12. Minuet from Septet

This is Beethoven's theme from his Septet chamber piece (Op. 20) and its hallmark is simplicity. The right hand melody is precisely that, and while the left hand accompaniment is also composed of simple broken chords, the fact that the pre-exercises J.T. provided were all previews of the left hand harmony demonstrates that simplicity sometimes requires work. I naturally observed his guidelines by practising the harmonies ahead of time, and that helped. (I usually just delve right into hands-together practice whenever feasible, so this experience was different in that I didn't even try HT to see if it was too difficult.) Above is the third of three such exercises.

I picked out a couple fast sections in the melody and added them to my daily list of techniques, ones I practise in lieu of Hanon and all that—less boring, you know. (I promise myself I'm using them to work up to the Czerny stuff, and some of them are taken from Burgmüller's 25 progressive etudes, which are studies in their own right. But this is all aside...) Here are the technical passages from Minuet.

alternative fingering

For this one (left), I practise both suggested fingerings. The top line is the more difficult, as my 4th and 5th fingers are rubbish. Whenever I play the song, I use the 3-2 fingering, as I can go much faster that way.

semiquavers 1

[Just uploaded these photos at a Peet's Coffee and Tea. Everyone's online and the internet is slow, so I actually saw the progress bar for the upload go backwards! I didn't imagine it, as it happened three times and the negative progress was quite dramatic. I think Blogger anticipated a fast upload and experienced a rude awakening when it ran into the bandwidth issue. Anyway, I'd never seen that before. It was like experiencing time go backwards and quite trippy.]

The harmonies in the above photo remind me of the legato section in Dorothy.

semiquavers 2

I still haven't got this Minuet quite up to tempo yet, but it's definitely getting there, and after I listened again to a recording of it, was surprised to find I was actually practising closer to tempo than I had imagined. This is a bit heartening because I'm still stuttering in my playing of many (even most) of the sections, so I haven't really put everything together yet. But I keep practising, and it's good to know that I'm almost already up to speed. 

repeated fingering

Some of the difficulties I face are, of course, related to practising the faster sections. Because they involve similar rhythms and fingerings, each passage interferes with the others. This is especially true for the photos captioned "semiquavers 1" and "semiquavers 2" above, but "alternative fingering" is also implicated. So I simply have to work on my fingers' ability to do what I intend and not just blindly follow any neural pathway it finds in the general area. It's a challenge, but I'm up to it. Interesting is the fingering pattern for the repeated notes (above). I understand that traditionally pianists were expected to change fingers when playing the same note several times in succession.

Alan Chan's rendition