14. Ballade

opening

I anticipated playing this piece by Friedrich Burgmüller so much that I cheated and started previewing the main left-hand section weeks before I actually finished all the pieces leading up to it. I had realized that it was going to take more finger control than I possessed then to play Ballade acceptably, so I think that preview was beneficial. By the time I actually got to it, I could in fact play the right-hand staccato along with the left-hand legato at a decent third-grade pace. (Note: the John Thompson text has no tempo indication but allegro con brio, so the definition of "energetic" is left somewhat open to interpretation. In the Burgmüller text, however, a much stricter speed of 104 is indicated per bar. I'm going with a slower version of energetic for now.) The opening bars above contain C-minor triads that should be played both mysteriously and quietly, and since piano is also indicated when the left hand comes in (view right), I've had to learn to modulate the volume of notes that are also being played at a fast tempo. This is a bit difficult for me because fast tends to be synonymous with loud when my hands are learning the tempo as well as the notes. (I read somewhere that each level of sound should have at least three gradations: three levels of ppp, three of pp, and so on.) Now I've always known that I have too heavy a hand to play anything really delicately and that I was going to need to work on that. In order to play this song anywhere near correctly, I guess I'm going to have to start working on it right away. Otherwise, the piece will tend to sound gruff and harsh, and it's too good a song to butcher in that way. The register is low enough and the tones ever so slightly dissonant that care must be taken to make it sing, and even though cantabile isn't indicated, I think it's desirable to aim at something close to that.

What occurs at this point (above) in the score isn't truly syncopation because it's the last (and not the first) beats that are dropped from each bar, but it seems syncopated. In fact, if you're not careful, it sort of feels that the second of the quavers in each bar is positioned at the beginning of the bar (as though the beams straddled bars or something). This is obviously not the case, so I have to take care not to become disoriented while playing or singing this section. I'm okay with it now. Like I said, I've been surreptitiously practising it for a while.

To the right, a key change occurs for the first time. It goes from C minor to C major, and the text doesn't simply drop the flats but naturalizes them, I guess to emphasize that the lack of key signature for the next few bars isn't just an oversight. This section is where the piece truly starts to sing. A lilting melody takes over, and the dissonance is suspended for a few bars. I think it would be interesting to examine the transitions between the two sections. First, a C minor chord is followed by two Gs an octave apart, and finally by a G major chord to lead into the change. After that section, a progression of the notes G#, F, D, and G heralds the return of the original key (C minor). I'm still trying to work out its meaning. Is that the usual way of switching between major and minors of the same root key? I haven't had much experience with that, so I'll have to look out for similar transitions in the future.

Here's the final return to the dissonant refrain, now played by both hands in unison. These measures are fun to play once I overcome my false starts. After this climax, the song fades out on four C minor chords. All in all, it's a very satisfying piece. I'm glad I've finally learned it. 

Now comes the hard work of practising so I actually play it as Burgmüller intended.

Alan Chan's rendition

Visualisation

(Re)reading pieces away from the piano with the aim of visualising the keys played. It's really hard, as, spatially, I am a complete cadet.

Nobody Knows De Trouble I've Seen (JTMCP3) December 29, 2014
Melody (Schumann) December 30, 2014
Musette (Bach)  December 31, 2014
Toreador Song (Bizet) December 31, 2014
Dorothy (S. Smith) December 31, 2014
Witches' Dance (Kullak) January 1, 2015
Evening Prayer (Humperdinck) January 2, 2015 
Sarabande (Handel) January 4, 2015 
Traümerei (Schumann) January 8, 2015
Traümerei (Schumann) January 26, 2015
Watchman's Song (Grieg) January 30, 2015
The Juggler (Loeschhorn) February 4, 2015  
Romance (Rubinstein) Part A February 7, 2015 
Romance (Rubinstein) Part B February 11, 2015 
Andante from 5th Symphony (Beethoven) Part A February 26, 2015 
Hymn to the Sun (Rimsk-Korsakov) Part A March 10, 2015
Prelude in D-flat Major (Raindrop) Part 1 of 7 March 27, 2015
Chant de L'Alouette (Song of the Skylark) (Grieg) Part A April 29, 2015

13. H.M.S. Pinafore

The tone of this Gilbert and Sullivan piece is lighthearted and even informal. It seemed, to me at least, to stand out from the rest of the numbers collected in this text so far. (Though I guess it's a bit close in spirit to Bizet's Toreador Song, and it couldn't actually be more informal than a song adapted from a negro spiritual, even if nowhere near as grave.) Still, I think those are appropriate adjectives, and when I took a look at a couple performances of the comic opera on YouTube, it seems that general atmosphere carried throughout the piece. So I wasn't too far off. 

