12. Prelude

Because of the anticipated disciplinary benefits, I've really been looking forward to the pieces by Bach that show up in this collection. There are two by Johann Sebastian and one by Carl Philipp Emanuel. This one is simply called "Prelude" in this text, but it's J. S. Bach's Little Prelude in F (BWV 927). I think somewhere along the line I changed my mode of practice. Rather than memorise as quickly as possible and then practice after that stage has been completed, I now seem to practise while learning, which makes the memorisation take longer. I've no objection to that, though it does make the record of time taken to learn (which I note at the top of the first page of each piece) seem much longer than usual. This particular piece took me 13 days, even though it was only one page long! And even after practising significantly during that period, I still have a lot of practice ahead of me if I want to get it deep into my fingers. I need to do that especially for this piece because I think it will cause my finger independence and dexterity to grow by leaps and bounds. 

So I plug along. The opening pictured left took a long time to become fluid. I think I have finally got it to a point where I rarely mess it up, but boy was that a hard place to reach. I spent so much time learning it, then moved on to a later section that I seemed to pick up even before this one. Here the Alberti bass is in the treble, lol. Reminds me of a song by Nate Dogg and Warren G. 

The hard part comes right after the above when for some reason I stretch from B^♭ to E using 2-4. It's a bit rough on the ligaments, and it ends in a bit of an arpeggio flourish shared between the hands. It's very similar to the one done by the left hand in the picture to the right, but it begins an octave higher. Both are in F, too, but the right hand has all but those final three notes (C-A-C).

This nice little left-handed walk down the scale succeeds a similar upward procession. The portamento indicated (by the staccato dots under a legato slur) helps the piece sound more harpsichord, which J. T. urges us to try to imitate. I played it in all kinds of ways (legato, staccatos, and portamento) when first trying to learn it. I find it's not too hard now to switch between those various expressions. This is a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. I recall how hard it once was to play staccato in one hand and legato in the other. And the right hand is almost completely legato all the way. In fact, J. T.'s first instruction is: "Play all passages in sixteenth notes with well-articulated finger legato." The hard part about the right hand—and this is true in almost all bars—is that the switching of Alberti bass from broken tonic to broken (sub)dominant confuses the fingers. It's not the doing but the remembering when to do it that's hard. Learning it as a pattern doesn't quite work when the pattern breaks. It's almost like learning the pattern of the patterns might as well be reduced back to learning the notes as a long sequence. It works out though, and the fact that I'm able to do it in one measure garners me hope for the other measures.

Here the first double semiquavers kick in. They don't last, but they do occur once more. We're talking major finger independence here. The notes are going every which way. 

To the right are some descending arpeggios. The same thing happens in a new key, but I think the first of them is a diminished chord: Edim, then Dm, and finally C. Interesting.

Finally, we have a solo for the right hand that leads to the ending pictured below it. Alberti chords in the right hand. Nice ending. Really. I'm exhausted by writing...









Alan Chan's rendition