15. Impromptu

Another reading piece. The arpeggios are for the most part diminished and ascending, but the interspersal of a reversed pair of notes strangely fits. I guess its because everything's pretty much out of whack and anharmonic already. The sudden descent merely throws a wrench into a trajectory that's already rugged. Playing was not too difficult. With a little effort, I could have memorized it. In fact, I did inadvertently (or is it fortuitously?) memorize the main arpeggio refrain. I didn't think it presented any especial technical difficulties, so that's why I didn't spend too much time on it. I did, however, like the angling of the fingers for the diminished arpeggios though: 1-3-4 at 45 degrees. I think maybe J.T. puts easier pieces in so students can practice their tonal quality on passages that aren't difficult to play. I've been doing that with Bach's Prelude (in F), Scarf Dance, and Hungarian. I was shocked into this tonal quality obsession by hearing some really trashy playing on YouTube by people playing on really really good grand pianos. So "singing tone" has become my watch word from now on. I'm even trying to pull it off with Bach, that's how dedicated I am to it. Always cantabilise!

But I digress...

This is the best part. Since it was the most technically challenging, I practised it quite a bit beyond mere sight reading. It sounds like the expansion and contraction of some kind of wave-like object. And I hate to say the word "accordion," so I won't. It got a little confusing for my fingers to do the intricate finger switching in the right hand. And notice how that B is held in the left hand. You would think it would be easy to just hold down a note, but actually with all the other notes being played above it, your hand kinda wants to lift and then replay the note at least once. Can the note even be sustained that long? Almost three bars! 

I also like the F-B♭ at the end. It contributes to the lilt; expands the wave and feels like those leaps in your stomach when there's turbulence or speeding on a hill. Anyway, after this we return to the arpeggios, and then do a few variations with lots and lots of modulation.

Alan Chan's rendition

John Thompson Fifth Grade Technique

I just bought this book. Here's what I think of it.


Table of Contents

Bach
Beethoven
Brahms
Chopin
Daquin
Franck
Grieg
Handel
Haydn
Hummel
Liadow
Liszt, MacDowell, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Moszkowski, Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, Rubinstein, Schubert, Schumann, Weber.

Lemme just say that the lone appearance of the word "scherzo" petrifies me.

I played the first bar of the excerpt from Bach's Allemande today (July 25, 2015). It is to be played "legato throughout with utmost smoothness." I think all the pieces have been placed in order of difficulty in the text, despite the alphabetized table of contents, because the excerpts from Chopin's etudes and ballades are all toward the end. Day two, and I've basically just been playing those few notes over and over without moving on to another bar. I'm going to treat it like an etude, and I think that means getting the notes so ingrained in my fingers that I'll be able to speed it up to a... well, to a fifth grade level. I figure I have time, since I'm not actually in the fifth grade yet.

Update (April 16, 2016): I started previewing the excerpt from Schubert's Impromptu (Op. 90, No. 2) a couple weeks ago (around April 1, 2016 or a few days before.) The C Minor scale is familiar from having played CPE Bach's Solfeggietto and Haydn's Menuetto (in E^♭ Major, but still...), but I haven't got everything down well enough to try for speed yet. And I've kind of forgotten to practise it for the past week or two. Will get back into it soon. 

14. Scarf Dance

Cecile Chaminade is the first female composer I've encountered while working on this blog and playing from John Thompson's Third and Fourth grade books. So far, too, Scarf Dance one of my favourites. I was looking forward to it because of this acerbic quality it seems to have. I think it's a combination of the quasi-chromatic nature of the passages and a bit of flirting with dissonance. The chromatic aspects begin right away, as you can tell from the opening. These were a bit of a technical challenge because I wasn't used to switching fingers in 1-3 and 2-4 groups. My fingers get tied up sometimes. After this, the leap to B-F gave me a bit of trouble, too. Getting it accurately took some doing. And then I had to practice it again with a leap of a slightly different size. Major interference! I'm still better at the first than the second.

Here is a variation on that alternating chromatic, which is really a kind of dyadic trill. This, too, required some practice to coordinate. This time the fingers weren't themselves alternate, but even this felt a little weird too. I wasn't at all used to playing 2-5 against the thumb like that (see left hand). Same with the right hand. Awkward as hell trying to play 1-2 alternately with 3. It wasn't hard to do, but it just felt so... almost creepy.

This part is a little fun and a little hard at the same time. Actually, lots of passages in this song are like that. The leaps are small but they were new to me, so I had to practice them. It's sweet when your hand finally gets to know them well enough to make it to the right spot on the first try. I'm almost there with this passage. The later ones are in worse shape than the earlier ones, as can be expected. The chords have a kind of familiar feel to them, and I hold most of them with 1-2-4. The first bar is a case in point, and it's pretty surprising that it gives me the trouble that it does. I either forget the G (less so now), or miss the leap from GBE to FAD. Getting better though. The left hand has some truly wide leaps, of several octaves sometimes.

I recall playing this over and over until my shoulders ached. Apart from figuring out an appropriate fingering and getting the leaps just right, the difficulty with this passage is learning to play the right hand staccato while holding the left hand for only the duration of a quaver without its sounding staccato too. I remember being a little irritated when I realised no pedal was indicated. I thought it would have been so much easier to play delicatamente if I used a pedal. Anyway, I stuck to the letter of the text and tried to execute its spirit. I think I found a way, but I'm still working on getting the left hand to balance the timing just right. A passage with some chromatic elements follows. Pictured left is the second of two and requires some delicate threading of the fingers. Good thing I was already used to that from playing Elfin Dance. Note the leaps in the left hand.

