6. Elfin Dance

Adolf Jensen's Elfin Dance is an animated little piece, as you can tell from the direction to play "vivace, con grazia." It would almost be a study in chromatic scales, except it provides fewer passages for the left hand... which is kind of a shame because I need to work on my chromatic scales. It has inspired me to do a very little work in that area, though. I remember trying to pass the improvement in my right hand chromatics on to the left hand at one point. The piece has lots of pedal work too, and it augments my recent discovery that euphony can derive from pedaling scales. I'd discovered that while playing Aragonaise and pedaling through portions of "normal" diatonic scales. Now these are chromatic passages and even those work with pedal! I guess it's sort of a carillon sound. Note in the opening how the staccatos end pedalled phrases and slurs. This requires precision in lifting the pedal, as it will ruin the effect if sustained.

These tied notes in the left hand are interesting. You don't simply hold them but change fingering periodically throughout out (between the slurs). The right hand has a few ties, too, but much more is going on over there. The chords are not very complicated, but the difficulty is to resist the urge to lift the middle finger as the fourth switches with the fifth. This happens in the middle cluster of the first bar. For that first chord in the ending bar, I actually use the fourth instead of the indicated third finger, so it feels like another example of what I just described, though I can't prove it. A variation on this follows when the opening is repeated and leads into the next section.

This is the chromatic section and it begins with a long 1.5 octave run starting on E and ending on C. The accompanying chords are alternating major and dominant seventh chords in inversion: G7, C, C7, F. Not a whole lot to be said here: start on E and play the next 20 notes. J. T. indicates the fingering here, and I'm not sure I remember any other chromatic passages this long for the past two books, so maybe we were due a refresher. There might have been a chromatic song in the First Grade Book—something about bells. Nope... I checked. It was just a C Major scale played with pedal and sounding like the eponymous "Chimes" (p. 24).

A descending chord progression follows with some pretty wide chords at one point (octaves) and narrowing to a minor third in the right hand. This was a little awkward to get at first, especially because of the portamento required in one hand while legato in the next. Actually, I've been playing those portamentos as staccatos, so I need to revise that. Eventually, though, after rote repetition, I finally got the hands to at least move to the correct notes at the right time—which is at least how every well-rendered performance begins.

I rather like these runs of staccato-supported legatos even though they did give me quite a bit of trouble to get down. It's awkward holding a chord with 2nd, 4th and 5th fingers, and to shift to that quickly only increases the difficulty. That's what I do with the second of the last four chords pictured here. The second group has me switching from the exact same initial chord to a different one, so of course learning that was akin to unlearning the previous combo. Murderous! (Well... almost.)

Soon we get to this section. It's got chords progressing down the keyboard chromatically. I don't pretend to have this under my fingers well yet. It was easy enough to learn the notes, and they kind of remind me of a manoeuvre we had in Spinning Song. But this was hard to execute, if not memorise, because the right-most finger of each hand is anchored to one note while the rest of the hand travels left. How unnatural is that? It reminds me of a certain starfish Annie Dillard describes in The Writing Life: it deliberately breaks itself. My hands are so contorted that it looks as though they are breaking themselves as I try to execute this. The funny thing is, when I watch a video of someone playing this, the pianist's hands are perfectly relaxed and well shaped as they travel down the keyboard. I try to strive for that level of facility, but it currently eludes me. One day...

After all these forays and difficulties, we finally get back to the theme. It is repeated via a sort of channel in which the right hand travels up the keyboard in intervals of thirds and then launches into that opening run. Then comes this passage, which repeats the opening but in the subdominant key. The original was in C (began on E) and this in F (beginning on A). But then it soon readjusts itself to the home key and ends rather mellifluously with some chords and a final staccato C played simultaneously in both hands as a sort of final punctuation.

Alan Chan's rendition