Amazon Piano fingering book CreateSpace CreateSpace Category:  Education/Training Publisher: AndreA ISBN-10:  1493768719 Type: Non-Fiction Pages: 212 Copyright: Feb 1, 2012 ISBN-13: 9781493768714 The book is devoted to piano fingering and technique. Contains photos, diagrams, music-score examples, explanations, advice, exercises. The Art of Piano Fingering - Traditional, Advanced, and Innovative is a new book by virtuoso concert pianist Rami Bar-Niv. Published in Febuary 2012, the book is the first of its kind and scope in the history of piano playing. It is intended for anyone who plays the piano, from children to college students, from adult amateur to professional piano teachers and performing pianists. The book teaches how to create your own injury-free piano fingering, starting with traditional, continuing with advanced, and concluding with innovative fingering. The book offers useful exercises and in addition to fingering issues it also deals with related piano playing techniques, phrasing, and interpretation. The text is illustrated with countless score samples, pictures, and diagrams. Soft cover, 212 pages, Available in 4A size and Letter size, English.         Excerpt Piano fingering is one of the most problematic and neglected parts of piano playing technique. In our modern times there is little academic material that is dedicated to this subject and that deals with it in detail and in depth. There are various booklets and charts that show fingering only for scales and arpeggios. Scales and arpeggios are a crucial part of piano playing, but these are just basics and there are all the other aspects of fingering that need equal or greater attention. Choosing fingering is probably one of the first things a piano player does with a new piece. Some players rely on their own fingering ideas, some consult various editions that offer different fingerings of the same piece, and some rely on their teachers for good fingering. There may be second thoughts and back and forth changing of fingering until a final decision is made, at least for a while. This book gives the tools and teaches in a detailed way how to create good and injury-free piano fingering utilizing traditional, advanced, and innovative fingering used by the great virtuosos. The book offers music examples, pictures, and diagrams, which illustrate the explanations and enable a better comprehension of the written text. --------------------------------------- Through all the periods of keyboard music, musicians, composers, keyboard masters, and especially pianists stressed the importance of good fingering. Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) said: "It can be seen that correct employment of the fingers is inseparably related to the whole art of performance. More is lost through poor fingering than can be replaced by all conceivable artistry and good taste." Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) remarked: "Fingering is the basis of good playing." -------------------------------------- The subject of fingering can not be totally independent of other piano playing aspects and facts, such as musical content, technique, and size of hands. Obviously, the choice of fingering should serve the music. Often the choice of fingering goes along with a certain piano playing technique such as vertical wrist movements, wrist ovals, forearm rotation, catching the keys, etc. Modern fingering ideas are derived from modern piano techniques, reflecting the evolution of the piano, the increased need for finger dexterity, and the virtuosic demands of challenging repertoire.

Mary Gae George, NCTM
http://origin.library.constantcontact.com/download/get/file/1101077157950-56/The+Art+of+Fingering+REVIEW.pdf
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The Art of Fingering
Traditional, Advanced, and Innovative
by Rami Bar-Niv

~ Reviewed by: Mary Gae George, NCTM
Co-author of Artistry at the Piano

Many books on piano technic have included fingering, but often only as a side issue. The Art of
Fingering by Rami Bar-Niv proves that fingering itself is a central aspect of piano technic.
Furthermore, the author provides exercises (at the elementary level), photographs of how
fingerings look at the keyboard, and examples from a wide range piano literature to enhance
the presentations. Though this is the first known book devoted to this essential aspect of
achieving beautiful, artistic, comfortable study and performance, it sets a high standard with its
clear, comprehensive coverage of the subject. Fingering can need to be adapted to fit an
individual's hand, but the text and illustrations provide useful starting points to guide those in
search of solutions. Do not hesitate to purchase this book for you will use it often to find a
storehouse of solutions to keyboard puzzles.

Please do not skip the front matter. Among other issues you will find a brisk, exhilarating Short
History of Piano Fingering. There are times when we can make use of some of these early
fingering principles on the modern piano. Early music was written to be played with these
fingerings, so it is not surprising that they can add to our repertoire of choices. In spite of this
section's brevity, it holds a great deal of information and bodes well for the explorations that
follow in the main text of the book.

The Table of Contents reveals the wide scope of issues presented with outstanding clarity by
Rami Bar-Niv.

The Art of Fingering is an adventure into the resources of the human hand as well as how to
teach these explorations inventively and thoroughly from the elementary to the advanced
levels. The piano has been with us for three centuries now, making this first book that is
devoted to fingering a most valuable and much needed resource.

Use this link http://pianofingering.tripod.com/ to read the Preface, Table of Contents,
Introduction, About the Author, Endorsements, and to sign the Guest Book.

