Group 2
Improve your Chopin Ornaments in Two Weeks with Jarred Dunn!
When playing Chopin, we face a tremendous challenge in using ornamentation to enhance musical expression. In this two-week intensive, we will learn how to make Chopin ornaments easier to play by targeting technical skills used in effortless trills, turns, grace notes, and arpeggiated chords. We will look at specific examples in Chopin's Mazurkas
Assignments
Your videos should show all three assignments!
- Learn over snap movement: practice for five mins per day on arpeggiated chords in Mazurka op.50 no.1
- Trills : the one I show is a preparatory step, because it’s a short trill. Try this movement of changing the key place with fingers 2-4-3 on many different locations/keys. Do this also for five mins per day.
- Grace notes: same as above, try grace notes on different keys, with forward arm movement.
Fellow Participants in Group 2:
AJ
Juan Carlos Olite
Susan Rogers
Angela Fogg
Jeff
Patrick Wong
Carol Chua
Leanne
Harriet Kaplan
Andrea Buckland
Some tonebase productions to get you started
Penelope Roskell on Developing Cantabile Playing
Course: Jarred Dunn on Crafting Scales
Wrist Movement: A Pianist's Secret Weapon with Norman Krieger
Arpeggios Regiment with Jeffrey Biegel
How to get the most out of this course
- Start by watching the introduction video and practice the passages given in the video.
- Write a post where you have been struggling with ornaments in Chopin's music!
- Share two videos per week and help your course partners through feedback on their submissions!
Zoom Check-In: Tuesday July 26 10:00 PST (13:00 EST/19:00 CEST)
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Hi Jarred,
Thank you so much for explaining in such details. I'm a beginner with less than 2 years of learning. I'm currently working on my first Chopin piece - Waltz in A Minor, B.150 posthumous, and found the ornaments very challenging for me. So I'm hoping that I could improve with the 2-week intensive.
Here is my video:
0:00 - Arpeggiated chords in Mazurka op.50 no.1. Since my hands are pretty small, the C-A# still feels quite a stretch. It feels hard to stay relaxed when I do this.
0:24 - Trills and grace notes. Looking at the video, I feel that I might be exaggerating the arm forward motion too much?
0:43 - Ornaments from Waltz in A minor. They just don't sound as light and fast as I'd like.
Thank you for your time!
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Here are my two videos:
Op. 50 No. 1
https://youtube.com/shorts/tBamLdp0-9w?feature=share
Op. 50 No. 2
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Sorry I am a little late. Better late than never. This is just a short clip of the exercise. I plan to make and post a video tomorrow applying the exercises to a piece I have worked on recently…
update: here are two measures from Ballade 3 that use the rolled chord. Applying the technique for the first (measure 120) the second one (measure 122) is a bigger interval requiring a jump. Anything I could do better on that one?
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Hi Jared,
I’m also a little late to this topic but catching up hopefully. I just had a query about something you said when doing the trill, you mention about not staying on the same place on the keys. Is this to avoid the hand becoming tense because it’s having to move and a preliminary step to doing the trill in the same place on the keys? Or do you always recommend this approach? I have never really come across this idea before.
Thank you!
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Thank you very much for introducing me to this wonderful Mazurka, Jarred! Here my upload of the piece .I will be very thankful for any critique also regarding the Mazurka style. One question about Arpeggios in bar 9 or 15 of the con anima section: no way my hand can stretch that far in the left hand, and Arpeggios (bar 9) hurt the rhythm I think. Am I allowed to cheat? ;)