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Is it just a coincidence that a lot of good musicians (pianists) are left handed?
here's a few composers:
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
Maurice Ravel
Wolfgang Amedeus Mozart
Sergei Prokofiev
Robert Schumann
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Jean-Sebastien Bach

here's a few famous pianists/musicians
Errol Garner (jazz pianist)
Wynton Marsalis
Christopher Seed (pianist)
Bob Dylan
Niccolo Paganini (violinist)
Paul McCartny (Beatles)
Jimi Hendrix
Glen Gould (pianist)

Do you know of any more pianists/composers that were left handed? Are any of you guys left-handed?

Who was that one-armed guy who commissioned left-hand concertos from Ravel, Prokofiev, and others? I don't know if he was left-handed or right-handed before the War, but certainly after the War we know which arm he used more...

Paul Wittgenstein. He was apparently a tight-wad, as he did not like a SINGLE one of the left-hand concertos that he commissioned.

Simply a rich, pretentious bastard who had the money to get what he wanted, is how I see him.

People who are left handed think with their right side of their brain and thats mostly the music, art, non science, non math side, of the brain. Get it?

Lol.

I'd have thought that by a certain point, your hand preferance is made void.

I myself am a lefty as well. Where did you get the information that those composers were lefties?

I have never heard once that Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, etc are left handed, I would think this is highly false information without credible proof.

RA -

Have you heard that they were right-handed?

I'm left handed and I'm not good at science or math, I'm more artistic, if that says anything.

i never heard that Beethoven or J.S.Bach is left-handed, where is the proof?

i'm not left-handed and good at science/math but also apreciate art more than average people and almost learned music and piano all by myself so far. so, maybe i'm not of anything! i don't think the original argument is correct anyway.

Jerome-Not in particular however I do have sketches of Beethoven that oddly show him writing with his right hand, and holding a baton with his right hand as well.

I can't think of any better reasons at the moment but classical portraits and popular movies such as Immortal Beloved and Amadeus show their respective composers using the right hand when writing and performing other tasks. I would think the great historical research that went into the production of those movies would have uncovered the fact that they were left handed if in fact they were so.

Furthermore, in all of the biographies I have read of said composers (and I have quite a few, though perhaps it is possible I could have overlooked such measley facts?) not one has ever mentioned any of the above mentioned being left handed.

Gould is an interesting case in that he was not only physically left-handed but his musical thinking is very 'left-handed' as well in that it is focused on harmony and moves up the stave rather than across it. He dismissed Chopin (erroneously, imho) as "a composer for the right hand."

My teacher is left-handed and she also has a preference for harmonic and/or richly chordal music (Bach, Brahms) over melodically led passage work (Mozart, Schubert Chopin). I wonder if this is related at all to left-handedness?

dont get me wrong amadeus and immortal beloved are in my top 5 favorite movies...however i wouldnt base much of any facts off of it...especially something like what hand the composed used to write...

Generally I would agree with you schuyler, I mean they're movies we're talking about here, but if you watched the "making of" documentaries in the DVD's of this film you'd see that great historical research actually went into their making, despite the fact that the directors/writers changed many things to suit their artistic ends. So with that said I would think the many writers/producers involved in each film would have uncovered something so blatantly obvious no?

On the other hand I should mention that a simple googling has revealed that Beethoven was in fact apparently left handed although I would still not buy it fully without credible proof.

Googling the other names of that list did not yield similar results however.

So ignorant, did you just pull this information out of thin air to see how people would react or are you going to defend yourself sometime today?

Sorry for the late response. I googled all of the information in my above post from the internet. Although I have no credible proof, I based them off many different sites, not just one.

I'm left handed and I don't really think it affects much, but at my Performing Arts highschool we have a MUCH MUCH greater percentage of left handed people so you never know...

That's the one...

I remember reading he lost his right arm in the war, or something, so had to play LH..

Also, he was the brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I'm left handed. And yes, Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm in the war.

I am left handed.

One problem I have is that I trill much better with my left (master) hand.

Left-hand trills are less common than right-hand trills.

My left-hand trills are okay, but I struggle with right-hand trills.