26. Minuet (from String Quartet)

Minuet is a piano adaptation of Boccherini's piece for string quartet. It is in A major, but I've also heard a version in E Major for string quintet... not sure if that was due to mislabeling, though. It's a very well known tune, and I was daunted by the knowledge of its approach as  I progressed through the book. As it turns out, its placement was at precisely the right moment in my education. It presented enough of a challenge to give me something to work on, but wasn't overwhelmingly difficult, so I wasn't at all frustrated while practising.

The opening bar is a case in point. This acciaccatura that goes directly into four semiquavers is one of the harder technical aspects of the text, but I'd already had enough practice executing such notes that I actually did it on the first try. This doesn't mean I've no need to improve on it—some renderings are better than others, but I'm not having to learn how to do it from scratch. So J.T. did well in placing this song here. Other aspects of the opening that required work were those notes staggered between the left and right hands in the second bar. First of all, the spacing doesn't make the staggering that obvious, though thankfully I did notice it before attempting the piece! Having to unlearn the wrong thing would have been unpleasant. (The time of the beats wouldn't have added up to the time signature, though, so apart from the non-too-obvious un-alignment of the notes, I guess that was another consideration that led me to the correct execution.) Secondly, my hands don't necessarily want to alternate like that, so this gave me another chance to work on hand independence. And it didn't take very long to come together. Only after successfully getting my hands to alternate did I add the indicated pedalling, which helped prevent the whole from sounding too choppy. Since the piece was intended for stringed instruments that perform continuous notes with much greater facility than the piano, the pedals are really necessary for making it sound decent. I have to admit that it sounds far better on the strings.

This part gave me the most trouble of all the text, and surprisingly the problem wasn't the simultaneous staccato (RH) and quavering (LH), but rather the transition from sloth to speed that the left hand passes through just prior to embarking on this section. Note how the first photo (above) has the left hand playing at most three notes (or dyads) per bar—i.e. going very slowly. Now in this one it's required to play twelve! Well, during that switch from 3 to 12 notes per bar, my hand participates in Newton's law of inertia and simply balks at the change in momentum. (Incidentally, there's a section in the first movement of Mozart's Sonata in C (K545) in which the left hand is required to do something similar. It's quite a bit more complicated, since it requires alternation not between two-note groups, but four-note groups. I am confident Minuet will help prepare me to do that well when the time comes.)

Pictured to the right is the repeated-note section that I mentioned in a previous post. In each bar, the right hand performs three executions of E, while the left hand follows suit in a lower octave, but drops the second of them. The hand work is actually not especially complicated, as each hand pretty much stays in E five-finger position for that whole section, except for a small leap by the left hand up an octave to the E the right hand controls. (See the penultimate LH note in the picture.) So the hands are moving pretty fluidly throughout the passage, and the real difficulty is in learning to drop that left-hand E at the appropriate moment. I had to work on it. Still am. But, again, the technique it requires isn't so far above that which I currently possess that it makes the necessary work terribly frustrating. Oh yeah, and the key signature changes.

This was another one of the sections that required extra practice. Notice the left hand switches to treble and then back to bass clef. This happens a few times in succession, so it's a repeated cross-hand section. It's not too bad and actually took a short time to learn, though it was necessary to isolate this passage from the rest and dedicate some practice time just to it. One snag is that this passage repeats later, but this time with the E (first note of the right hand in the second bar) in staccato. So my hands had to learn two ways to play this, and there was an appreciable pattern of interference at first.

It's the fingering for this section that presents the biggest challenge. Getting the staccato progression right seems to rely on (or gesture toward) staccato scale playing. I only recently tried that, and even though it seems a minor transition from regular scale playing, the fingers do show a tendency to become confused at first. This passage also suffered from that in the beginning, but the fingers learned fast. There's an interesting little twist of the wrist that inevitably occurs at the beginning of the third bar where the left hand transitions from single-note progression to spanning a seventh. The motion is very subtle and perhaps unremarkable... except that I seem always to mark it.  

The end is a return to the that familiar melody of the beginning.  It requires movement back to the A major context and continues all the way through that section. The result is that the song is quite a bit longer than the two pages of printed text in my book, since even within that repeated portion are other repeated portions. No, it doesn't wind up (get it?) looping infinitely.

Enough corniness. Here's Alan Chan's rendition.