This pictures an extremely melodic passage that follows the above. It accentuates the leaps in the left hand and breaks chords in the right. Throw in an appoggiatura and you've got a sweet, lyrical passage. The variation that the second full bar provides on the melody of the first made learning it slightly more difficult. Also, the left hand chords were difficult to find accurately at first. Required some hand independence. In fact, the very first notes pictured are the result of a leap of different sizes in each hand, so even getting to this passage was tough. But worth it. I'm really starting to put some feeling into its execution now that I can take my mind somewhat off the technical aspects of playing it.

Above the key changes for two bars. A♭ to E Major. I remember wondering, "Why go through all the trouble of change the key for two measly bars?" Then I saw another version of this score in which the notes were individually modulated to desired key. I think J. T. must have made that change to simplify the score, and boy did he do me a favour! The difference is like night and day, as you can see from the picture on the right.

The song pretty much repeats after this, but with a variation near the end. You'll recognise the first two bars of this passage, as it is also quoted above. But the single-note quaver is now replaced with two- to three-note chords, which (needless to say) required a lot of work to get right, especially as the text indicates some jumping back and forth. Again, the effort's worth it because it produces a very beautiful harmony.

It ends with two-handed four-note chords, much like those that end Il Penseroso. The hands splay over each other like eagles' wings again--at least in the first variation. The second has the hands very far apart, separated by three or four octaves.

Alan Chan's rendition

13. Arkansas Traveler

I employed Arkansas Traveler in service of my reading, and I must say this was a good challenge: it became readable at the right speed, that is, if I slowed down enough. It's a bit on longer side, spanning three full pages, so it would always be kind of a marathon reading session. Thankfully, the opening is familiar and simple enough to soothe my anxious  soul. Anxiety is my default reaction to the prospect of reading, so it's always a relief to be confronted with two simple left-hand chords and an easy right-hand progression to begin this piece. It reminds me of the way H. M. S. Pinafore begins for some reason. That song is, freakily, also the 13th piece, but in the Third Grade Book! The connection is not a far stretch, though, since the both are in F Major, begin on F (different octaves), and if you check out the opening of H. M. S., you'll find a similar arc in the direction of the right hand notes. Anyway, I soon got used to reading the left hand chords and kind of moving my hands around in the "home base" of the F clef. I think that's something of a victory, however small, and deserves note. My future self would be interested in a fact like that. 

I encountered quite a bit of these 7th chords (built on C) and got used to them, too. We'll see these in variation coming up. I still need to think a bit about the way these move to the third that follows in the left hand, but it's coming along. That kind of manoeuvre occurs a lot throughout as well--moving to a third just below after playing an initial wide(r) chord. 

Top left pic shows a passage that was kind of a difficult to read through, but still more to coordinate the fingers. I remember forgetting to repeat the higher notes in the right hand, and it's pretty much always a hardship to read chords in two hands. I managed, but slowly. Reading--or, rather, anticipating the intervals helped. Note that tenth in the left hand at the end of the second measure. Not sure I anticipated that! These alternating left- to right- hand chords pictured bottom left came nearer the end and were a bit easier and satisfying, although did have to concentrate to get the interval shifts correct, as I tend to dyslexify stuff in a way that sends the shifts in the wrong direction. 

I had enormous trouble reading this passage. Not only were double-handed the rule chords throughout, but they're all pretty much slathered with accidentals. Only memorisation could have saved me. I wasn't memorising this piece, but at this point I almost started. The pattern is interesting though, with a kind of slant to the dyads that places first one finger (of each two-note chord) and then another on a high black note. The progression leads you out of and then back into the key. 

Below are two variations on that seventh chord I mentioned much earlier. The picture to the left shows an added C in octave that gives my fingers a stretch. It's weirdly a stretch I noticed only on the second or third playthrough, though. I'm hoping my fingers didn't become shorter. Or, worse yet, that I didn't regress!

These semiquavers mess with the rhythm enough to trip me up... or maybe it's the reading that trips. I can see how these are similar to section that gave me some finger coordination trouble, but with a lot of shifting back and forth between staves. (Also a reading hazard.) But I'm getting more comfortable even with that, believe it or not. 

The ending is a familiar kind of broken-chord-melding-into-chord progression. But there's a cool section in the second half of the first bar where the melody from the very first measure of the song is now shared between hands. I guess it's a lesson in style. It must have been done for aesthetic purposes, since the right hand had managed it quite well on its own earlier. Overall, a fun piece, reading notwithstanding.

Alan Chan's rendition

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

Grade Four Blues... and Greens

Took me forever to make it through the first six songs. Almost two months—way slower than third grade. But these past 3-5 weeks seem to be a little bit better. A song a week, even though At Evening sort of kicked my butt as far as memorisation goes. There is a light at the end of the tunnel (hence pic). 

Several weeks after the above note, I realize that piano (being a percussion instrument, after all) is like drumming. You can't be good unless you have mastered the rudiments. This means scales, arpeggios, and their ilk have to become a bigger part of my daily routine. I don't think I'll be able to master the geography of the keyboard without them. So... I'm working on a weekly practice schedule based  on the RCM Grade 7 technical requirements. I started today, July 1—almost 9 months after first returning to the piano. I have been doing scales pretty consistently for a few months now, so in this way I'm really just codifying the regimen... and beefing it up.

The Schedule:

This regimen to too ambitious though. I've only been able to get through the major scales, arpeggios, and chromatics in any one day. Perhaps once I am a master of these, I'll be skilled enough to do all their variations in one sitting. (sigh...)