Fingering (music)

This article is about hand positioning on a musical instrument. For other uses, see Fingering.
Hypothetical cello fingering of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" with hand positions with ordinals, fingers with numbers, and strings indicated with Roman numerals. The A could instead have been played open like the D and the entire line could have been in 1st position.

In music, fingering, or on stringed instruments sometimes also called stopping, is the choice of which fingers and hand positions to use when playing certain musical instruments. Fingering typically changes throughout a piece; the challenge of choosing good fingering for a piece is to make the hand movements as comfortable as possible without changing hand position too often. A fingering can be the result of the working process of the composer, who puts it into the manuscript, an editor, who adds it into the printed score, or the performer, who puts his or her own fingering in the score or in performance.

Fingering...also stopping...(1) A system of symbols (usually Arabic numbers) for the fingers of the hand (or some subset of them) used to associate specific notes with specific fingers....(2)Control of finger movements and position to achieve physiological efficiency, acoustical accuracy [frequency and amplitude] (or effect) and musical articulation.[1]

A substitute fingering is an alternative to the indicated fingering, not to be confused with finger substitution. Depending on the instrument, not all the fingers may be used. For example, saxophonists do not use the right thumb and string instruments (usually) only use the fingers and not the thumbs.

  1. ^ Don Michael Randel; ed. (2003). The Harvard Dictionary of Music: Fourth Edition, p.314-5. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01163-5.