Week 2 Assignment

Adena nice work! I think there are two things you can try and apply here.

1. I know you suggested trying the 3 trills per note last week. The one issue with this is that it can be hard in your stage of learning to break a note that is typically divided into division of 2 into divisions of 3. In counting and feeling the half/quarter note durations, we would tend to think of dividing them into eighth notes. To use that baseline to help us, it might make more sense to do a division of 2 (doing either 2 trills or 4 trills). I know there are some technical hurdles to conquer but I think auditory clarity helps our technique automatically.

2. The biggest technical thing in your way is that, once your fingers are in place on the keys for a given trill, they are not moving from their spots at all as they trill. Imagine you are my 1.5 year old toddler for a minute. If he wants to move forward, if he keeps his feet in exactly the same place, he will do a march and be kind of off balance and stuck (which he does frequently). If he takes tiny steps forward, he will stay balanced and move forward incrementally. Similar in trills, even if we are on the same note trilling, we can take tiny tiny steps in and out to stay balanced and make sure we aren't feeling like we are hyper engaging our fingers. Think of staying at the key but moving very subtly toward the fallboard and then away from the fallboard.  

Dr. Leann Osterkamp He Right, like your toddler. I got it! I’ll revise the division and the in and out motion. I am also learning an incredible amount from your replies to everyone's exercises. Thank you!

Dora Burak Nice work! The one big thing that we need to modify is that we don't want to every curl any fingers or try to get fingers "out of the way." The rest of your hand that is not playing should look as though your hand is just casually resting on the keys. Your fingers may actually be touching the keys but, because your weight is centered correctly on the trilled notes, they will not create sound. When we curl, we are causing tension and throwing off the weight distribution. Disclaimer: keeping the rest of your hand fully relaxed and loose while doing this exercise is VERY hard :) but you can do it! 

Dr. Leann Osterkamp He Here is my practice using the trill from wk 1, Chopin Opus 9 No.. 2 .   I am trying to move in/out without reverting to finger trilling, but am not sure if I succeeded..  This is clearly something that will require routine practice.  Thanks for help!

https://youtube.com/shorts/cM9WwWgVieo?si=e435nV0EXM51X_6V

Dora Burak You are on the right track! The goal is to work from the outside in with mapping your motion. You will have to start from a certain place (based on what came before) and you will have to end in a certain place to allow for what comes after..... in between, you will need to map your motion in and out to also have a logical pace of motion, usually following a metric structure (like on a beat/equally dividing your trill length/ or doing a gradually equally timed in and out). 

Dr. Leann Osterkamp He the precision of your descriptions are so very helpful!  Thanks again..

Andrea LeVan nice work! I will try and break this into the three separate trills.

1. on the first trill, notice that you kind of stay in exactly the same place on the keys that you start in. With prolonged trills, we are going to want to have some in and outward motion to allow for balance and freedom from tension. When we stick in one place, there is a higher tendency to play too much with our fingers, which gets us feeling "stuck" when we try and go faster. usually, if speed is struggling, the culprit is playing too much with our fingers. You can see that your trill stays close to the key (a good thing) BUT you can see your thumb progressively starting to come off the key and trying to play independently as the trill progresses. 

2. Notice that by the time you get to the second trill, you are playing very much with your fingers, which is creating what I call the airplane effect, where your thumb and your pinky are elevated to try and isolate and "balance" the inner fingers. What we actually want if for the outer fingers to be fully at rest on the keys and the weight on the inside of your hand is what allows your to oscillate between notes, instead of having to try to do it with your fingers. Again, when we try to go fast with finger-originated trills, they max out quickly and are sloppy and unclear. 

3. Notice that when you temporarily it the lower note of the third trill, there is a moment where the trill kind of "frees" up and looks easier. It is because you moved in and out! That's what you need in part on the first two trills. The airplane continued a bit here, as well. 

So a combo of moving in and out and trying to keep the non-trilling portion of your hand completely at rest which you balance on the trill. 

Kimy the short trill sounds on the right track!

You are CORRECT that the 1-3 fingering on the long trill was more successful/in control easier. 

