Learning Bach's Invention in C Major

Dustin Anderson 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 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 ah yes .. was out in the mountains away from piano for past few days. Will try it out. As soon as a I hear a great section from any concerto I locate the score and then rush to the piano - since it is right here. Did that with a glorious set of notes from the Emperor concerto (L Bernstein + Zimmerman - version) and it was so much fun!.. Now with having learnt how to control the sound on the grand piano it wont bother anyone even whilst they are talking in the adjoining room. But I should try it out away from the piano also.

Andrew Smith Thanks a lot. The article is very informative citing Heifetz ( violin legend). It is definitely applicable for advanced pianists/musicians who sing/vocalize scores.  All pianists will most likely find great benefits in just practicing singing ( solfegge) as after a while ( unknown time) one will be able to sing the notes in the mind away from the instrument. At that point the playing level and musicality will undergo a rather dramatic transformation for the better.

I  am adding solfegge singing into my daily piano practice - little by little. 

Andrew Smith ok finally I got a short recording of first page - hands together. Slow tempo only - dogged persistance with memorization.

A tiny bit of progress after a long time.! lol!

https://youtu.be/vu33bLKZH_A

Andrew Smith Thanks ! 

I haven't seen that particular video of the virtuoso but saw his absolutely stunning playing ! :-) - first of a Chopin etude video at devastating speed and then of this very piece.  My paltry method is what I called above " the 2 bar hands together calculus method".  This is just a variation of learning poetry in my school days . Our curriculum had lots of poems to be memorized from Wadsworth all the way to Shakespeare.  The method worked so well that  even now after 50 years my recall of some of them is near instantaneous.  On experimentation I have a further simplification of it which works even better for me " it is 1/2 bar 2 hands together".   (shh!  - I don't want to jinx it .. I actually sped up significantly listening to David Chang's version yesterday evening and playing along with it and moved up the tempo for the first page up a lot. ). So far I was only doing the super slow tempo method in the video above. 

I also did this

1. Wrote every finger number in on the way to memorizing the first page both hands. ( the 2nd page is not done - but will happen at some unknown time less than 4 weeks from now.. The first page took me about 6 weeks to get into memory )- but I think I have some learnings for acceleration. 

2. I found the memorization jumped up a lot when I experimented with " 1/2 bar hands together" extremely slowly and softly - no intentional dynamics/articulations at the moment. The idea is just get every note both hands read in correctly and fixed in and test recall without looking at the score. A few years ago another wizard ( Jocelyn Swigger ) gave a talk on TED which was absolutely stunning. Later I found she was a piano professor (never met her but that TED talk had some great gems on memorization. It was a talk for the uninitiated so I listened to it out of curiosity but it stuck. The visual part of looking at the hands whilst playing is totally lost when one looks at the score so you will end up handicapping your memorization ability if you only read the score and get fluent at it.

3.  Picked random spots to start from - basically toss and turn the piece - like a rubiks cube and see what happens. lol! 

4. Totally ignored the complex ornamentations as that will be added in last after the entire piece is memorized ( some unknown time in the future ) 

There are mistakes that I knew instantly but need to rework those lines into memory correctly. The biggest takeaway for me from this experiment for the past 4 weeks (off and on) so far is that I will now start memorizing every piece right away. The first hour.. ( at least 1 bar ) and will not waste any time  just reading pieces badly!

Thank you again!

Dustin Anderson Brevity is the soul of wit.

Dustin Anderson ha ha ha ! By now you should realize that I will never be Polonious ( The advice to both Laertes and Ophelia is very pertinent though ) . Your compact Greek statement sounded like a musical phrase -(  I didn’t learn Greek lol). Yes I figured you looked at the long post above and thought these guys need to play more and talk less. lol..  On the musical matter your advice is absolutely on point— do small pieces first carefully rather than try a big piece . I have already made such a big mistake for 2 years prior. 😂