Week 2: Share your progress - get feedback!

Hi Dr. Leann and everyone,

On Debussy's Claire De Lune (m. 15-26),

1. My goal is to try to memorise most of the chords and bringing out the melody with expression that I can hear on both hands. No pedaling yet. Example as below..

2. For practice, I still practice LH first, then RH, and listening to the melody (in octaves), lighten the touch on the notes (in the middle of the chords, that are accompanying the melody). Then both hands togethers, as relaxed as I can.

Thank you for guidance.

Hello Dr Leann, firstly, I love the clarity of your teaching on Tonebase. Thank you so much for this. My plan for Week 2 is to have much more clarity about rolling chords and to achieve more beauty in the distribution of the notes and the resulting harmony.

 I am a trained flute player so I’m much more comfortable when we’re playing ‘in the gods’, which is great for the leger lines at the top of the keyboard, but the opposite end is less than good. I am okay to C below the bass clef then I have to count down in thirds, which is fine but the problems come when it’s not a straightforward  diatonic chord. I manage this by memorising the chord then not really reading the notes. This can have its own challenges as I find myself on occasions inserting a chordal note, which sounds correct harmonically even though the written note may be another note in the same chord. The most confusing leger lines for me are when the ones above the bass clef have ones below the treble clef at the same time. My brain hurts when trying to work out the fingering. 

I do read in blocks so I know, for instance, that if it is a G7 chord then the F and the G may be next to each other in the chord, and if there’s a note around three lines below the bass clef then it’s likely to be the tonic of that chord. I do play my scales. I have a table that includes three of everything each week, so that I rotate all the scales, arpeggios, dominant 7ths, etc., each month. However, I don’t read them when playing. I look at the keyboard, apart from checking the correct fingering in the score if necessary. I use the ‘Grand Form’ so I have to play without looking at the keyboard for the extremes of the range, particularly in contrary motion, so feeling from one note the next is part of that process. I don’t find that this transfers to arpeggios very well (yet).

I don’t do the pecking head business because my peripheral vision allows me to see the page and glance down to make sure I am in the right vicinity on the piano for the required chords. I often see the pattern in the score and then look at the keyboard while playing through several chords. Not glancing up and down is fine if the chords are under the hands but the problems arise when there are leaps, say the start of the C minor Chopin Nocture Op 48, which is numbered 13, not 1, in the edition I have.

The ‘rolling’ appears many times in this nocturne and I have to add in more as my stretch is now just a 9th, at most. I don’t think it was ever a major 10th, but I recall some minor 10ths used to be manageable. Of course, with Chopin, it’s not only the outer notes that need a maximum stretch, but there are challenging stretches required for the intermediate notes too.

You mention in Week 2 rolling out from the thumbs, which I have never done. My preference is to roll from bottom to top, starting the RH when the LH has completed its notes, but I am never sure whether I should be starting to roll each hand at the same time. Similarly, if the LH is rolled and the RH is not, as it’s straightforwardly a chord, then I play the RH chord when I reach the last note of the LH rolled chord. Also, I prefer to use arpeggio fingering for the ‘roll’, while being conscious that I ought to be developing the use a wider span across all the notes in the chord without crossing over the thumb.

I have been practising all of this C minor Nocturne. It’s always such a pleasure to discover that I can get something off the page that I would have doubted previously. I was practising another Chopin piece before this TWI began. It’s the D flat major Prelude, Opus 28, No: 15. Chopin’s bel canto lines are the best way of internalising ‘voicing’. I’m loving applying your voicing technique from Bar 36 onwards.

My flute playing comes in handy when voicing. We play with our fingers hovering over the keys, if you have  a good technique (each key has its own finger albeit we use additional  keys in tricky fingerings). This means that we develop the hovering technique that you demonstrated while depressing the voiced key, albeit the intention is to play the chordal keys ‘sotto voce’. I am now applying this to the piano.

My teaching method for flute beginners was not to use music for several weeks. It’s hard enough for a 10-year old just to hold the flute in balance and play one note, let alone try to decipher a score at the same time. I used to teach three notes over the course of a couple of weeks. This was after they had no trouble getting the flute to speak with a good embouchure on the head joint alone, which could take several weeks in itself.

