RB Piano Forte Chronicles

THIS UPPER-RESPIRATORY GOOMBAH has knocked me down for three days, with no end in sight. It tends to leave me pretty exhausted.

I’m still practicing, but one night I carried it too far and finally went to bed amid an explosion of hacking, coughing fits.

Perhaps I shouldn’t do that, until I get better.

Something that I’ve been meaning to talk about, though, is that basic component of any baroque keyboardists toolkit – the trill.

I can do second and third finger trills pretty effortlessly. But sometimes, the music doesn’t cooperate and I have to do the trill between a couple of other fingers. The third and fourth finger seem to be the next most popular configuration.

Sometimes, I can rattle them right off, but often, they turn into slurry mush. Has something to do with the third, fourth and fifth fingers’ tendons being tied together and not able to move quite as independently as they do in, say, Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Chang talks about developing the third and fourth finger, as well as the fourth and fifth finger trills. That seems to be a long way off in my physiology.

Another solution is to use non-adjacent fingers – for instance, the third finger and thumb work well in the Scarlatti on some of the descending passages that leave a fore-finger on a bottom note, to be trilled with the next note up. Shifting over to the third finger and trilling with the thumb seems to work pretty well.

In another section on the Scarlatti, the first-glance solution suggests a trill between the third and fourth fingers or, horrors! the fourth and fifth fingers. However, I find that with just a little shift, I can accomplish it with the third and fifth finger, which I seem to be able to do quite evenly!

THE ONE PIECE I don’t seem to get around a third and fourth finger trill is the first section of the Handel Messiah Overture. In fact, there are several of them, and I can’t see a way to do them with anything but those two fingers. And they always slur.

Come to think of it, there may be a way to trill with the second and fourth fingers, provided I land on the last note with the third finger so I can continue the passage in time.

Hmmmm….