CA Music Teahcer Magazine
http://www.ortav.com/images/CaMusicTeacherReview-BarNiv.pdf
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Piano Fingering
Lyn Bronson, Contributing Editor Books & Recordings
The Art of Piano Fingering:
Traditional, Advanced and Innovative,
by Rami Bar-Niv.
In a testimonial appearing on
the back cover of this book, Dr.
Walden Hughes, Professor of
Piano at Northwest Nazarene
University states, “The Art of Piano
Fingering” by Rami Bar-Niv, fills a
tremendous void in the realm of the
pianistic world. Published in 2012, it is the first book of its kind in the 303-year history of the piano.”
Actually, the first book exclusively devoted to this subject was “The Art
of Fingering in Piano Playing” by Julien Musafia, written in 1970 and
published by MCA Music in 1971. Musafia challenged widely accepted fingering principles for scales, arpeggios, and chords, and suggested new principles of his own based on the understanding of musical patterns with the intent of simplifying and reinforcing learning. One of his important principles was that although keyboard music normally
utilizes the bass and treble clefs, we shouldn’t limit ourselves by thinking
we have a left hand and a right hand, but accept that we instead have a
“ten-fingered apparatus” allowing us to re-distribute notes in passages and musical lines whenever it will help us to understand and enhance the musical meaning.
There were, however, some significant shortcomings to Musafia’s book.
At a meager 90 pages, the book would have benefited from the inclusion of many more musical examples. Since most of the selected examples were from the Beethoven Violin and Piano Sonatas and the Preludes and Fugues of Shostakovich, this further reduced the book’s relevance to the standard piano literature. Another serious problem with Musafia’s book was its lack of an index to topics and musical examples. Therefore, anyone using his book
as a reference tool had to do a certain amount of manual searching through the text, and it was time consuming.
Bar-Niv’s book is superbly indexed and valuable as a reference source. In the index the reader will find next to each composer’s name a listing with page numbers of every work quoted with musical examples in the text. Bar-Niv includes a generous amount of photographs and charts illustrating many of his concepts. In his introduction, Bar-Niv acknowledges that most editions contain some degree of fingering, and he assumes that students benefit by comparing various published
fingered editions as a basis for establishing their own. However, he points out that an essential element is
missing: “The majority of editions do not help you understand how to create
your own fingering, nor do they help to develop a sense for, and the skill of, good fingering at the piano.” And
herein lies one of the most helpful aspects of this book. In addition to quoting and discussing difficult passages, he also analyzes difficulties, formulates solutions (often adding his opinion why one solution is better than another), and even suggests exercises to help us master difficult solutions. For example, in the rapidly ascending parallel B-flat melodic minor scales in the Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat, Op. 53, Bar-Niv shows us four solutions, three of which have thumbs coinciding. One of these, which he recommends highly, is initially slightly awkward, but when adopted is easily assimilated and results in a more powerfully even scale and a more effective crescendo. It turned out to be worth the trouble to adopt his fingering.
I have always had difficulty in the middle section of Chopin’s Etude in E major, Op. 10, No. 3. The slurred
pairs of major sixths in rapid contrary motion defied my efforts to memorize them. Bar-Niv suggests an ingenious
fingering solution (although not the most comfortable one, I might add) based on how the sequential patterns
and groupings change during the course of the passage.
Because his fingering helps a pianist recognize and mentally organize these pattern changes, the passage suddenly makes more sense and is easier to memorize.
The descending scale in fourths on the second page of the first movement of Chopin’s Sonata No. 3 in B minor has
always been troublesome for me, and I have tried four different fingerings during the past thirty years. Well, Bar-Niv came up with two more I hadn’t thought of. They are ingenious and they work.
Bar-Niv discusses principles of fingering in his introductory chapters, and he freely admits that many of these principles are probably well known to serious pianists. However, it is the application of the principles and their demonstration using familiar passages from the advanced piano literature that is the true value of this book.
Bar-Niv emphasizes throughout this book that fingering problems and their solutions are basically problems in
how to render musical ideas effectively and clearly. He constantly stresses that understanding the musical concept
is the first step toward the solution to a fingering problem.
Anyone who plays the piano with serious intentions can benefit from reading and studying this book.

Dr. Walden Hughes, Professor of Piano, Northwest Nazarene University
http://pianofingering.tripod.com/endorsements.html
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Dr. Walden Hughes, Professor of Piano, Northwest Nazarene University:
Wow, The book is superb, fabulous work!
​"The Art of Piano Fingering: Traditional, Advanced, and Innovative" by Rami Bar-Niv, fills a tremendous void in the realm of the pianistic world. Published in 2012, it is the first book of its kind in the 303 year history of the piano. Mr. Bar-Niv, a world-renowned concert artist and master teacher who has performed extensively on 5 continents, has recognized that although virtuoso pianists have learned to figure out the best fingerings as they learn new repertoire, no one has systematized the process over the past 3 centuries in a way that can be taught effectively to others.
Students are typically simply left to flounder as they wallow and stumble through learning new pieces, with only the standard scale and arpeggio fingerings to guide them.
Glancing at the Table of Contents, prior to reading this outstanding book, I became very excited and recognized immediately the remarkable contribution Mr. Bar-Niv has made to pianistic society world-wide. Only Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments comes anywhere near this accomplishment, and although it had a great impact on 18th century keyboard players, that treatise was conceived and written for harpsichordists, not pianists.
"The Art of Piano Fingering" is an exceptional contribution to the future of pianism, and should be required reading for all piano teachers and piano students. Order your copy today; you will be immensely grateful you did!