When using the other fingering, your thumb was lifting off the key and was throwing your hand off balance, so you were having some slight tension in your hand to counterbalance. 

I always prefer 1-3 with rotation for control... it is reliable.

As for the in and out thing... the general motion and idea is correct. However, right now the timing/pacing of when/how you are going in and out is not thought out. Each time, it was a bit different and random. As with everything on the instrument, you need to have a little more "goal" as to when and at what pace you plan to move in and out. I recommend usually linking it to a pre-existing rhythmic or phrasing objective. 

Dr. Leann Osterkamp He  I am giving myself another try on the long trill practice, with the in/out movement. I have drawn up my idea as attached. Since this is a fast tempo 1st movement, there isn't much time to move in/out. So I only do it on 3rd beat and coming back ending on the 4th beat.

https://youtube.com/shorts/62_yLztCDqM?si=qK7ot8-8l0zX3lMw

When it's 1-3 fingerings, the movement inward is very small.

I also tried with the 2-3 fingerings to see the effect. My right arm and shoulder has to be very relaxed for the right thumb not sticking up. In the video, it did tense up again towards the end.

Does one have to use the in/out movement even on a fast tempo trill ? I'd think it's easier when it's easier to execute on a slower piece. 

Thanks a lot for your guidance. :)

Kimy the in/out movement exists on everything. The thing you are focusing on in the SIZE of the movement. Yes, doing a large movement in/out can only feasibly be accomplished on a slow piece.

The goal of movement is always to maximize the effect while minimizing the motion itself. At first, we exaggerate the size of the motion to help us retrain our bodies about what we are trying to do and get perspective. However, at a professional level, all of these motions discussed are very very small, almost to the point of being imperceptible. This is what eventually creates maximum efficiency that allows us to tackle all kinds of different passages. 

Around :11, you did a trill that had the most evenly planned motion in/out. The others, although more planned, still had hiccups with coming in or out too quickly compared to the opposite motion (showed that the movement wasn't really happening in a planned organic way with the metric ideas you planned). The more that you incorporate/reconcile the slight in/out motion with all of the other components going on (rhythmic meter, phrasing, etc.), the more and more it should feel like it is inevitable/required to achieve all these different things. :) 

Victoria Macdonald nice work! The most obvious technical starting point we would want to address is the attempted "isolation" of your trilling fingers. Notice that, when you trill, you curl your upper fingers (pinky) and then hyper-lift your thumb out to the side. The two mental ideas behind this is to 1. isolate the fingers 2. balance the opposite side of the hand. If your thumb is suspended out to the side (you can try this just on a table), notice that to kind of counterbalance that weight, curling the other side of your hand somewhat balances it. 

We don't want to play trills with fingers to begin with. But, prior to the work in the week #2 video you can try, we also need to make sure that, when we are playing trills, any part of the hand that is not trilling remains fully relaxed and at ease. That means, there will be no curling, lifting, or activation. Fingers may gently be resting on top of other keys and we can trust that they won't depress the keys because our weight will be accurately balanced over the trilling portion of our hand through our practice methods. 

Dr. Leann Osterkamp He Thank you so for the feedback. I tried again focusing on keeping my thumb down and my little finger uncurled. Still need to get used to the feel of this, so both trills have slowed down a bit. I find the second trill (m. 11) quite tricky, because of the semitone black-to-white key configuration. I feel I need to keep my fingers closer together in this smaller space and it's difficult not to curl the pinky here. I followed your suggestion to move further inward and I think this helped a bit. Looking forward to your comments.

Victoria Macdonald m.5 is much better! For m. 11, you are starting in the right place but can add in a little in/out motion during in order to not feel cramped. When you think about it, if you are taking super baby steps in and out, it will CREATE more space for your fingers, going at very very tiny diagonals, instead of one tiny space side to side. Additionally, if 2-3 doesn't work for your hand, you could experiment with 3-1 on a black/white configuration. :)

Javier In this instance, I would say that the thing giving you the most bad habit is actually the metronome! The metronome is helpful to understand concepts or test things but when we just turn in on and use it to count for us, we actually lengthen the time it takes for us to learn something because we are having the metronome do some of the hard work for us. 

