17. Prelude in C

This "little prelude" by J. S. Bach is filled with arpeggios. I'm not very good with those. Still, I seem to be doing alright articulating them for now, while I'm simply getting a feel for the song under my fingers. I can only imagine they'll improve once I really start practising. The pattern for each bar (for about the first half of the song) goes sonething like: broken chord, dominant seventh to fifth, broken subdominant chord, broken dominant. Repeat. More or less. Of course, since the text is just one arpeggio after another, they all start running together after a while. It takes effort to disentangle them and get them in the right order. It'll happen though; it usually does.

[Incidentally, this Prelude in C isn't the one I thought it was going to be. For almost all my life I've known (and loved) another tune—which, in my teens, I'd discovered was composed by Bach. Apparently the one I really love is the first piece in The Well-Tempered Clavier. I heard it this past week on the companion CD for the Sonatina Album and will definitely be playing it soon.]

This section (left) is basically the biggest deviation from playing straight arpeggios, and it's more of a variation on than a deviation from. The sporadic staccatos begin here too, and basically culminate in the section with the mordents, each of which is punctuated by a staccatoed G.

The mordents come in at the second half, and luckily J.T. gives us a clue on what to do with them.

I practised them a tiny bit beforehand, but even though the mordents are difficult on their own (demisemiquavers!), putting them together with those right hand arpeggios and getting the timing just right was still harder. I spent a couple sessions practising just that section. So much so that as it stands, I now play the mordent section much better than the rest. Not because the rest is hard, but because I simply haven't practised those parts as much. But still, there is something to be said for practising the difficult parts first and hard. It builds your confidence since you know that if you can play the harder part, then you'll be able to do the whole thing soon enough.

The section below is actually my first longish run of semiquavers. This tripped me up quite a bit where the second and third groups overlap that A in the middle of the pic below. I kept messing it up because it required deviation from the regular scale fingering I was used to, and it was hard to unlearn the automatic motion from third to second finger while descending the scale. The text requires 3-2-3-1, and that last 3-1 was murder to do without the second finger slipping in. I'm still working on it. I can do it pretty well slow now. (Before, even that was impossible.) But fast? Forget about it!

Well, I can't quite forget about it. Gotta keep workin'...

Alan Chan's rendition