I spent a couple of the practice days just reading my way through the entire song, and either this song is easier to sight read than the others, or my sight reading is improving. (I'm guessing it's the former.) In any case, it wasn't utterly distasteful to read through it and far less painful than usual.

The song's in F major, but spends a bit of time in C major with a time signature change (right) to go with the key change. This is the second time-signature change encountered since I began using this book. The first was in Berceuse. This one seems to be primarily related to the synthetic nature of the piece. J.T. titles it "excerpts from H.M.S. Pinafore" because he sutures three separate songs together to make this medley, songs originally written with different key and time signatures.

The construction works, though; it doesn't seem fractured or even like a medley at all. The picture above also shows an interesting section characterised by arpeggios, tied notes, and hand crossing. Even though the execution turns out to be some pretty straightforward two-handed arpeggio work, figuring that out required some close textual attention, as I kept getting lost in the notation. It involves holding some of the notes in a chord while releasing others, so that I really had to focus on what I was doing to get it right. Turns out that the pedalling simplifies a lot of this though, but this isn't so apparent the first time you look at the text. Notice that E in the bass clef whose stem extends all the way down from the semiquaver group in the treble (pic above-right). I am not entirely clear why it's printed that way, unless it's to reduce the need for excessive ledger lines. I think I'm more aware of that kind of thing today in particular, though, for two reasons. Last night I glanced ahead in my book to Chopin's Prelude in C Minor and noticed he does a similar thing, but when I really took notice was this morning when I took a look at the score for his Raindrop Prelude and saw it was also filled with those transgressive stems. So now I'm seeing them everywhere. At first it was daunting to look at, but after thinking for a while, that's when the simplification idea came to me. Why use ledger lines to duplicate portions of the staves if you don't have to? But... if that is indeed the reason, why not just write the entire group in the bass clef? Perhaps to preserve the connection or flow or the arpeggio between that first low C in the left hand and the final (E-C) dyad in the right? Who knows... but as long as we're on the subject of arpeggios, above-left is another interesting one. Here the stems of all six notes are beamed together, somewhat supporting my earlier hypothesis about preserving connections.

I dunno if I should be embarrassed to admit that it took me a long time to adapt my fingers to playing this section. (I'm not.) It looks simple enough, but I had to play it scores of times just to get it to feel right under my fingers. Unrelatedly, this is also where the time signature change first takes place, and I remember not really being able to cognise (or perhaps accept) the change when reading through it the first time. I had to re-listen to a recording, but then it became clearer. I'm sure sight-reading jitters were largely responsible for this lapse.

This was another section that took a while to get right. The first two bars actually came easy, but the third and fourth required some work. There's something about the fingering in the left hand that's a tiny bit awkward. The thumb is perched on B flat, while the third finger is buried in that valley between E flat and F sharp. My hands don't take well to finding that position twice in a row, but I don't think it can be avoided. The right hand does an interesting little flourish that, once learned, is pretty fluid. It seems more comfortable with the 4^th finger on B flat and fairly frolics in that measure. So, all in all, the passage turned out pretty sweet, but after a bit of work.

I'm still working on playing these acciaccaturas just right. Each seems to require just a simple flick of the 4^th finger and then a solid strike with the 3^rd, but (alas) I'm still botching it. It'll work itself out though. Fingers crossed...

