28. Bublitchki

Bublitchki is a Russian folk song and is literally the word for pretzels. It's a very upbeat number, and I remember liking it immediately the first time I heard it played. J. T. points out that lots of great dance tunes are written in the minor mode. I found this bit of knowledge surprising, but cool. It's nice to know that minor keys aren't just for mourning. This opening is probably the most morose part of the song, and it presents its challenge in the need to switch fingers while repeating that first A. It's kinda cool though: the right hand shifts to the right on each stroke like the head of a typewriter (if we still remember how those things work) and gets in place just in time to strike out that dyad that begins the second bar. The seventh in the left hand is followed by the second in the right to create a slight dissonance that leads into the main theme. It's an interesting sort of bendy sound.

The main theme (if Bublitchki can be considered to have one) is this bit to the right, and I guess it's the rhythmic pattern it exemplifies that makes it "main," since that pattern's pretty much the backbone of each section. (So, yeah, no theme per se...) The two-note slurs in the left hand sort of suture the melodic gap in the right hand just after that accented dyad that breaks the line of staccato quavers. It is also fun to play. The whole thing has a sort of rag-ish flavour, and the rhythm is itself very similar to that of The Entertainer. It's noticeably not rag though, despite this similarity. The travelling sixths in the right hand required some practice to keep my fingers the right width and to travel consistently only one semi(tone) down in each (half) beat. (That'll get me ready for Bertini's Octave Study in the 4th Grade Book!) This sequence repeats before the text changes, so I also needed work on getting my fingers back in place after the trip.

To the left is a little flourish that follows the repeated sequence mentioned above. It's preceded by a variation on that repeated phrase (first bar), and then bam! this section in the second bar comes in. Note that the semiquavers in the left hand squeeze into the second half of that quaver I pointed out in the previous paragraph, so it seems that all the cool stuff happens right there in that portion of each bar. Okay, maybe other interesting things happen elsewhere...

One such is this complication of the left-hand accompaniment which has it handling far more than the two notes it started out with. Its part is spread evenly throughout the bar this time, but that final C that ends the flourish in the previous section is repeated here too, see? Playing that right hand staccato with the legato in the left requires some care. 

The portion below I recall well. It's quite a feat to recall any one section particularly well because each bar is so similar that I did have some trouble differentiating them while learning. It wasn't quite as bad as Will o' the Wisp, but there were moments of confusion. Still, this bar is conspicuous not only because of the gradual increase in pitch, but especially because of the fingering. The 1-4-3-1 terminates in a C# played with the second finger at the beginning of the next bar. This fingering reminds me of something I played back in Londonderry Air: I think that was a 3-1-2 fingering with the right hand. Wow... it seems so long ago. Was only a tiny bit over four months, though. So much has happened since, and I even have a few blogs in the pipeline. I'm sitting on Melody (Massenet), Prelude in E Minor (Chopin) and I just finished learning all the parts of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (J.T.'s adaptation), so I haven't exactly been idle these past few months...

This final bit is the end-variation on the last section, and it completes the piece. D minor is the final chord, but held in its first inversion in the right hand. Bubilitchki doesn't actually change keys at all throughout, so it's been in D minor all this time. I seem to recall a lot more Fs and As than Ds though. But in two prior culminating moments that ended each bigger section, the final sequence of notes in the left hand were D-B Flat-A-F-D. (I really should have included a picture of that, too.) So I guess a D minor key signature holds up. This song was fun to play, and I probably moved on from it too soon. Well, I suppose I haven't really, since I do still practice it, even though I'm currently learning something else.

Alan Chan's rendition

27. Romance

I think I've done this song an injustice. At some point I decided there were a few songs in the John Thompson Third Grade book to which I was going to allocate minimal effort, and this one was on the list. For me, minimal effort translates to sight-reading through the piece, perhaps a couple times if interesting. Since this one proved a little difficult to sight read, I guess I concluded it wasn't interesting and abandoned it. Yet whenever I listen to a recording of it, I find it's an extremely well crafted and moving song. Furthermore, it's composed in minor mode, and since my knowledge of how that mode works is extremely limited, I ought to learn more songs written that way. This is why I decided I can't quite let this song go by without playing it through a few more times. The song is largely arpeggiated: note the opening bars and the group of four measures depicted below them. The frequent accidentals are telling of the unbeaten path the melody treads.

