Why is corrections important?

Answer 1

Fingering is important for a number of reasons. If you play a horn of some kind you might think that it's silly to talk about fingering, since there is a one-to-one relationship between the valves and the fingers that play them. But how you position your hand/fingers on the valves will determine how clean and accurate your fingering and valve changes will be.

For piano players, things get scary very fast when working on fingering. Put it this way: It is very easy to be a beginner at the piano, and extremely difficult to be excellent. Fingering is one important reason.

Careless pianists make the pedal do as much of the phrasing work as possible-- after all, why make the fingers do all that? The problem is that the damper pedal, the pedal work-horse, has created more mud than all the silt put out by the Nile and Amazon put together. These pianists find the tyranny of the damper pedal appealing because they are not developing their 'chops', their ability to use all of their fingers effectively. There are many tricks to phrasing where the fingers (and sometimes clever fingering) are the key.

Challenge: When practicing a new piece, try playing without the pedal at first, and make all the lines smoothe by letting the fingers move with a legato touch and sound. No staccato or awkard pauses. Of course there will be places where breaks or a rapid movement of fingers will be necessary in order to come close to a smoothe line. Position your hand to get optimal efficiency from your fingers-- you'll have to bravely accept that 3, 4 and 5 are actually fingers, and with careful effort they can be made to participate in the music making.

A very simple idea is that very often when a note is repeated, working out how to change fingers for the second attack is a wonderful way to produce a smoothe sound, and with practice you will see that (especially for more rapid passages) this takes less effort in the long run. When initially practicing a passage that will eventually be played rapidly, striking a note 2 or mores times with the same finger seems positively essential, and this 'finger change' business seems a waste of effort. But when you pick up the tempo, you find yourself having to strain your hand, wrist or arms to rapidly lift and then re-strike. With a change of fingers, a clean second attack can happen with almost no more effort than a lateral shift of the hand/wrist. There are many other things that your teacher can show you as the need arises.