Alan Chan's rendition

Miscellany

March Wind (Czerny) December 23, 2014
L'Avalanche (Heller) December 25, 2014
Preludes 1 & 2  (JTMCPG3) December 26, 2014
Sarabande (Haydn) December 26, 2014
Evening Prayer (Humperdinck) December 26, 2014
The Juggler (Loeschhorn) December 27, 2014
Come, Dance with Me (Humperdinck) December 28, 2014
The Juggler (Loeschhorn) January 6, 2015
Sarabande (Haydn) January 7, 2015
Prelude in C (Bach) January 9, 2015
Sonatina (Clementi) January 10, 2015
La Styrienne (Burgmüller) January 11, 2015
Evening Prayer (Humperdinck) January 11, 2015
Sonatina in C, part A (Benda) January 12, 2015
Sonatina Op. 36 No. 2. I, part A (Clementi) January 13, 2015
Come, Dance with Me (Humperdinck) January 16, 2015
Dona Nobis Pacem (Anonymous) January 18, 2015
Waltz in A Minor Op. Posth Part A (Chopin) January 19, 2015
La Cucaracha (Mexican Folk Song) January 20, 2015
The Skaters Pt. 1 (Waldteufel) January 21, 2015
The Skaters Pt. 2 (Waldteufel) January 22, 2015
The Skaters Pt. 3 (Waldteufel) January 23, 2015
Waltz in A Minor Op. Posth. Part B (Chopin) January 24, 2015
La Cucaracha (Mexican Folk Song) January 27, 2015
Watchman's Song (Grieg) January 28, 2015
Tarantella (Thompson) February 1, 2015
Gavotte Part A (Popper) February 3, 2015
Gavotte Part B (Popper) February 5, 2015
Sonata in C Adagio Part A (Haydn) February 5, 2015
Romance (Rubinstein) Part A February 8, 2015
Bublitchki (Russian Folk Song) February 9, 2015 (HBO!) 
Romance (Rubinstein) Part A February 12, 2015
Prélude in E Minor (Chopin) February 13, 2015 (Friday13th!)
Romance (Rubinstein) Part B February 15, 2015
Bublitchki (Russian Folk Song) February 16, 2015
Prélude in E Minor (Chopin) February 18, 2015
Prélude in E Minor (Chopin) February 19, 2015
Melody (Massenet) February 20, 2015
Melody (Massenet) February 21, 2015 
Hungarian Rhapsody (Adaptation) February 22-25, 2015
Sonatina Op. 36 No. 2 Rondo (Clementi) Part A February 28, 2015
Sonatina Op. 36 No. 3 Spiritoso (Clementi) Part A February 28, 2015
Romance (Rubinstein) Part C March 2, 2015
Minuet in G (Beethoven) March 2, 2015
Sonatina Op. 36 No. 3 Spiritoso (Clementi) Part A March 3, 2015
Minuet in G (Beethoven) March 4, 2015
Prelude in C Minor (Chopin) Part A March 5-6, 2015
Prelude in C Minor (Chopin) Part B March 7, 2015
Curious Story (Heller) Part A March 8, 2015 
Curious Story (Heller) Part B March 9, 2015 

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

Review

where it all happens...

It's finals week at my university, so I've decided to go back through the stuff I've learned for the past 11 weeks and recall to mind some things that might have fallen by the wayside. Much had been forgotten, alas. I "sight read" through some old pieces, in a way just to see if I could gauge any improvement in that particular skill. I know it wasn't true sight reading, since I'd seen the pieces before, but I think it helped me measure my progress in that area, plus it was indispensable to reviewing anyway. So I killed two birds. I had forgotten much of Nobody Knows, but not too much of the others. Still, they were a bit rusty since I'd long(ish) moved on from them. As I move on to newer songs, it becomes harder to keep these old ones fresh. Anyway, they get to go under my sight reading for today, though they are officially not really that. Maybe it helps that I did two per day?  Maybe it helps that I think I did make some marginal sight reading progress?

December 16, 2014

Nobody Knows
Melody 


December 17, 2014
Toreador Song
Dorothy 

Also sight read a couple pieces from John Thompson's Hanon Studies Book 1 (Dec. 17)

8. The Steamboat
10. The Fountain 

December 18, 2014
Londonderry Air

December 19, 2014
La Bergeronnette


December 20, 2014
Bits of Ballade and John Thompson's excerpts of H.M.S. Pinafore (more preview than review, I guess)

January 5, 2015
Sarabande

Bach

First Lessons in Bach Complete:  For the Piano

1. Minuet in G major (Dec. 12, 2014)

2. Minuet in G minor (Dec. 13, 2014)

3. Minuet in G major (Dec. 14, 2014) 

4. Polonaise in G minor (Dec. 15, 2014)
 



 
5. March in D major (Dec. 21, 2014)




6. Minuet in G major (Dec. 22, 2014)

 

11. Will-o'-the-wisp

Or... omg! Seriously, Franz Behr?

I had a strange experience learning this song. I progressed through learning it far faster than I expected. From just looking at the text on the page, I expected it to take me at least as long as Berceuse, which looks much simpler. However, I sat down prepared for a struggle and found that I just kept moving on to the next bar. That really surprised me. In the end, I pretty much had the whole thing learned by the end of that day (three hour-long sessions or so).

Yet my apprehensions were certainly not unfounded. After learning all the parts—in order, I thought—then came that weird stage in the memorisation process where the second guessing and interference began. And boy does this piece lend itself to interference! Suddenly, the piece became shufflable and began reconfiguring itself during my playing. I've isolated some reasons for this.