Pictured above right is an extremely high G, and an interesting shape the notes make in their progress to that point... lots of jumps followed by plateaux. Above left are a couple lilting phrases that flow very gradually down from the E flat to the A flat. The challenge is to keep that thumb down on D while performing the higher portion of the RH passage, but I'd already had some practice doing that in Boccherini's Minuet and The Skaters.

I'm hoping this section might help me analyse why I had trouble sight reading the text. I don't seem to have that kind of trouble when notes are written as quavers and semiquavers, etc. The beams connecting them must have a psychological effect, encouraging me to see them as a unit and therefore to read intervals more easily. I dunno, but I noticed that this was the case with Gavotte as well, since it contains a lot of disconnected notes. I compare my reading of those pieces to that of Pathétique, Watchman's Song, Tarantella, and Melody (Massenet). Those four gave me very little trouble presumably because they were full of quavers and their ilk. I guess I'll just have to motivate myself to see those connections even without the visual suggestion of the beams.

Alan Chan's rendition

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.

25. Gavotte

This song was hard to sight read and I don't know why exactly. The first third was not too bad and I could hear the melody while playing it through for the first time. However, I think the once I got out of the scope of the refrain, the melody became too dissolute for me to hold on to it. That may be why the sight reading got progressively worse. Another reason was distraction at the time of playing. I acknowledged that and duly returned to the portion I had botched on that account. It was much better the second time around, but still not great.

The opening (pictured above) is simple enough: the melody and harmony are both single voiced, and I guess that remains true to a large degree throughout the piece—which makes it all the more mysterious that I found its sight reading so much more difficult than the songs immediately preceding. These octave-length quavers to the right are perhaps the most technically difficult aspect of the piece (though easy to read because you only read one note and all the rest are the same.) Still, they are not at all difficult to play, and that makes the song pretty easy, at least on some level.

The passage I found most interesting was this one in which arpeggios in each hand dovetail and terminate in Edim with a major 7th added. Those "arpeggios" may just be broken chords, actually, but I like the figure they make and the idea of harmonising in contrasting directions.

Alan Chan's rendition

24. from 6th Symphony, Op 74, Pathétique

Pathétique starts out in the bass clef. This excerpt, which is from Tchaikovsky's sixth and final symphony, is the Andante portion of the text and is as understated as a theme. It's not the main theme, but it has that ephemeral aura, that ghost of a melody which infuses a larger work—a thing to be absorbed and then interpreted rather than a thing itself. I could justifiably describe it as the work's thing-in-itself, the way the philosophers usually use that term: it is the noumenal rather than the phenomenal piece! Though maybe that distinction ought to be reserved for the main theme. (I knew reading Kant would come in handy someday...). At first I was concerned about being able to sustain my improved ability to read through songs while tackling this one. I needn't have worried: reading through it wasn't simple, by any means, but it proved tenable enough to support my doing it several times throughout the session. (I have had less fluid times with reading since... but that's another post.) The picture above shows a walk down from F that terminates in a diminished D chord and soon resolves into what I think is a Bdim7. I had to do some research to name that chord because its one of those interesting ones that are the same interval all round and can therefore be shuffled at will.

The repeated group above (left) is itself repeated throughout the piece, as is evident in the variation that accompanies it (above right). At first, no pedalling is indicated to make up for the lack of legato (i.e. to attenuate the clanginess), but its other incarnations indicate varying degrees of pedalling. To the right, the pedal is sustained for the duration of the five semiquavers. Later we'll see a group that receives the pedal about half the time.

This middle section is interesting because of the D that repeats over and over in the left hand. It looks pretty easy, and it is, but there is a certain amount of awkwardness involved in learning it. This awkwardness was a surprise at first, and in fact, as soon as I started playing I got the feeling I'd made an awful error in judgement about how well my practice session was going to go that day. Suddenly it seemed like playing this simple passage was going to be difficult, but soon enough my fingers kind of figured it out. I don't know why they needed time to get used to pressing the same key at intervals like that, but they did. (Actually, something similar occurs in Boccherini's Minuet for String Quartet, J.T.'s transcription of which I'm working on right now. Lot's of repeated notes, but executed non-uniformly and in both hands. Tricky...)

