7. Witches' Dance

I didn't think I was going to enjoy playing this song as much as I actually have. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I like playing legato, and this song is riddled with staccato. So at first glance, I was somewhat apprehensive.

As it turns out, the wrist staccato that animates this piece is pretty fun to execute. It wakes me up, too, requiring the best posture I can muster. Good piano posture is something I haven't yet developed, so this piece is good training for me. For in order to play it at my highest level of competency, I need to use good posture. However, I'm not sure I always adhere to J.T.'s warning to "preserve a sharp, brittle rhythm throughout." I try though, and I actually have more fun whenever I'm able to pull it off without getting lazy.

An interesting dynamic exists in this song between the staccato and sustained notes. It simulates the tension of a spring or elastic, as though while you're sustaining a note, you're really just holding it back against its innate drive for release, one which it precipitately achieves in the sudden staccato. Like a slingshot! The passage quoted above does just this, I think. In fact, it does more because it requires simultaneous staccato and sustained notes, one with each hand, repeated twice in lower octaves. Challenging, but fun... and you could really exhaust an entire keyboard doing that! Almost. 

It reminds me a bit of Für Elise, actually. All those E's...

The mood of the piece, we are told, is one of "eerie mystery," and sure enough, the particular section pictured to the left (and which happens to be my favourite) has a lugubrious air, but one that also contains a tinge of mournfulness. It really highlights the fact that the song is written in A minor, a fact that is somewhat downplayed in other parts of the song where the C drops out of the A-minor triad. But here, almost all the notes that comprise the minor scale are played in succession. Only the G is missing. Note that both staves are in the bass clef, so that single note played by the right hand in the middle bar is an A, and more or less completes the scale begun with the left hand. (There's another A in the final bar that truly finishes up the scale, but it belongs not to this my favourite part, but to a later phrase, the final one of the song.)

After this, the witches fade out. I'm still working on not being too heavy handed in order to really pull off the pianissimo.

Alan Chan's rendition