19. Ay-Ay-Ay (Creole Song)

This song holds no charm for me. But I read through it a couple times. It's complicated enough to pose a helluva challenge for me in that respect, so I used it for that. I think it also would have provided technical challenges, but I still couldn't bear to spend the time memorising it. It's got a lot of staccato going on and sharing (semi)quavers between hands. 

Repetition, imitation, and unison

Syncopation and rhythm shared between the hands










This gapped chromatic passage that jumps between A and C







The ending that skips down by half-octaves.

Alan Chan's rendition

18. Prelude in B Minor

That word assai doesn't seem much like an Italian word. Why not molto. Is it French? It's about as inelegant as any word from a Teutonic language. Anyway, Chopin's Prelude in B Minor is to be played very slowly, and I guess if this is the case, it indicates that the piece is to be played with the utmost grace and fluidity. And pathos. Apart from the left-hand melody, repetition characterises this piece. The right hand's job is to accompany and tap out a steady(ish) rhythm upon which to build the melody. My RH fourth finger is perpetually en garde. An interesting thing happens at the hiatus between pedals. I had to develop a special rhythm to get the left-hand finger off the D in time to get the right-hand thumb onto it without a hiatus in the actual melody. It has to do with getting the pedal down again just before lifting that left-hand off the semi-quaver (D). Practice made almost perfect, but even that'll improve before long. 

Pictured right is an interesting passage with a lot of chromaticism going on in the chords. They change by semitones one at a time. The sound is a bit difficult to learn, but very compelling because unusual. It teaches you about tones and the way harmonies can be squeezed out of unlikely (too-close) tonal associations. 

The continuation of that passage moves a tiny bit faster down the keyboard, as the note changes are a bit wider at times and sometimes even double up. It requires some rigid fingering and subtle wrist/palm movements to get it just right. The triad in the middle of the first bar is built on F#. It moves from the dominant to the subdominant with a minor 7th added. Then it's got a difficult acciaccatura that crushes into two notes (F# and C#), not just one, as it was in the good old days. I'd been getting some practice with that in Hungarian though. Still working on that bit as well. 

This long, long arpeggio is really a C-Major chord inverted and dragged out for two octaves. I like to play it. It feels cool moving my hand with ease such a far distance across the keyboard. And I get to do it twice! It's interesting that they modulate to C from B minor. I could hardly tell anything strange happened, as you usually can. But I guess all those weird, narrow chords in the earlier phrases prepared me enough so that C doesn't seem too far afield. I really need to analyse that modulation. 

Then the fun begins: an intricate manoeuvring of chords (and repeated high-notes) in the right hand with the most lugubrious part of the melody in the left. I try to play it especially lento and make it all dramatic, but there's nothing but piano and sostenuto indicated. Does sostenuto grant the freedom to do all that? Perhaps.

The ending is a return to the beginning that adds a couple extra notes at the end. Forlorn.

17. You

This animato piece is in the Habanera style. The telltale sign is in the tree semiquavers closing bar two. I read through this piece a few times and the rhythm is where the technical lessons reside. 

A case in point is the triplet and (semi)quaver combination. It sounds really latin-folky. It's the best part. Interesting to learn which note groups combine to form that rhythm. 

This was the most difficult part, but it's wasn't too bad. The slanting, contiguous notes are difficult for my dyslexic mind. I tend to play high-to-low when the notes go low-to-high. And vice versa. I also get visually confused about which notes the accidentals truly modify: before or after, line or space...? Yeah. But it helps that this molto allargando is indicated here. It gives me time to get everything together, and delays don't sound like errors. 

The end is very interesting. Each hand does a wide chord, contracts to hit a note in the middle, and then widens again to hit another chord to the left/right. It's a bit like a see-saw. Notice that treble clef that sneaks in between two semiquavers on a beam! Very tricky. I caught it in time though. However, there's an even bigger trick of this sort that shows up in Ay-Ay-Ay. That messed me up bigtime once. 

Alan Chan's rendition

Perspective: A Note on Levels

Henle Verlag classifies Bach's Musette at level 1 of its grading system. It places Chopin's Prelude in B Minor at level 3/4 and Prelude in E Minor at level 4. If this is true, I have gained 3 of their levels in 10 months. What it's worth is that my work hasn't been utterly futile and there's an end in sight to the period of preparation before I can play some of the songs I've been looking forward to. For example:

• Raindrop Prelude is given a level 5 rating. I really want to play that song. I love it. I am also patient enough to wait till I'm ready. 
• Nocturne in E-Flat is 5/6. It's in the last 1/3 of the John Thompson Grade 5 book.
• Minute Waltz is 5/6, too. It's in the first half of the John Thompson Grade 5 book. 

I'd like to play Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# Minor too, and it's given a level 6 rating. So I wait. He's pretty tough, of course. He shows up for the first time in the John Thompson series as the penultimate piece in the Grade 5 text, and consequently in the entire series. The piece is Melodie, the third piece in his third opus (Op. 3, No. 3). By comparison, Chopin (who is also tough) shows up as early as the Second Grade Book: his Prelude in A, Op. 28, No. 7.

In about late January / early February 2015, I tried out Chopin's Waltz in B Minor, Op. 69, No. 2 (Posth.). I acquired the score in the text shown here containing Chopin's most accessible works published by KJOS. I was playing the notes of the piece, but they didn't feel very comfortable under my fingers, so I put it away.  Yesterday (Aug 5, 2015) I picked it back up just to try out those first few bars again. I had forgotten the notes by then, but the only delay I found was in re-memorizing them. That took less than five minutes (just the first two bars). Playing them was not hard at all. It only took six months, haha! But at least it's progress and I'm glad to see it has occurred. I attribute much of this progress to the Theme from Second Movement of Beethoven's of Fifth Symphony and Scarf Dance, which are both in A-flat Major and gave me practice balancing my fingers on all those narrow perches (aka black keys). I also think some of my progress is due to the fast fingering of Curious Story, Petite Russian Rhapsodie, Eflin Dance, and Hungarian.