In every bar, the rhythms are more or less identical; the chord groupings in each hand are pretty much the same; several passages repeat, but with slight variations; the variations are themselves taken from other passages in the same text, so each bar, being a sort of microcosm of the whole piece, is as much a shuffling of the other bars' components as the piece is itself a shuffling of bars. In short, Behr takes all the difficulties I mentioned having with Berceuse and extends it throughout his whole composition so that sometimes (during the memorisation stage) I'd be playing a passage entirely correctly... then realise I was playing it in the wrong place. (smh)

Potentially Confusing Passage A

The piece definitely has a fun factor though. I honestly recall observing, in the middle of this intricate memorisation process, that I was having fun playing the song. I may have to revise my usual philosophy on staccato-riddled pieces, because as "an Etude in forearm staccato," this piece is full of it. But I think maybe the animation that inevitably accompanies staccato is what made the fun I was having. Not only does the piece use the regular dots, but it also includes the accents of "ordinary intensity" and introduces us to the vertical wedges (below) that indicate accents of "unusual emphasis." We're also exposed further to Sforzando (Sfz), which encourages forceful (as opposed to loud) playing.

Potentially Confusing Passage B
(Note how the notation for the first
group of three notes in the right hand
differs from that of the photo above,
but the notes played, A-flat & G-sharp,
are exactly the same. Tricky...)

It's interesting to feel the difference between the forearm staccato being studied in this piece and the wrist staccato, which I'm more used to. And it's weird how the piece itself seems to suggest that you execute the accents with the forearm and discourages the use of just the wrist. (Maybe it is because these accents are repeated so much throughout that the wrist couldn't possibly handle all that activity? Not sure.) My forearm staccato still needs a lot of work though, especially in the section where we play two rapid quavers, only the first of which is wedge-accented. It's hard to attenuate the forcefulness on the second beat after putting so much into the first. My hands want to do both with equal strength.

I wonder what a shuffled version of this song might sound like, and how many shuffled versions one could get out of 24 bars. If we keep the bars in tact at least, the math says we could have 2²⁴ different versions of Will-o'-the-wisp and quite a lot of those would have the full 24 bars. Good luck learning them all!

Alan Chan's rendition

10. Berceuse

Memorising this song by Benjamin Godard took me a couple sessions longer than I expected. It was worth the time, of course, because like Serenade, I really appreciated the song's vibe when I listened to a recording of it and was eager to learn it. The opening passage pictured to the left provided me with more training in  hand-independence and reminds me a bit of Melody. But I think many of the factors that contribute to the song's charm also made learning it tricky. The fact that much of the song is composed of broken chords aids memorisation, certainly, but the arpeggios in the left and right hands are sort of tessellated and repeated in variation. So that it's remembering the precise configuration that gets you. It's not so bad the first time, but the second time the chord comes around, since the arrangement is a little different, the challenge then becomes recalling which pattern you're currently on. Getting it right is challenging, but also extremely rewarding, because the melody is in the changing patterns, and it's very satisfying to hear it unfold. Below is a comparison of two similar passages:

In the second bar, the change between the first and second renditions of this passage occurs only in the fingering: the final C is played with the second finger the first time and the first finger the second time. This very subtle adjustment isn't at all a change in the text's aural manifestation but only in the intention shoring up the execution of a future change, one that occurs in the first note of the third bar (F to G). After that, the text adds C# in the third beat of the fourth bar (RH) and replaces the D that follows with an F. This (sort of) forces the semibreve to contract to a dotted minim, altering the rhythm slightly too. So overall, three material changes in an otherwise identical passage encourages some mnemonics.

I chose to change the fingering for this passage to something that provided an easier transition to the notes that follow. But I have to admit, J.T. was on to something when he chose the 2-5 fingering, because that actually makes it easier to play the notes. Playing the text with 1-4 isn't so much awkward to hold as to play in arpeggio. My left thumb and right index keep trying to strike simultaneously! So I keep playing with the fingering I chose now out of sheer defiance because I think they need to learn to act independently.

This arpeggiated A-minor chord with added B-flat (below) soon transforms into the C7 chord that marks the key signature's transition from the C major to F major. At this point, the time signature also changes from 3/4 to 4/4. Key changes happen all the time in music, but this was actually the first time I've had to play a song that changed time signatures. It was interesting. I keep wondering if I should pause a little longer between the two sections to get into a 4/4 mood... It was also at this point that I noticed a greater facility in my reading abilities. I read through this middle bit while playing for the first time in my life. A landmark moment really, and ought to be recorded.

This final section shows some three-staved hand-over-hand crossing. There on the left is that curly brace that shows everything's played simultaneously by the same person—simple enough to do here. (I saw some today at the end of Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# Minor that made my head explode. But that's the story of a year, another year... way, way, way into the future.)

 

For now, I'm still trying to figure out what these dotted lines mean. I googled it and nada. (Legato between hands, maybe, in pace of the slur?)

Update June 26, 2015: I think I figured this out, or at least have another theory. It seems to mean play that note with the right hand. I think. I saw these dotted lines in Arkansas Traveler too, and it just felt that J.T. wanted me to use my right hand to play that single note on the F clef. Still seems kinda weird here though.

Alan Chan's Rendition