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When Abigail Terrill (MM ’24) learned about alternative piano keyboards, it seemed she’d found an obvious solution to a complicated problem. Terrill spent the last year of her master’s experience researching narrower keyboards to accommodate pianists with smaller hands, and how quickly pianists can transition to and from them.

“The length of alternative keyboards is the same as standard keyboards, only the width of each key is very slightly smaller,” Terrill says. The CU Boulder College of Music has had such a keyboard on loan from the since April 2023, featuring a six-inch octave instead of the standard six-and-a-half-inch octave.

“The reason I got interested was because I have tendonitis and I noticed a bunch of my female pianist friends were also getting tendonitis. I’ve had friends who have had to quit because they got some kind of severe playing-related injury,” Terrill says.

can help pianists avoid injuries sustained from over-reaching and enable individuals with smaller hands to play some repertoire that is physically impossible for them to perform on standard-size pianos. 

“Keyboards are made to a standard size and the human hand is not a standard size,” says Jennifer Hayghe, associate professor of piano and chair of the Roser Piano + Keyboard Program at the College of Music. “In my 25 years as a professor, I have seen the number of students with injuries rise exponentially. I spend a lot of my time working with students trying to reduce their stress and tension and work through the injuries they’ve accrued. I do believe that if we had smaller keyboards as a standard thing, that would not be an issue.”

The piece loaned to the College of Music is a piano action—that is, the keyboard and the mechanism that causes hammers to strike the strings when keys are pressed. This action can technically fit onto any piano, though some fittings are more difficult than others. Mark Mikkelson and Phil Taylor, both piano technicians at the College of Music, say they put in 50 to 60 hours of work fitting the alternative keyboard into a Steinway piano.

“The problem in making these keyboards for Steinway instruments is that Steinways are entirely handmade, which means they’re not all exactly the same,” Hayghe explains. “So when alternative keyboards are made as close as possible to a ‘standard’ Steinway size, all these little adjustments are necessary. It took a long time and a lot of adjusting to get that keyboard used to that piano.” 

As part of her master’s thesis, Terrill discovered that attitudes around alternative keyboards are often of disdain. “I was really frustrated when I first started this research because I was telling people how unfair it was to not have smaller keyboards available to students—and the reaction I heard most was people saying ‘you don’t need that, you just need to fix your technique.’ So my response was, if I can show numbers to people who don’t want to bother with having to switch sizes, that may be more convincing.”

Terrill’s thesis project involved 15 pianists playing a musical excerpt on a standard piano, and then on a narrow keyboard. She measured their errors when initially playing on the alternative keyboard and after 10 minutes of practice. 

“We found that everyone by the end—transitioning from the standard size to the second try on the narrow keyboard—had fewer errors than on the first try,” Terrill says. “Most of them said ‘I wish I could practice more on it.’”

Since graduating this spring, Terrill has been teaching piano lessons—another instance when narrow keyboards would be helpful. “Most instruments have smaller versions for when you’re learning as a kid, but not the piano,” she notes.

“I really see this as an equality issue. I’m looking for movement from people. I want to push for more research and for people to have conversations about it—I think even arguments will help.”

Related:
(NPR)