Overall, I think the jumps in level (Henle, RCM, ABRSM, or any other grading system) are geometric rather than arithmetic. Kinda like the levels of the Richter Scale. It'll probably take me as long to get from level 4 to level 5 as it did to jump between the first and fourth levels. Rachmaninoff by December 2016?

(btw... Happy Independence Day, Jamaica!!)

16. Hungarian

I couldn't wait to get to Hungarian It's in A minor, and you know me and those minor keys. I was also eager because I thought those fast runs it contains would present a challenge, and it made me happy that J.T. thought I'd be ready for those challenges by then. And here I am. As it turns out, these triplets are a kinda tricky too. (See first bar in pic above.) I didn't know this part would prove difficult, but the 2-3-4 fingering for the fast triplet is actually kind of tough, especially because the 2nd finger's on a black note and the other two in the gutter. It's an awkward placement, and I had to practise a lot just to get it somewhat smooth. I kept omitting the middle note. I did find it a bit easier to replicate it a bit higher up the keyboard on a variation a few bars on. It seems that playing with the right hand a little to the right of my body made the whole thing a bit harder. (Note that both hands begin in the bass clef.)

This is the second of two sets of three sustained chords. (The first is pictured at the end.) The third chord is the hardest because it's got a grace note an octave down and it's a three-note chord. Jumping up from that to accurately hit three notes at once is... well, murderous enough to justify splitting that infinitive. I practised it a lot though. The run that follows is a back-handed ascending melodic A-minor scale. It starts on E so that the half with the raised 6th and 7th is played first. It's kind of cool. And weird. At first it looks like it's gonna be an E major chord, but then the tail flattens out and it just... isn't. So it sends you running to scale catalogues (in your mind or online) to find out just what it could be.

I've just been plodding like a snail through this book, and I'm hoping that I truly have gained quite a bit of technique up to this point. [Note: it took me 5.5 months to complete the third grade book. I'm closing in on 5 months now in this text, and I'm not quite halfway through yet.] The good news is, I do recall thinking that despite the need to really practise these triplets and runs, Hungarian as a whole didn't seem so hard to learn. The memorization process went much faster—perhaps because so many of the passages repeat. It's a little shorter than Scarf Dance; both a two full pages here but only two-thirds of Hungarian is repeated. Scarf Dance repeats in its entirety and extends to four pages in the original, in which the repeats are written out. So maybe it's not especially sanguine that I learned Hungarian somewhat quickly by comparison?

I'm still practising it, but it's coming along.

These semiquavers contain repeated notes that make an interesting melody, and they're followed by a pair of triplets that at first scared me a bit because I thought I needed to fit each into the space of two semiquavers. Luckily I was only half right: the space of four semiquavers is a lot easier on my fingers. That B that crushes into the A on the first triplet is one of several crushed notes in this piece. But with this group it is a little tricky because they're staccato. I try to do delicate staccatos here; it just seems called for. Then because the leap to the chord is of a different size in each hand, I have some trouble making it in good time without messing up at least in one hand. I'm messing up less and less now, so that's a good sign.

Here the main difficulties are those grace notes right at the beginning of the measure and then that dyad of adjacent notes (G and A) being held by fingers 4 and 3. The hard part isn't holding them; it's releasing them and then hitting F with the third finger. Sounds simple, but it was surprisingly awkward. I think the space between my third and fourth fingers is too small. Needs stretching, and I think this piece'll be the one to do it. The rhythm on this run is pretty sweet. It's the same as on the above semiquavers, and is basically the defining rhythm of the piece. So I have to watch those two note slurs. They're very important... and very fun.

In this measure, we have a fast sextuplet group. Notice how the first chord indicates the B should be held with the 3rd finger. Then the B switches to the 2nd finger for the fast trill. I just hold the B in the first chord with the 2nd finger from the beginning and save myself the confusion. It's a little tricky to strike the supporting chord at precisely the right instant. It's also a bit tricky to start the trill at the right time. I think this bar can be stretched out a little bit using a bit of artistic license. 

It's followed by a really long version of the run run we saw in the second picture above. It finishes up with that back-handed A minor, so here "all" I have to do is learn the first three notes and then attach it to the one I already learned. The difficulty here is the way the 2-3-4 fingers have to roll to and fro above the thumb. That's 4-3-2 to the left, then thumb, then 2-3-4 etc. Pretty spiffy. Ah, the precision piano requires... 

Then we have this run. It's simpler than the previous ones because it's pretty much an extended C major scale that starts on E. It's trickier than the others in the left hand, however, because the accompaniment enters in a weirdly syncopated manner. The hard part is getting them in at the right time so that the speed of the right hand doesn't leave the left hand behind. This is also a factor in a couple of the single triplets (not pictured), but here the difficulty is compounded times three in both hands! 

These broken chords in both hands come upon me suddenly every single time. I always feel like there ought to be a couple more notes before I have to play this. I get the feeling it deserves a bit of slowing down, too, before launching into these final semiquaver groups--and that last demisemiquaver before the big finish. But there's no ritardando indicated. Not sure if I'm advanced enough yet to start taking liberties with the tempo. Maybe I can plead rubato?

Okay, so maybe the finish isn't so big. See, it ends on a diminuendo. But it's a great finish. That grace note trio does about the same thing as the 32nd group did before, just a bit slower. And the final chord has just got that wonderful closing ring befitting a minor chord. I rather love this ending.

Extras:

The first grace-note chord located very near the beginning in the 4th bar.

Alan Chan's rendition