one hand is clumsy for the other.
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