Most violinists use their left hand for intricate fingerwork, so why is the right hand used for more complex key pressing on the piano?
Peter Sheppard Skærved
London, UK
As a violinist, I can say that the right hand and arm executes more complicated sets of movements than the left. These are almost too many to enumerate: combining up and down bow motions and complex voicings (up to four strings played at once), pressure downwards on the strings from arm weight and/or muscular tension, bow angle (which controls how many of the bow hairs are in contact with the string) and articulation, the impossible-tocount possible beginnings and endings of notes.
What’s more, there are the hundreds of different bowing combinations that are necessary to control the timbres, colours, tone and syntax that the bow (which is always in motion, and with no consistent point of reference) has to produce in even the simplest music.
It shouldn’t be surprising that a number of great players who were left-handed, such as Rudolf Kolisch, played with their violin the other way round. The dominant hand needs to control the bow.
As for the piano, I can’t help you there!
Jerry Whitman
Barnham, West Sussex, UK Early instruments were for accompanying singers. Lutes, mandolins and guitars required intricate plucking, which was carried out by the more dexterous hand. The pitch of the strings was determined by frets across the fingerboard, so the less dexterous hand only had to “stop” the strings with fingers behind the frets, a much simpler task.
Viols still had frets, but also had bows. These instruments made the dexterous hand and arm’s task more dynamic, which it is suited to. The transition to violin, which had no frets, made the less dominant hand more responsible for pitch (tuning) accuracy, but still didn’t require as much dexterity as the bow. Don’t underestimate how difficult it is to control a bow! Having established that pattern, the rest is history.
Keyboard instruments, however, evolved so that a player could play tunes and harmonies simultaneously. So the dexterous right hand needed access to the dominant higher-pitched notes and the left hand the lower-pitched harmonies with their less complex patterns, thus determining the keyboard ori
