Why Is the Left Hand So Hard on the Piano?

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. The question today is, why is the left hand so hard? Why is the left hand harder than the right hand? You've got two hands. Why is that? I bet you all feel that way. You can leave them here in the comments of LivingPianos .com as well as YouTube if you feel differently. Well, there's a lot of reasons for this. I want to start with the most obvious reason. Most people are right handed, so your right hand is a little bit stronger and more fluent anyway. But there's much more to it than that. I'm going to give you a couple of other fundamental reasons.

Now, think about when you're playing a piece of music.

A little bit of Mozart there, the famous 545, Kershaw 545, C major sonata. Well, if you're learning a piece like that, where's the melody? The melody is obviously in the right hand, and the left hand by itself doesn't even make much sense. So just from listening to a piece of music, already you grasp the melody, which is typically in the right hand. Doesn't that make it easier to learn instead of some abstract thing that by itself doesn't even sound like anything? It's harder to learn. At first, you might even have trouble just reading the bass clef. I haven't even brought that one up, but eventually you become fluent in both. It's easier to count up through the alphabet from middle C than down backwards through the alphabet into the bass clef when you're first starting out. What I'm talking about, even as you study the piano for years, you probably still feel your right hand. It's easier to play than your left hand. So I discussed this, the melody, the part that you sing, the part that you know is in the right hand. So learning that left hand becomes a little bit of an arduous task because it's the structure of the music, the harmonic foundation, and it's harder to learn that than something you could already pick up by ear. But it goes much deeper than that. You know, I have a video I did a few years ago about why your left hand is bigger than your right hand. And if you don't think so, go test it out on the piano right now. Look at my hand. Okay, I can reach...

Well, I can't really reach to a tenth there. But in the left hand, I can't really reach it either, but I can squeak it out. Now, why is that? Well, that comes to our second reason as to why your left hand is harder than your right hand.

Typically, your left hand has more outstretched music than your right hand. For example, in this E minor nocturne of Chopin, look at the difference in the right hand compared to the left hand.

The left hand is reaching all over the place, and the right hand is comfortably right under your fingers. This is typical. This isn't an outlier in music. This is the norm in musical composition for the piano.

So, what about other pieces? What about the famous E flat nocturne of Chopin? Same thing there.

And you notice there again, the left hand's all over the place. You have to remember where to jump to.

It's much more difficult to play than a simple melody. Think about the harmonic complexity of the left hand compared to the right hand in Chopin's Prelude in E minor.

So, even when the left hand isn't stretched out, it's doing much more complex music most of the time, supporting a melody that you could already learn so easily because it's tuneful. That's why it's harder to learn the left hand. The right hand has all these nice melody notes, easy to learn. You can sing them. You can almost play them by ear.

The outstretched positions we have to jump around and leap, yes, it'll make your hand bigger.

And of course, just reading those bass clef notes at first is an arduous task, and it goes deeper. Look at Schroben in his A2 to D sharp minor opus 8.

Okay, both hands have a handful there, but the left hand is jumping like crazy, big intervals. Leaps to octaves. The right hand, yeah, it's hard, but not nearly as hard as the left hand. The left hand has the support. It's like to build a skyscraper. Did you know that there are many, many stories beneath the ground supporting the structure above? That's what makes a skyscraper have structural integrity, is the foundation. And yes, it's your left hand that provides the foundation to your playing so you can soar the heights of beautiful melodies with your right hand. So you're not alone in thinking that the left hand's harder than the right hand. In many ways it is. Intellectually it's harder, grasping harmonies, the jumps, the leaps, the stretches, and it's not as tuneful most of the time. Naturally there are exceptions to everything I've said, but generally, how many of you agree with this? Leave it in the comments here at LivingPianos.com. We are your online piano resource. Thanks again all of you for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/why-is-the-left-hand-so-hard-on-the-piano/

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