11. Will-o'-the-wisp

Or... omg! Seriously, Franz Behr?

I had a strange experience learning this song. I progressed through learning it far faster than I expected. From just looking at the text on the page, I expected it to take me at least as long as Berceuse, which looks much simpler. However, I sat down prepared for a struggle and found that I just kept moving on to the next bar. That really surprised me. In the end, I pretty much had the whole thing learned by the end of that day (three hour-long sessions or so).

Yet my apprehensions were certainly not unfounded. After learning all the parts—in order, I thought—then came that weird stage in the memorisation process where the second guessing and interference began. And boy does this piece lend itself to interference! Suddenly, the piece became shufflable and began reconfiguring itself during my playing. I've isolated some reasons for this.

In every bar, the rhythms are more or less identical; the chord groupings in each hand are pretty much the same; several passages repeat, but with slight variations; the variations are themselves taken from other passages in the same text, so each bar, being a sort of microcosm of the whole piece, is as much a shuffling of the other bars' components as the piece is itself a shuffling of bars. In short, Behr takes all the difficulties I mentioned having with Berceuse and extends it throughout his whole composition so that sometimes (during the memorisation stage) I'd be playing a passage entirely correctly... then realise I was playing it in the wrong place. (smh)

Potentially Confusing Passage A

The piece definitely has a fun factor though. I honestly recall observing, in the middle of this intricate memorisation process, that I was having fun playing the song. I may have to revise my usual philosophy on staccato-riddled pieces, because as "an Etude in forearm staccato," this piece is full of it. But I think maybe the animation that inevitably accompanies staccato is what made the fun I was having. Not only does the piece use the regular dots, but it also includes the accents of "ordinary intensity" and introduces us to the vertical wedges (below) that indicate accents of "unusual emphasis." We're also exposed further to Sforzando (Sfz), which encourages forceful (as opposed to loud) playing.

Potentially Confusing Passage B
(Note how the notation for the first
group of three notes in the right hand
differs from that of the photo above,
but the notes played, A-flat & G-sharp,
are exactly the same. Tricky...)

It's interesting to feel the difference between the forearm staccato being studied in this piece and the wrist staccato, which I'm more used to. And it's weird how the piece itself seems to suggest that you execute the accents with the forearm and discourages the use of just the wrist. (Maybe it is because these accents are repeated so much throughout that the wrist couldn't possibly handle all that activity? Not sure.) My forearm staccato still needs a lot of work though, especially in the section where we play two rapid quavers, only the first of which is wedge-accented. It's hard to attenuate the forcefulness on the second beat after putting so much into the first. My hands want to do both with equal strength.

I wonder what a shuffled version of this song might sound like, and how many shuffled versions one could get out of 24 bars. If we keep the bars in tact at least, the math says we could have 2²⁴ different versions of Will-o'-the-wisp and quite a lot of those would have the full 24 bars. Good luck learning them all!

Alan Chan's rendition