The most important thing in this section is to feel in three, both per melody note and within the bar. Right now, all of your LH notes are very much the same. We don't feel the measure divided into three and the subsequent beats further divided into three per each melody note. I would start without the trill, being able to feel the melody and LH consistently controlled and in 3, focusing on the phrasing and correctly timed dropping of weight that need to happen to achieve that. Once that is achieved at an acceptable tempo, you will find the trills much more easily fall into place. Any technical issues with the trill can be further addressed by the video above, but that is currently not the issue :) 

Peter Golemme you have your YouTube video listed as 'private' at the moment... that means no one except for you can view it :) To enable me to watch it, you need to change it to "unlisted." That will NOT make it go public but will allow people here to see it. thanks!

Dr. Leann Osterkamp He So sorry Dr. O. It’s always something with me & technology!  Here’s the link to the video, now unlisted:

https://youtu.be/vX0NJ42L4XU

I’ve got another one I’ll be uploading shortly.

Peter Golemme Hi!

Very nice video... so fancy with the multiple camera angles! 

One thing I would suggest focusing on is your thumb motion. It was not really talked about in this intensive, but the thumb should ALWAYS be played in an outwards (towards you) downward motion. If you flop your hand onto the piano and let the dead weight slide your hand off the piano... that is the idea/movement needed always for your thumb! We never activate our thumb in an up and down motion. You typically did not but I did notice that, at times, you played your thumb ever so slightly going inwards towards the fallboard. In doing that, it is the reason sometimes your first LH trills are unsuccessful. 

When we play our thumb going in, we are doing a non-organic motion. When you thumb comes out/down, the natural follow-up motion is to slide down/to the left on the instrument, which allows us to kind of create a baby circle with our motion to start the next motion. When we play our thumb poking inwards, it puts us in a pickle because there is not natural next motion. Either, we try to follow it up and realize that we are stuck/out of space and do some awkward tweak or maneuver with our hand or we end up quickly pulling out afterwards anyways. 

If you break down your trills whenever you see a thumb and imagine that each time you will start your motion with the thumb going out/down and then do the natural motion from there until the next thumb, I think you will find control/ security in that. Often, these natural arm shapes don't happen coinciding with the beat, so the challenge is to feel the needed natural shapes of the fingering contour while also feeling the meter, etc. It might feel very challenging at first but with thoughtful work, it will click. 

Dr. Leann Osterkamp He Dear Dr. O, thank you so much for this feedback.  I'm totally stuck on making progress with those trills and your advice here may be the thing that unlocks them for me.  I hadn't given much thought before to the in and out aspects of using the thumb on these trills. 

I've since noticed my counterproductive behavior in other pieces. e.g.  the presto section of the C minor Prelude from Book 1, I've now noticed that I deliberately push my thumb INWARD in order to hit the top LH notes on the beat. It somewhat works, but brings huge tension with it, as I tighten up all the way to the shoulders to make sure I whack that top note at the right time. Of course that puts a too-low upper limit on the speed and lightness one would hope to achieve, not to mention that it precludes any semblance of gracefullness. 

I'm going to take these and other passages (e.g. I've had similar problems with the LH trills in the B Minor prelude from Bk. 2) back to the workshop and do my best to implement your invaluable feedback.  thanks again for your careful attention to our videos and the very specific and useful tips.

P.S. glad you like the videos & effects!  They were all done on the iPad with LumaFusion, an inexpensive App I downloaded about 2 years ago. I re-purposed every device in the household capable of recording video (as you can see on my recording), to capture different angles.  Then the 'multicam' feature of the software allows you to pick, choose, mix and match them.  The transitions are all pre-packaged with the software; you simply drag them down to the timeline and stick them on top of the 2 clips that you want to transition from/to. The most tedious part of the process is not using the software, but rather having to turn 6 devices on and off when doing multiple takes, and then the file managment involved in naming, copying, importing and grouping the respective files for each take from each device.  But still great fun and a way to add variety to the video.