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Comment by Johanx64 | Hacker News Reader

It's one thing to point out how women have especially hard time competing due to hand sizes. Which is true and a fair argument to make in favor of among other things (such as sizes accessable for children, etc)

But saying that it's the most compelling argument is where it arguably becomes full on sexist.

Truth of the matter is most concert pianists and serious competitors have absolutely gigantic hands that most people do not posses. With very few and rare exceptions.

And that the current piano size is way too large for most people, esp. if they actually would like to excel at it. Or at a minimum a very large portion of the population, incl. geographic areas where people tend to be shorter on average.

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> Truth of the matter is most concert pianists and serious competitors have absolutely gigantic hands

Is that true? I wouldn't have thought so, at all, and a few minutes googling "do most concert pianists have huge hands" digs up a lot of sentences like "Plenty of world-class pianists have small hands, including Alicia de Larroccha and Vladimir Ashkenazy, and yet they seem to be able to cope with the most physically demanding works in the repertoire." And sites talking about how it's a misconception that classical pianists have or need huge hands.

Jazz pianist with huge hands here :-) Huge hands often goes with height, and I have never noticed classical pianists are unusually tall. I can't think of any who are. Maybe people are thinking of Rachmaninov (6 foot 6). One would expect classical pianists to look like towering basketball players if, as you say, they mostly have absolutely gigantic hands. But I'd say there are many more under 6 feet tall than over it.

There's data on the correlation between hand size and national/international acclaim here: http://smallpianokeyboards.org/hand-span-data-recent-austral....

From this, it seems clear that internationally acclaimed pianists typically have quite large hands.

Yes. It is true.

If I got a penny for every time Larroccha gets mentioned in the discussions about small hands and alt sized keyboards I would be a millionaire.

First of all, nobody, ever in their right mind would bring up Larroccha when talking about greats. Frankly the only times Larroccha would get brought up... is when talking about pianists with small hands. Severely limited repertoire.

Secondly, isn't that curious that they don't mention what the actual reach of Ashkenazy was? Well, it turns out that he doesn't have small hands, merely on the smaller side when taking the absolutely gigantic hands of every other concert pianist as a reference point.

I've heard by some people that Horowitz had small hands too (compared to whom, a 7ft tall giant who can reach a 15th?)

I'm not an expert in the matter, just am talking about your specific claim

> most concert pianists and serious competitors have absolutely gigantic hands

which I still doubt, unless you have data supporting that. Depends on what you mean "absolutely gigantic" and how you define "serious competitors" etc.

Also, almost every sentence in your reply uses exaggeration, so it does seem you allow that to yourself but insist others speak accurately. Maybe this is just a case of that, not to be taken literally. It seems so. And nobody apart from you mentioned limiting that matter to "great" pianists - a straw man.

Look, the very link OP has posted even has an image which shows that the handspan of the "internationally acclaimed pianists", it is wholly concentrated in above average handsizes. Which only a fairly small portion of the population has.

http://smallpianokeyboards.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Ri...

Never "small". If we are talking about "greats" it's even more so. You can't be with a small hand span.

Not sure what kind of more evidence you need.

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