RB Piano Forte Chronicles

IN THE PREVIOUS POST I reflected on my dismay that the Bach #8 Invention (F major) seemed to be deteriorating.

Now, last night, I was working on the #4 (D minor), and, to my continued dismay, it seemed to be deteriorating, as well. A lot of slurring, indistinct notes in the passages.

Time to knuckle down.

The knuckle down tool of choice is the metronome, I am becoming to believe, hands down. It forces you to evenly measure each note, and keep that tempo constant. With this in mind, I flipped on the metronome (my piano has one built it), set it to about 120 beats per minute, and started hammering. I started at 10:00pm. The goal was to make it through a complete run by 11:00pm. After several aborted attempts from fingers suddenly hitting random keys, falling off keys (the black ones, especially), or just falling of the piano, complete, I finally got a reasonably clean run at 11:05(pm)… Almost.

It was my best run, yet – with only one hiccup, that I could tell. Even, slurred passages measurably cleaned up, and hands working more independently (I think there’s a certain cross-communication between the hands – I noticed that with certain passages, I can play with either the left hand or the right perfectly cleanly, but when I add the other hand, it seems to influence the first hand. This is especially true when the first hand is the left.)

IF YOU’RE NOT A PIANO or other instrument player, I can give you a little exercise to get an idea of what’s required:

1. Start counting three beat measures: …1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3… about walking speed (andante.)
2. With both hands, touch each finger to the thumb in sequence, two touches per beat, from the forefinger to the little finger and back. You should hit the start finger on the ‘1′ beat, each measure.
3. Once you have it worked out starting with the fore-finger, reverse the sequence – starting with the little fingers, instead.
4. Now that you have that down: start with the opposite finger in each direction – little finger on the left hand, forefinger on the right. Run each hand in opposite directions.
5. When you have that down, reverse hands.

If you can do that in a sustained manner over, say, ten or fifteen measures, congratulations. Take up piano.

THE THING THAT BOTHERED me about my 11:05pm run, was this: on certain very busy passages, I couldn’t seem to hear the metronome, any more! It seemed to be drowned out by the sound coming from the piano (unfortunately, turning down the piano volume also turns down the metronome volume), and the noise in my head as I focused more intently on the passage. And, it seemed that, when I could hear it again, it was off beat.

What’s going on?

I need a metronome that makes itself more prevalently known. Maybe a model that smacks me up side the head every downbeat. Lacking one of those, I tried other tricks – tapping my toes (the Inventions don’t need pedals), counting aloud. The latter was a disaster – it introduced yet one more physical thing to coordinate while playing. I couldn’t play at all trying to count out loud – it was like starting over, again.

Scratch that idea.

This metronome has a feature I had disabled and forgotten about – a downbeat indicator in the form of a chime that sounds for each first beat. I re-enabled that and tried again.

That’s when I realized I was dropping a whole beat, somewhere – things that should have been on the downbeat were on the third after the passage in question.

Horrors!!!

Back to practice, again this time with the chimed metronome. As near as I could figure, I was speeding up the troublesome passage slightly and that’s when I was losing track of the time, so to speak.

Continued practice for another hour yielded an almost perfect run around midnight, and this time, all the measures started on the downbeat. Just like they’re supposed to. Two hours, sore hands, focusing on just this one piece – but things were definitely improved with just this one session.

So, the metronome isn’t appropriate for everything – it’s useless on the Beethoven’s and marginal on the Scarlatti – any piece that has any tempo changes either written or interpreted.

But for purely technical pieces like the Bach Inventions, it’s perfect. And, getting those fingers to move independently has ramifications for the other pieces.