Polyrhythms in Debussy's Reflets dans l'eau
Hi there, I'm hoping someone can give some advice on how to play these bars from Reflets dans l'eau with the conflicting rhythms between hands:
In this one, is the answer to play the groups of 13 as eg 4/3/3/3 per 16th note?
How do you manage the 3 against 8 patterns in this bar?
This is one of my dream pieces and I am returning to playing again after having learnt most of it about 20 years ago but have lost my original music and cannot remember how I approached it (I am 65 so not surprisingly memory is a bit shaky!) Any help is much appreciated! Many thanks, Ian
-
Hey Ian,
Here's how i approach this
First section
I try to line up the notes i have boxed here, making sure those are played together, otherwise it's as fast as possible while making that LH melody "sing" (and of course, be somewhat the correct rhythm, I listened to a bunch of different performances on Spotify)
Second section
Sing the right hand part by itself. Listen to performances and just sing it. It helps me to recognize the difference in feel between the triplet measure (that you've screenshotted here) and the measure immediately after (8th note measure). I imagine an opera singer singing that line. How does it sound? And again, find some anchor points. We know that the boxes here in the square are to be played together. This measure in particular is a classic triplets over 16ths type problem, and fortunately (unfortunately? Ha ha!) it's so fast that as long as the right hand is singing and you hit those anchor points, it should sound pretty good.
-
Hi Trevor, I've only just seen this! Many thanks for going to the trouble of posting this advice, which I will certainly use in tackling these passages. I have more or less got the 2nd one down, but the first is taking longer, probably because of the additional challenge of the right hand!