I would ask their parents to bring them three times each week for a twenty minute lesson because leaving them alone for a week is too long when they’re young. I would take an A4 sheet around Week 4 of putting the flute together and draw a single line across the landscape page and say this line is ‘G’. They would then play G looking at the page. I would then add the G clef at the end of the lesson and say this is why we call it the ‘G clef’. Other lines would be added in the coming weeks and the relationship of the notes was built up organically/harmonically. 

I write this because, even though the flute is a single-line instrument, the same problem that we have at the piano occurs on the transverse flute. The notes in the score are vertical, whereas the instrument is horizontal. I often wonder whether writing out the names of the chordal notes in a straight line would aid comprehension of the vertical structuring of a score. I am going to try this after writing on the score the harmonic progression on the score, and then writing out several chords in sequence to see if this aids memorisation of the given chords.

I have to say that in watching your video, I thought I completely understood the technique of dropping your hands and thumbs onto the chords. This was my goal for the second video. But, sadly, it doesn't seem as easy as it looks, or I'm just not used to it yet. I came away with a feeling as though I was petting or stroking the keyboard. Not sure if it's an improvement over the first video, but I welcome your feedback on how to improve. Maybe I just need more practice.

I am still working on the second movement of Ravel's Sonatine and it has quite a few chordal passages that I am working on. I likely will try to record measures 33-44 to post. In terms of the voicing, the melody is in the upper voice of the right hand and so that needs to be brought out. Tone wise, the right hand is quite high up and so I am looking for a bright bell-like tone. While lower, the left hand is still relatively high for most of the chords. However, in measure 33 there is a low D-flat and A-flat and then you get a B-flat double octave in measure 35, and a low E pedal from measures 39-40 that I think are texturally important to emphasize sufficiently to ground this section. 

Regarding practice, I am trying to use a combination of the squid technique and the pulling of the hand towards the lap. These are both new concepts to me. It is not something my teacher has worked with me on. I am still working this out as it is so different than my usual technique. I have found that everything started out to loud and jarring, but I am starting to be able to control it better. It is, however, easier to get a faster and more legato feel to the chords. Thankfully, this section has a lot of the same chord in various inversions from bars 33-38 so it is a bit easier in the sense of not needing to memorize a number of chords. There is a bit more movement for the remainder of the bars, but it is an allusion back to the first movement and something I am more familiar with.

Hopefully, I will be ready to post a video soon.

https://youtu.be/2x4XhS3nLWg?si=gqjO8V0En5XWDl9Y

Yes goals are important...after being a teacher and speech pathologist for 40 years I can attest to that...

Over all general goal is to improve consistency in tempo to provide a flowing sense of melody...

1.) memorize the portion I need to improve...measures 60 through 76...This has been partially done..

2.) Relax especially between  chords...If that doesn't work...drink alcohol..Just joking..

I have improved some as compared to my original above and I can see how this can improve your playing...

I usually memorize my pieces but on this one I was lazy...

thanks for your comments..conrad

Hi again, Leann. Thank you for your very clear and engaging tutorial. I am continuing with Chopin's Raindrop Prelude this week - middle section. My struggle until now with this section of the Prelude is that it was very ‘growly’ and blurry, and I found it hard to balance my playing to bring out the LH melodic line amongst the low-pitched chords, and the repeated G in the RH also tended to dominate.  All in all, I found it hard to play the passage so that it sounded musical.  I was hugely inspired by listening to Yumeka Nakagawa play it so beautifully during the recent International Chopin competition and wanted to give it another try.  So:

Voicing and tone: I am aiming for a smooth, ‘non-growly’ tone that emphasises the melodic LH line (and, where appropriate, when it transfers to the RH). 

Practice tactics/method: The practice tactic that most made sense to me for this passage was the ‘ghosting’ method.  My goodness – it was so hard!!! I couldn’t believe how badly my brain and fingers failed to communicate to help me isolate and play the melody without playing the other notes.  Over the last week or so, the neural pathways have started to fire a bit but it is clear there is a long way to go!  But this technique has really, really helped – first, by exposing this flaw in my technique, and secondly, by helping me address it.

Here's my video of my attempt – I have taken it all the way through the section so that I join it together with the section I was studying last week where voicing matters too.

https://1drv.ms/v/c/86de3439f81deda4/EStnQbDjyCJNjb2NJQH_X7kBkmEsENNZXxXPx_igAgoAAA

Also – I have used the ‘squid/splat’ method (love the metaphor) to help with chords on a couple of things (e.g., Chopin’s E flat nocturne; Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin) and it has really helped me so thank you!