What are narrow keys? Let me explain.
As a youth taking classical piano lessons, I began to understand that my piano teacher was very sad about the fact that my fingers are short. A lot of classical repertoire requires that the pianist be able to reach an interval of the 10th. I can only reach an octave (an interval of an 8th) on white keys by hitting them from the side as opposed to the top of the keys. She began having to modify a lot of my music so that I could play it.
I stopped playing piano for many years but my yearning to play jazz piano never went away. So, I resumed piano lessons with John Hansen and started on the journey to learn jazz piano.
In 2018, I sprained my wrist and then suffered a devastating wrist injury caused by poor physical therapy on top of an overuse injury which left me unable to play piano for six months. Thanks to my good friend Richard, who recommended acupuncture treatments for the pain, and my piano teacher John, I slowly began to relearn how to play the piano and to release the tension in my hands between strikes. I had to change how I practiced piano because I could not play rapidly or for too long without experiencing pain. I learned that proper positioning of my shoulders, forearms and hands is essential for balance and injury prevention. The way to do this is by making sure that the piano bench is adjusted to the correct height. Recovery from my injury also required that I become more aware of tension and pain that I hold in my body, and not ignore pain that my body senses.
While recovering slowly from my injury, I also learned that many women become injured from trying to play big handed repertoire on the piano. Depending on the size of the pianist’s hand, some can compensate with technique, such as the Taubman method and Alexander technique. However, I also learned that the modern piano, as we know it right now, was sized in the 1860s based on the handspan of a white man. The white keys on the modern piano are spaced at an interval of 6.5 inches per octave. Prior to the modern piano, earlier keyboards and harpsichords used a smaller interval closer to 5.5 inches. This means that the lot of big handed classical piano repertoire was composed on keyboards which were in fact smaller than the modern piano.
I found a group called “Pianists for Alternate Sized Keyboards” or PASK. https://paskpiano.org/. I learned that male and female handspans comprise two distinct statistical distributions, and many women are unable to reach an interval of the 10th on the piano because of the standardization of the 6.5-inch octave on the modern piano. This is a contributing factor to the lack of women at the upper echelons of different piano performance genres. In my case, my hand span is slightly over 7 inches which renders me at the bottom 5% of hand sizes for women and explains why I cannot in fact hit an octave on white keys.
PASK began advocating for “right sized keyboards” for all people and contacted many major instrument manufacturers about building pianos and keyboards with octave spacing of 6.0 and 5.5 inches, but received very lukewarm or nonexistent feedback. I was puzzled by this lukewarm response because there are ¾ sized guitars and ¾ sized violins and upright basses.
Through PASK, I learned that there was a pianist who lived an hour’s drive from my home and who was willing to let me try her Steinway piano which had been retrofitted with a 5.5 inch octave keyboard customized for her piano by the David Steinbuhler Company. After playing on her piano for five minutes, I marveled at how natural and easy it was to play her piano. And I began to dream of one day being able to play a narrow key instrument all the time. My fingers are so short that I would still not be able to play an interval of the 10th, but there was a noticeable reduction in tension I experienced in my hands.
The people leading PASK started a company to produce a narrow key piano (a MIDI keyboard). https://www.narrowkeys.com/ After several years of development, they have now put in production the NK 5.5. Videos about the narrow key piano are on their website at https://www.narrowkeys.com/videos
I put myself on the waiting list for this keyboard and look forward to playing my right sized keyboard in the future!
Another good video about playing on narrow keys: https://youtu.be/ZXlknI-Jc48
marissa 恵 singleton 