Instrument Players - Come and chat (Part II)

[CoteDAzur]

Previous thread is here.

We filled one thread, so here’s another

Just had a look at Prokofiev’s Musique pour les Enfants - they are good!

Welcome Port

I couldn't work on a piece I don't love! Why don't you choose the pieces that you want to play? That's what I do.

Welcome Port. I agree the g5 selection isn't inspiring, and agree with pp that you don't have to play pieces you hate. Have you looked at the alternatives too?

Picking pieces I like and playing them to death is my method too Never Talking of which... I have a video up of me playing! -
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/music/2975504-Brokens-Grade-4-Piano-Thread

Has anyone made a musical New Year's resolution? Mine is to stop looking at my hands so much when playing the piano, and relatedly improve my sightreading.

That's nice playing Broken - it sounds like you are more or less there.

Very nice, Broken! Thanks for posting the video. You're much better than me!
Well, I agree ABRSM G5 pieces aren't the most inspiring - I don't see any harm in switching between boards!
Musical resolutions:
more sight reading but doesn't have to be the abrsm book!
Stop hesitating so much
No more exams after G5 - focus on Bach instead.

Thanks both! Piano Fruit is now up! No I'm sure I'm not Loose. Good resolutions.
That's why I'm going for Trinity for g5, lovely pieces.

Broken, well done!

It seems like adults enjoys playing baroque musique a lot more than kids do. I play a lot of'Bach too (currently working on the prelude and fugue in C minor from the Well Tempered Clavier book 1) but my teenage DD hates it. The last Bach she played was one of the Sinfonia (which I am keen to have a go at) and it ended, literally, in tears. She could play it but she hated the work her teacher asked her to do on the different voices. They gave up and went back to Chopin lol.

Re resolutions, I am the opposite, need to learn pieces by heart (something I find very difficult) rather than always reading from the music. My natural instinct is to never look at my hands, but it's holding me back now.

I liked (and still do) Bach when I was a teenager. Very reassuring, those lines and voices. But DS1 seems to find it hard - he said you could see how it should go but you just can't make your fingers do the right thing ...

I've tried memorising but it doesn't come easy. I've only ever managed to memorise one page of a Rachmaninov prelude but actually I don't think it helped me play better. But then maybe nothing would!

Both videos are very good, Broken. Well done!

I remember the "piano fruit" from somewhere. If you don't mind me making a suggestion, I think you should practice it with the metronome, as you play some parts significantly slower than others. Very good overall, though

J S Bach was the 1st classical music I ever liked, and he is still my favourite composer. Since then I learned that I like Baroque music quasi-exclusively, Late Baroque (Bach, Rameau, Handel) in particular. Mozart, Chopin, etc sound like elevator music to me. Beethoven is sometimes interesting but not always. This is why I'm a student of the harpsichord at the Conservatory and not piano - the répertoire I need to play is all Baroque!

What I like in Bach is the near-inevitability of his mathematical precision, incredible variety and original genius of each piece of music, and especially his perfect counterpoint in 2, 3, sometimes even 5 voices on a single instrument I love playing and listening to different, complete and perfect melodies with just my two hands. It feels like my brain expands to follow two different threads of music, forgetting all else. It's the only time I can "live in the moment" and truly rest.

I'll stop raving about Bach now

My DC love Baroque music, incidentally, especially Bach's pieces from the Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach. We have the CD in the car and they often ask to listen to it. DS (8) has been going through it this year, choosing the pieces he wants to play. His favourite is still a bit too difficult to him as it requires a hand span that is out of his reach for the moment, though.

Mistigri - That Prelude & Fugue in C minor is beautiful. It is one of my favourite pieces from WTC

he said you could see how it should go but you just can't make your fingers do the right thing ...

That sounds like me and Bach ;) I am working on the presto section of the prelude in c minor this week and it is coming together very slowly (and tbh for me this is the easiest part of the piece, the first page was a real slog). And I don't play the piece anything like as fast as it "should" be played.

DD finds Bach easy to play (the notes), but hard and unrewarding to play well. Even her teacher has given up for the moment, after a lesson spent trying to bring out the different voices which ended in tears.

As for memorising pieces, I don't really know how to go about it, but I do think that I rely too heavily on the written music. I think I'd be more accurate if I could "let go" of the sheet music a bit more. But it's hard, and even when I know a piece well it seems like there are always sections which I find hard to play without the sheet music as an aide mémoire - the offending passages are usually ones where there is a transition of some sort; where the notes are in some sort of sequence muscle memory is enough. My teenager is totally the opposite - she can commit pages and pages of music to memory in a very short space of time even when she can't yet play them well, i.e. muscle memory isn't a major factor.

Here's an article about memorising ...

My kids also memorise everything. DS1 even practise by memory. I mistrust that deeply. He's just too lazy to dig out the sheet music.

"DD finds Bach easy to play (the notes), but hard and unrewarding to play well"

Some Bach pieces are easy to play and others are diabolically difficult - fast, complicated, having to keep multiple fingers down while you fiddle with the others, etc.

I totally understand that it's hell having to practice music that you don't like, though. I refuse to do it, personally

Re playing from memory - I used to do this all the time in the beginning, and (at least in my case) it was because I couldn't read/follow the sheet music and play at the same time. Several years down the line, I can now read music much better (although nowhere near perfect) and don't have to rely on memory as much.

Then again, there are pieces like Rameau's Gavotte & 6 Doubles that Never & I tortured ourselves with learned to play in the previous thread that have so much jumping around on the keyboard that it is impossible eyes off the keyboard imho.

I prefer to follow the notes as I play these days, as it makes it much easier to come back to a piece I played some months ago.

DS1 even practise by memory. I mistrust that deeply. He's just too lazy to dig out the sheet music.

This is 100% what DD does. She was resurrecting an old piece the other day and had to work out some passages by ear because she had learnt it from a photocopy that had been thrown away and was too lazy to download another

I think I need to start learning pieces by heart earlier in the learning process and relying less heavily on muscle memory. I'm giving it a shot with my latest piece (one of the longer Scarlatti sonatinas) and trying to learn sections as I practice them. Otherwise what happens is that by the time I can play a piece reasonably well, instead of finding that it helps to look at my hands e.g. when there are large jumps or octaves to play, I actually find it disorientating.

CoteDAzur that's why DD got into the habit of memorising (she couldn't read the bass clef when she started piano and even now she finds it hard to read two clefs at once). My sight reading is very good, so I don't need to memorise, but that has its downsides too.

Cote You should see Albeniz's Layenda for jumps... Your eyes can't see both the right and left hand jumps ...

I try to memorise things at page turns so that I can turn pages at a convenient place but that doesn't seem to work. It just makes me panic.
I really don't know why. How hard is it to memorise a couple of bars??

I think it's amazing that you can sight read fast enough to reliably play every piece without having to remember any of it, Mistigri & Never!

I think one does remember... I just don't know how much.

Obviously I do memorise pieces partially, but not completely or reliably. If I try to play a piece that I know well without the sheet music, I can usually play chunks of it, but not all of it, and often I'll make different errors at different attempts. I also find it hard to pick up again once I've made a mistake, or to start in the middle of a piece - whereas DD can play sections of her pieces from memory out of order.

" I also find it hard to pick up again once I've made a mistake, or to start in the middle of a piece"

Me, too. I've taken to practicing different sections of the pieces I have to play in concerts, so that if I make a mistake, I'll have more of a chance of picking up again.

Dammit. Now I really want to play the C minor prelude and fugue.