Week 3: Art, Character, and Imagination

Dustin Anderson Beautiful playing! 

Michelle R Oh thank you =) Yours as well; a delicate touch on the chords of that prelude is tricky to achieve. Your isolation practice is a great way to develop consistency! Thank you for sharing.

Dustin Anderson Thanks, Dustin. I'm excited to be learning my first Chopin. There's so much in it, so many new things that I've not worked on before! I'm having a lot of fun listening to and experimenting with this piece. 

Priya Viseskul 

Hi Priya, 

I recently had a student learn this piece. They had a similar take, especially with the very end of the piece which they felt was almost a scream of overwhelming rage and grief. Look forward to hearing it =) It is a special piece! 

Priya Viseskul Dear Priya, I can already feel all of these emotions built into your recording for Week 2, even as you are still working on the many technical aspects of playing the notes.  It's already extremely powerful even in this raw state.    it's interesting to compare the emotional map of this piece with the Funeral Marches in Beethoven's Op. 26 3rd Movement and Eroica, as well as Chopin's Op.35. They open in a state of grief, and then briefly visit  what might be happier memories of the beloved deceased person, but then the grief reasserts itself in a more punctuated way.  Beethoven's Op. 26 could be said to end in a similar fashion to your Elegie, albeit in a much abbreviated and understated fahion, where the unsettled minor sixths hint at a resigned sorrow (as opposed to a sorrowful outburst in your elegie) before a resolved (pun intended) positive resolution on his quiet Ab chord, which is in contrast to Rachmaninoff's insistent on a triumphant (your great description for it) 5th of his chord, which almost suggests to me that he's forcing out a positive ending, but kind of misses the mark of the tonic, indicating that the sorrow has not really departed but he's going to make himself persevere through it....... Can't wait to hear your further work on this!

Peter Golemme thank you for your thoughts and kind words! I should listen to those pieces you mentioned again for inspiration. And, yes, I feel the ending of the Elegie is like shouting to oneself "No, I will not succumb to this tragedy!" - in a way I welcome this fighting spirit - such a powerful message to end the piece with :)

End of week 3 progress - returning to the main theme bar 84 to the end https://youtu.be/LQW3NZJZEdE

claudiadm73 

Some fine work! This is one of my favourite Rachmaninoff preludes. Thanks for sharing!

Dustin Anderson Thank you so much, Dastin ! You are very kind😁

Michelle R I love how deliberate and detailed you work through your pieces. It does sound soft and gentle. Beautiful imagery too!

Vidhya Bashyam Thanks, Vidhya. My teacher has been taking me through step-by-step, and it has been super helpful for me. I'm often amazed when he takes me through a bunch of little steps and then says, "Now let's put it together!" Then, more often than not, it all comes together!

Michelle R Hi Michelle, you are a credit to your teacher, just as good a student as he seems to be a teacher.  I admire the discipline you take to your practicing in trying to express these voicings of the chords.  Such an essential skill to develop and this is such a good approach to it!  I'm hearing the differently emphasized notes here quite well.

Victoria Macdonald Some solid work - your cross rhythms sound very natural and flowing. Great piece thanks for sharing your progress so far =)

Dustin Anderson Thank you!

Victoria Macdonald That's quite lovely Victoria.   I agree that the hemiolas (? is that the correct term for 2's against 3's) really flow (and ebb) naturally and smoothly.  They convey an impassioned conversation, where the discussion does not proceed in lockstep, but overlaps and rises and falls in content and rhetoric, much more naturally than a rigid counted out approach.  I find these contrasting rhythms here and elsewhere to be very challenging. I can only learn them by trying to play them with mathematical precision at first so I know theoretically where each note is supposed to fall in relation to each other.  then I try to practice them totally in isolation, so that I know how the line is supposed to sound by itself.  then combining them, I try turning my ear off to one line and listening to the other and then vice versa.  and then trying to factor in Rubato and dynamics, OMG what a challenge! THEN I try to forget all of the above and let it play itself.  so much easier said than done, but you are getting there here!

Peter Golemme I also like to work cross-rhythms out slowly and precisely at first for 2 vs. 3, 3. vs. 4 and 3 vs. 5. I do find once you get things like 4 vs. 5 or 6 vs. 7 it is just easier to put one hand between the other after the initial 'together'. They tend to move so quickly that they are more or less perceived as alternating and your muscle memory will smooth it out before long.

Hemiola is different from a cross-rhythm though. Hemiola is when you place syncopated stresses in one meter that make it sound like another meter. The most common example is 6/8 time being pulsed to sound like it is in 3/4 time.

Dustin Anderson ah thank you Dustin. I knew it had something to do with 2s and 3s! I’ve acquired a good amount of musical knowledge over the years but in a rather haphazard manner, and Tonebase is really helping me fill in the gaps. And this is just another example of that!

Dustin Anderson p.s. I'm looking forward to your Chopin. Unlike many pianists here at TB i've never played much Chopin. I've heard some very moving performances in our Tonebase concerts, and picked up TB Artist Claire Huangci's CD of all the Nocturnes ("A Chopin Diary"), which has allowed me to hear & understand them in a new way.  HIGHLY recommended to all Chopin players.