Sara Davis Buechner: Ask Me Anything!

aliceyip Dear Alice: Happy to answer questions about any period at all.

aliceyip Alice, hope you got my answers which I pasted just a little while ago.

Angelo B. Dear Angelo: I think it is always a good idea to practice legato in general, and in the case of Mozart, many of the great European players have advocated a kind of overlapping legato wherein you hold one finger down on the present note, and keep it down as you press the next. It's a kind of finger pedaling. This helps make for a seamless sound and you can of course also apply pedal with the foot as well for sonic bloom.

Slow practice (without a metronome) and great attention to detail is the key to success in this realm, I have found. It takes patience!

Michelle Dear Michelle, performing in public always guarantees a certain amount of distraction and nervousness which shows itself in the form of simple mistakes and of course, memory slips. For my advanced students, I always urge them to study the score away from the piano so they can get it firmly into the brain. It's also a good idea to sing the piece, again away from the piano and without the music. If you are able to do that, you have internalized the memory and it will not bother you again.

But in the case of non-professional players, I simply say: why put yourself through such agony and extra hours of preparation? If you are playing for the joy of it, let yourself use the music. At times when I play with a score on stage, I always make sure to practice the page turns as well as the playing. If necessary I make xerox pages or do some cutting and pasting. Others use the AirTurn Pedal if they play from an I-Pad. You should not over-value the memorization of music if it takes away from the joy of playing or hearing the music itself.

Tim Dear Tim:

Thanks for your nice words. I struggle every day to make my music sound cohesive LOL. Welcome to the club! As for your progress, it is probably better than you think. Please read my other replies as there is some good info for you there, particularly my one answer regarding overlapping legato practice. That will help with the cohesive sound.

Lars Dear Lars: I too have struggled with those scales and tried several fingerings. Make sure to differentiate between the small notes which must be executed rapidly, and the large notes which have clear rhythmic notation (and thus, slower). It's also well worth looking at Busoni's Klavierübung where he suggests unconventional scale fingerings including things like 1-2-3-4-5-1-2-3-4-5 (etc) for passages which must fly. I often use such fingerings and practice major and minor scales with consecutive 1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-3 (etc) and 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 (etc). Try not to get too hung up on old canards like "no 5th finger on the black notes."

I think those bars have many possibilities depending upon the shape and size of the hand so I'm not sure just writing down my own fingerings would help much. Besides, I tend to change them each time I re-learn a piece! Also a good idea, to think of fingering as something malleable, not fixed or permanent.

Ching Lee Goh Dear Ching Lee: I'd say that there are many words we can use to describe Mozart's most exquisite Rondo in A minor -- painful, yes, but also poignant, nostalgic, gleeful in its mid-section, resigned, quiet, accepting. Words are always inadequate to describe music.

As a youngster I often made up stories to think of when playing, in order to provoke emotion into my performances. In time I stopped doing that, as I wanted to tell my own stories in sound, not portray a movie script. As for the emotion in the Rondo, well, it's far more complex than just "pain," I think. Mozart is the composer who can portray the emotion of tragedy in one measure, then like a coin just flip it over to reveal the humor in it all.

I see no reason to rush into baleful emotions just to help you play the Mozart Rondo. Whatever you find in the piece, is valid. Make it yours and be proud of what you make.

As for myself, I see that Rondo as an epic reflection on many spheres of experience. Mozart at the age of 35 had the wisdom of a very old man. When I play such music, I try not to project as much as I try to listen. When I play, people listen to me; but when I play, I am listening to Mozart.

Michael Dear Michael: Your essay is quite detailed and intellectually probing and I doubt that I am up to the best reply. I had the great honor of working with Badura-Skoda in his last years and can assure you that no one could possibly ever have delved so thoroughly and so spiritually into the world of the composers he connected with -- Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert (not to mention many others, including his good friend Frank Martin).

One of my favorite stories to recant is the time I played the slow movement of the Sonata KV 533/494 and executed an ornament in one of the repeated melodic passages. He stopped me, saying, "oh no, Zara, you must not do an ornament there." Then he sat down at the piano and played the same passage, adding a different one. "However, if you vish to do zo, ziss is a nice one!"

Which rather sums up the combination of great scholarship and also performance practicality that the great musician knew so intimately. Yes, we should read all the treatises and ponder the solutions to the many questions of ornamentation and embellishment. But so many of those pedagogic tracts include the proviso, to use one's good judgement and taste. And judgement and taste are qualities that change greatly over time.

Decisions over such matters vary widely in any case, and particularly if playing on different instruments. For me, the idea of not using the piano pedals when playing Bach or Mozart is as inane as not using the pedals of a bicycle. The instrument will never sound good without using its full resources. I'd say the same of any organ or harpsichord or clavichord. It is the performer's duty to find the ways of adapting the instrument's possibilities to recreate the correct sound and emotional world of the composer.

When I am unsure of such things I always consult Badura-Skoda's book on Mozart, or the equally wonderful Frederick Neumann volumes.

And lastly, I'll add, in the midst of performance, if an ornament strikes me as "a nice one," as Badura-Skoda put it, I will play it and answer the musicologists after.

Michael Neumann's signature volume on Mozart, "Ornamentation and Embellishment in Mozart" (Princeton U Press) is a vital work that is also quite entertaining to read. Well worth the time to look it through and afterwards you can make more informed choices about which rules to follow and which rules to bend or break.

Sherry Knowles Dear Sherry: I wouldn't worry too much about "cementing" fingering in the Brahms exercises. I think they are meant to have fluidity. And of course it's the intellectual idea of how do you adapt such fingerings when executing those exercises, in all 12 keys as indicated. I think one of the best uses of both the Brahms and shorter Czerny exercises is as transposition material. And don't practice any of them for a long period of time, either. Regardless of whether you can play them at a particular tempo, or even correctly, just keep moving on. Remember that exercises are just as much for the mind, not just the fingers.

Sherry Knowles The challenge of matching up rhythms of 5 vs. 4, or 4 vs. 3, etc. is in NOT figuring out what finger hits in the right in the space with the left or whatever. You have to FEEL the pulse of the downbeats. In college we all had to learn how to conduct a 3-pattern in the right hand at the same time as doing a 2-pattern in the left. Then we did 3-pattern vs. 4-pattern, which is much harder. Another place where command of downbeat listening is vital is in the Barber Cello Sonata. You simply will never be able to play it unless you train your ears NOT to listen for the match-ups of every note.

Having said that, I would urge you to practice hands separate for a long time, and before putting hands together, try to play the pattern with more notes in one hand while SAYING the lesser pattern as you play. Try to put the number 1 with the downbeat. Anything you can say or sing, you can play with the hand. Concentrate in the hand, with the finger that plays a downbeat -- preferably a thumb, or at times the 3rd finger. A strong finger, not 4 or 5.

This kind of thing is devilishly hard to teach in a written forum or even a Zoom lesson -- thank goodness!