9. Spinning Song

Well, I must say that this song is certainly not my favourite of the collection so far, but it does have its benefits. The opening refrain pictured to the left, is upbeat and pretty intuitive. After an initial few minutes of disciplining my fingers to the task of reeling out those leggieros and punctuating them with the posted staccatos and sustained (tied) notes/chords, I pretty much had that part down. The interesting section followed, and that was a bit more challenging. 

These nine interlocking dyads are played staccato and followed by two triads. It took a bit more effort to get my right hand to "remember" the correct fingering because the notes follow a subtle crisscrossing (or zigzag) pattern—one that is surprisingly intuitive, but nevertheless takes time to get just right. Furthermore, the first four are syncopated, coming in on the second and fourth beats of their respective measures. I must say, the syncopation in the right hand added to the overall coolness of the effect. The left hand has it very easy up to this point.. As is apparent in both photos so far, it just hammers out four notes every bar to keep the time. 

A curious thing happens after this run of dyads is repeated; the text asks for some pretty impossible fingering (see left under the "poco rit" direction) . It would take some major finger braiding (or finger crossing!) to play this as scripted here. At first I thought it was just a typo, but the exact same fingering is used in a later section in which this part repeats. So... I soon figure out they want me to use the right hand, when I'd just assumed the left hand jumps up there and takes care of it. I'd like to think it was an honest mistake: the note stems are pointing down, after all, and for no apparent reason! (Except for the rest above them that needs the space. Okay fine...) Either way, I think I'm going to keep using my left hand for that and just use a more practicable 1-2-3 fingering pattern instead—an executive decision I hope I'm allowed to make.

The middle section of this piece (not pictured) is what took the majority of the time to learn. It seemed long, unintuitive, and was mildly boring to listen to when I first heard the piece. It is rather less boring to play, but still sounds pretty clunky and decidedly un-cantabile. Lots of stamping out notes in staccato. So much staccato, indeed, that it was more notationally economical to write the word staccato at the beginning of that section than to place dots over every note! I played through this piece just as often as the others, though, because I can't afford to spurn the disciplinary benefits it affords. But in all honesty, the experience was pretty blah. Auspiciously, the ending (above) is a return to the beginning, but with an added variation on that leggiero (light and delicate) section that turned out to be pretty sweet, though I'm still working on it. 

Here is Alan Chan's rendition.