Learning Bach's Invention in C Major

This page is for Tonebase Players ( Levels 2,3,4,5) who are learning to play this beautiful piece by J S Bach. The discussion here is solely on this piece. If you are interested in discussing your strategies and practice methods please feel free to share as you deem fit. All ideas are welcome.

 

Higher level players -there are many many here on Tonebase -  who are fluent in this piece are extremely welcome to provide advice. 

I will start (my level - 2/3 maybe ? ). Heard the piece played by several renowned artists.  Read the piece a few times after that on day 1 then proceeded to do the same for a few more days - what I call the really coarse method.  Recorded the really coarse version as a checkpoint to see if the strategy is working - record again in 4 days and see if anything has changed.  After deciding this piece is perhaps playable in a few weeks/months I have adopted  a strategy and describe my  process. 

1. 1st line RH only ( actually split into 1 measure first then string the rest to a line) -use a metronome at 60 bpm to the quarter note. Play and memorize right away. Close the line and see if there is recall. 

2. Same as 1 but for LH. 

The final tempo is 120 bpm to the quarter note( it is really fast for my level - so  dropped to half speed) 

 

3. Proceed to line 2 in the score only after line 1 is reasonably accurate. Skip ornamentation in the begining.

 

4. Then play both hands together accurately - just the first line. This is quite tough in the beginning. For the first few hours nothing seemed to work.  When I hear the recording I can tell right away that something is off.
 

So far in about a week of practicing this piece everday there is a bit of progress. Quite noticeably from the recording. Need to baseline it in the next couple of days.

If there is interest in this topic I am happy to share anything I read about or come across that may be useful to anyone else learning this piece.  Feel free to post anything that you may think may be useful to others in their learning journey. If there is no interest in this topic I am happy to delete this page promptly. :-)

55 replies

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    • hot4euterpe
    • 3 days ago
    • Reported - view
     said:
    I don't hear any sound from printed page - without touching the key. This is a skill I will pay in gold to acquire - lol!.  But alas this is in an innate skill ! either one is born with it or one has to deal with a lack of it. lol!. In my case it is the latter. 

    Good news! this is not an innate skill. No one is born able to interpret notation into sound. You develop this through a combination of sight-reading and ear training skills (often called musicianship). Some develop this skill more quickly than others but it is a trained skill not an innate one.

      • hot4euterpe
      • 3 days ago
      • Reported - view

       It is something that is often taught additively as one advances in skill at their instrument. For those that study at university there is usually a musicianship 100 and 200 level requirement. Much can be achieved with fundamentals though. Learning to sing a scale and an arpeggio to solfege syllables is a common start.  Once you can sing / hum steps and skips (2nds and 3rds) you can do basic sight-singing! Many amateurs in choirs pick up these skills. If you have any inclination, joining a choir is a great environment for developing musicianship abilities.

      • Peter_William
      • 2 days ago
      • Reported - view

       yes. Thanks a lot. all ok. I have been doing a bit of solfege singing on the C maj scale over the past few days, like I wrote to Andrew above. Need to focus on sight singing over the next few months to see if the situation improves substantially. Choir is definitely a possibility since a member had asked me a couple of years ago when I was tinkering on the Church grand piano when no one was around and he had just come in to collect some of his music. :-)

      • Andrew_Smith
      • 2 days ago
      • Reported - view

       Ditto to all Dustin has said; also you shouldn't expect to be able to see a score -- of anything other than a baby beginner piece -- you have never heard and hear it in your head. That is ultra ultra advanced.

      You haven't really responded to/written about -- not that there is any obligation, of course! -- the procedure of mental practice I described. Have you/will you try it? (I don't care, I'm just curious and want to understand what the conversation thread is leading to for your playing)

      Last, two weeks per invention to memorize each one? No way, you'd have to be very advanced. 

      • Peter_William
      • 2 days ago
      • Reported - view

       ah yes! thats the gold I was referring to. Hearing it in the head without ever having  played it. That would be nice, but I guess this is mostly impossible even for advanced players. I have re established contact just yesterday with my very good friend a conductor- FRCO and will definitely ask him - I suspect he does. He conducted Handel's Messiah a few years ago in the big church here. :-). 

      I am all for mental practice but at the moment the best way seems to be at the keyboard.. ( " the 2 bar hands together calculus method "). Going out of town for a few days again so will post right after. Oh yes I have assembled a bunch of videos on Solfegge singing I have a hunch it will be helpful. Let's see after the experiment. Also when I tested myself (blind testing) my differentiation of the 2nd and 3rd intervals seem to be faulty - while the 5th, 6th, 7th and Octave seems to work quite peachy. There is also some confusion on the 4th. The first order of business is to practice this for a few days and see if it improves.

      I jinxed it again ( spoke about a latent idea of embarking on the 15 preludes :-) ). Yes agreed - absolutely impossible to get through a new one in 2 weeks ! This one is already 3 weeks old and not even 1/2 complete.   Let's see how long it takes to play from memory with notational accuracy at least. sigh!

      • Andrew_Smith
      • 2 days ago
      • Reported - view

       Thanks for your reply, Peter. My last comment on this: 

      The mental practice can take like only 5 to 10 minutes if you are just wanting to get a few measures, or even one measure, more secure. So it's not an either/or proposition. It can just be one of several things you do within a practice session.

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