Notes

135

These beginners hands display manifold hesitations, holding onto

a given note thats found to be in the melody, so as to be able to return
to it, then finding a next place, leaving it, and immediately losing that
place when it comes up right away again, and more.
As scales are incorporated, the hands searching for correct melody
tones undergoes progressive elaboration, and the single huntingpecking finger becomes increasingly part of a scale-oriented appraisal
of the terrain. Most melodies are constructed in terms of major scales;
acquisition of these scales gradually finds the hand arraying itself
along scale axes; choices for next notes become progressively integrated with this grasp of axes of scale territories.
This change can be seen in the developing looks of searching fingers
as they come to find rather than search, the security of each reach
along a way seen as an emergent acquisition. From the beginning
use of a single stabbing-in-the-dark fingersimilar in its general elegance to typing with one finger but only in that way, as the piano has
nothing written on it that tells one about its soundsbeneath a moreor-less-high- and then more-or-less-low-reaching hand and arm there
gradually emerges a digitally fluid grasp of the contours of a scale.
And the competent melody finder immediately locates that particular
scale within which a melody resides, given some starting note. He
knows his way so as to find a well-tempered bearing with only a quick
first exploration (the well-tempered tuning of modern instruments
fashioned by and for bodies with wayful-tempering potentials). The
hand becomes rapidly posed once a scale path has been identified.
With further progress, my students hands show increasing incorporation, where closely hovering appraisals of places at hand are
gradually loosened. The process is not unlike the change from that
point when a beginning typist must hover over a home territory and
reach out gingerly for each digits particular assignments, to where
positions are very fluidly sustained in ongoing reconfigurational work
well above the keyboard, hands hovering over the whole terrain
typefully.
One concerned with a close investigation of wayful acquisitions as
general mobility phenomena of the body may take up, as one example,
such a task as picking out a melody. A videotaping of several months
of such work can aid in a further detailing of this process, offering
appearances whose relevance is informed by what the student himself
comes to learn in solving the task at the keyboard. Appearances may
be screened for their productional relevance, with new potential details
made available through such a record.