This is how the repeating D passage begins, and it forms the bridge between that and one of the repeated dyad passages mentioned above. This is the one with medial pedalling. Soon the text lifts the right hand out of the bass clef, to which it has been consigned since the piece's beginning, and messes with the key a bit. What interests me, here, is the shape of the chord created. It's basically a variation on C minor, but with the 5th (G) raised to a 6th (A). Kinda turns it into an A diminished actually, and it's instructive: since a C major chord with 6th replacing a 5th is A minor, it makes sense that doing the same to C minor would result in Adim. Cool!

The final walk down to the ending chord is pretty interesting. A-F#-D-B is the path (shared between hands) leading to what seems like a B minor chord (without the 5th) and with an added 7th. This chord doesn't really sound like it's leading to anything, even though in relation to B that 7th is a dominant 7th. But maybe the minor key tempers all that so we don't feel as though we're left hanging—or is it that with a minor chord you always feel that way? I don't know. Either way, I like the ending. I've been playing a lot of songs lately that seem to end with a progression of related notes leading into a chord: The Skaters, Tarantella, and now this one. Coincidence probably.

Alan Chan's Rendition

23. Tarantella

I'm still in the process of learning this song, and my current method of learning, one that involves sight reading through (as opposed to memorising), is rather new to me, since I've only very recently developed the skill of being able to read my way through a piece. I'm not actually sure if this process terminates in memorisation, or even if the latter's a more desirable outcome than merely being able to play while having the score before my eyes. But this is where I am with this piece: I can play it while the score's available. I now realise (while writing this) that I haven't actually tried to do it without the score, and the reason is that I've been trying to keep my eyes on the music while playing. This is more difficult than it sounds. I've been known to be looking at the score while playing, but not actually following it—looking through it, or something. It appears that trying to correct that aspect of pianism has deflected me from my more usual method of abandoning the score (with prodigious celerity) the second I can remember what's in it. I usually don't even bother opening the book once I'm satisfied I have every note memorised—so averse was I to reading. I guess I could try this again without the score to see what happens. Will update. As it stands, I like the way my hand bounces off the high A and onto the lower one when playing the "two-note slur" in the first bar above. J.T. (not surprisingly) advises that we pay close attention to these slurs, as they are characteristic of the tarantella. Also, the rolling action of the hand on the triple quavers is also pretty sweet.

(Update: I remembered enough of the piece to give good practice material for the following day's session—more than enough, even—but one or two of the variations got mixed up.)

Here's an octave-spanning section (top right) that mutates to an A-minor chord. I must have found the section interesting (or was it difficult?) while playing it, since I chose to take pictures of it for the blog. Once I got to cropping the pics, though, I couldn't remember what I'd found so interesting about an E octave. Perhaps I anticipated discussing the variation on this phrase that occurs later in the text (bottom right). This octave takes a different path to the A minor. Notice, the second group of notes (in both staves) are a shuffled version of those in the first picture: the notes are the same, but held with different hands and in different registers. So maybe the comparison that section affords with its second incarnation justifies my inclusion of the pic? It's interesting to think about the decisions composers make. John Thompson composed this, actually. I was glad to play one of his songs, since I'm so indebted to his pedagogy, and this song's really fun. Vivace is the pace indicated for this piece, and this means (J.T. insists) that it should be played quite fast. Maybe memorisation is in order! (I'm anticipating—and dreading—another composition of his that shows up in the fourth grade book. It is called Nocturne, and it's written for left hand only.)

This section mimics the rhythm of the opening, but naturally varies the melody. The second group of quavers does an interesting manoeuvre that (accidentally, get it?) causes it to deviate from the A-minor natural scale pattern. It rolls off the fingers with the indicated fingering, though, and it sounds cool. It also leads to another interesting variant that contains some pretty elegant finger work: 1-2-5. I know, it looks pedestrian on the page, but when the fingers do it, it turns out pretty slick—partly because the 1 and 2 play the same note in succession.

Here (top right) is another variation on the beginning theme, but with a new chord in the left hand: an Amaj7 variation (with the 5th dropped), or I guess it could be an Esus variation, with the 5th augmented (twice?). I dunno... but it works, and sounds as though it's taking the opening theme to another level. After this is where the variation on the E octave (discussed above) comes in, and then the A-minor "chord" following that is really a scalish passage that ends the song. It's pictured here (bottom right), and notice how the left hand infiltrates the progression at regular intervals to insert a G#. It ends on an A-minor chord (not pictured), one that drops the C in the left hand and holds C and A in the right. A grand exit: (quietly) brillante!

(Learning this took 60 minutes: a personal record.)

Alan Chan's Rendition

22. Watchman's Song

 Something quite strange seems to be happening to me. I thought it was a fluke when I was learning this song two days ago, but it happened again in the song following it. I'm actually learning these songs faster than I'd ever expected. The time I mentally allotted myself to play this song was 3-5 days. I was leaning toward the lower limit (3) because it is considerably shorter than The Skaters. I'd learned that one in three (which was also a surprise) with just an extended practice session on the first day. But I actually practised the whole of Watchman's Song in that one practice session for the day—even with time to spare for working on my other songs! I think it must be that my reading's truly getting better, so that it allows me to actually play a song in such a way that it sounds recognisable while I'm reading it. That used to definitely not be the case. Reading used to be so laborious that I'd have to stick to getting at most two bars at a time and then practising that for several minutes before even thinking of proceeding. Now, even if I forget a section of the bar, I can read it from the text quickly enough to refresh my memory and play it at a decent level for practice. (Now that I've said this, watch me crash and burn on the next song—Tchaikovsky!—and render all this celebration void...)

The text pictured here is the second of two very similar passages that required a lot of concentration to get right. Many of the notes are tied, and these ties cross bars in almost every case. This means that the dyads being played on the first note of the bar in every instance are broken across bars and across time. The effect is akin to one of playing broken chords, I guess. But it takes some concentration every time I get to a new bar because my fingers want to start afresh, and it's strange having to hold one note and then strike another one to join it when I really can't even hear that "sustained" note anymore. (No pedalling indicated.) I end up trying to re-strike the note because I forgot to hold it down, and then that spoils the song, since a right note being struck at the wrong time is a wrong note. So I have to start again... Another problem I had with this section was getting the timing right. I kept bringing that last sustained note (held over from the previous measure) into the time of the new measure. But that was not right. In the new one, the note is only the length of a quaver, but I tended to think the measure started on the crotchet that the first note once was. So I had to redraw my own erroneous mental bar lines, otherwise I'd get the feeling the bar had too many notes in it. Overall, this is a pleasant part of the song though, so I'll keep replaying it until get it right just so I can hear it.

This section seems to be one in which a ghost enters. Intermezzo means in between acts or movements, and both meanings apply here, since a performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth inspired Grieg to compose the song. J.T. indicates this section should be played mysteriously and grow in intensity from pianissimo to forte. I mentioned these fast arpeggios in a previous post. I'd seen them a couple days before and tried them  beforehand. The softness, velocity, and pedalling indicated makes for a truly lugubrious tone apropos of a "spirit of the night." The chords that follow were daunting, for not only does the text require that  they be executed in triplets (i.e. three notes in the space of two), but this is to be done with both hands. Technically, hands share chords all the time, but I'd never had to do this with the hands so close together and moving at such a speed that they'd potentially be getting in each other's way. It seemed to make the possibility of playing these chord-triplets doubly difficult, and indeed it was difficult. I practised over and over and over... and of course it got better, but it's still shaky. And check out the fingering for the right hand triplets! That was one of the hardships, but I'm not complaining, because it helped me get my fingers doing new and interesting things. This same pattern (arpeggios in sevenths, two-hand chord in triplets, and the four chords that follow) is repeated once, but with an F-major emphasis. (The first was in E-minor, as indicated by the key-signature change above left. Too many pics, I know...)

After that, the song returns to a version of the opening. This tendency to review what has gone before certainly helps with my learning speed, I'm sure. All in all, this was a good song for reading and learning new technique. I really appreciate John Thompson's acuity in selecting songs at just the appropriate level to nudge my development forward, but not to overwhelm. 

Thanks, J.T.

Alan Chan's rendition