Group 4

Rachel Doornink can't wait to hear you play - if you love folk dancing, this will definitely be an exciting two weeks. Good luck with your Mazurka - which one did you pick?

Jarred Dunn Looking through my library of printed books, Op. 7 is one I have a Henle copy of, so I think I'll go for that! :) 

Rachel Doornink Go for it!  

Aline Valade the op30 nr1 is more accented on 2nd beat, the rhythm being 2 eighths followed by half note. Great choice, can’t wait to hear you play this! Do familiarize yourself with the other c minor mazurka op56 nr3, and the middle of op41 nr3 in A-flat major has a similar c minor section.

Mark Forry dzień dobry, witaj! It’s great you’re going through the entire Chopin mazurkas in order. Looking forward to hearing your op6 nr.3&4, and keep the questions coming! 

 great question. From what we know of Chopin’s students and the works they studied with him, mazurkas typically come as a package deal. They are certainly organized with an arc in mind and while they can be performed individually, they sound best in entire cycles. The harmonic links between mazurkas are subtle but once you know them well, it’s more fulfilling to do an entire opus. Op6 has five mazurkas, Op7 has four: the Paderewski version justifies Op6 with 4 and Op7 with 5 rather this less convincingly than Ekier argued for Op6 with 5 and Op7 with 4 (with all due worship to my roots having learned Chopin from Paderewski editions). Chopin originally planned four mazurkas for each opus, but added the c major to op6 at a later stage and since he was directly connected to the French Edition, which published the c major as op6 nr5, it is almost impossible he intended it for op7. The German Edition published the c major as op7 but this was most probably an error. 

Jarred Dunn Wow - that's a revelation! So that short C major mazurka was intended to follow op6 no4 in eb minor, and not follow op7 no4 in Ab major? I'll have to rethink both these opuses, I've gotten used to playing the C major as attaca from op7 no4.

Very happy to hear that mazurka opuses are indeed intended as entire cycles. I'd welcome any further insights you have about connecting mazurkas within opuses.

Thanks!

Mark Forry Yes, the short C major is Op. 6, not Op. 7. Connecting mazurkas within opuses is a complex topic I'll discuss with a few examples during our Zoom meet-up. But if you're looking at the later works, observe the connections between the keys (eg., Op. 50: G major - A-flat major - C-sharp minor = nr. 2 and nr. 3 are in a dominant-tonic relationship).

Mark Forry that's a great question and a highly interesting one! As a humble amateur, I will just tentatively offer one general comment: with the last Chopin piece I worked on, the Polonaise-Fantaisie, my teacher insisted on taking Chopin's pedal markings (and yes, the ones in the Henle edition are his own and are quite specific) very seriously, at least as a starting point until the piece was learned really, really well. In the slow middle section, that required tremendous discipline and the best possible finger legato I could muster. It didn't mean that I could never use any pedal where it wasn't written, but there had to be a good musical or technical reason for it, and it had to be controlled and tasteful. I'm trying a similar approach for the Mazurka I'm working on now. I would love to hear from Jarred Dunn if it is known whether there are differences in how specific Chopin was in his pedal indications between different pieces and/or different periods, and how reliable and to-be-taken-seriously the markings are in various editions?

Mark Forry The bagpipe isn't the only possibility for the 5th drones - I believe it isn't pedal-marked because Chopin might have been recalling the three-stringed bass (mazanki) that is plucked and resonates until the next note. The articulation between quarter and half note is the opportunity for a real break in sound like a plucked string followed by a period when the sounds resonates off the board (not like a lira korbowa or so-called hurdy-gurdy). I play the introduction with no pedal because it helps show contrasting articulations in the drones + legato melody.

Op. 17 Nr. 4:

-mm. 1-4/129-132: pedal discreetly between each chord or not at all - the inner voice which introduces the melody (B-C-D) in m. 5 needs to be clear enough that we recognize it in all subsequent places.

-mm. 36-42: pedal as indicated in First French Edition - Paderewski - Ekier (https://s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/c/c9/IMSLP398169-PMLP02281-BnF_btv1b52500413m.pdf)

-mm. 109-123: pedal is Paderewski's and corresponds to the hand-span of most pianists as unable to reach the upper notes; whereas Chopin's piano allowed him to notate a bass as dotted-half notes (=pedal) in an A organ point (tonic pedal). In the manuscript Chopin indicated that his piano neither needed pedal nor was it desirable to communicate the transparency of the passage, but Paderewski added it because it might be necessary given the nature of the bass-tenor relationship in the passage.
 

Alexander Weymann Chopin was specific with pedal, and every Chopin enthusiast knows he was marvellously discrete about using it such that it never disturbed but rather charmed the listener. Chopin's pedal markings flatter the delicate nuances of his harmony and in many cases show us that finger pedal is a terrific skill in achieving an artistic distinction between one voice and another.  The Henle reports Chopin's autograph of Op. 61 faithfully. In the late and last works, Chopin's pedal markings are strictly connected to thematic, harmonic, and new formal innovations. Furthermore, I find Chopin's later works demand more subtlety and colour shading in their repeatings of the same melodic figures that have no pedal markings (eg. Op. 56 nr. 1 and 3) = extract as much beauty from the piano's natural state as possible by using the inbuilt counterpoint of each voice. Mazurkas, particularly, need a special focus on instrumental resonances (lira korbowa, cymbały, basy, fidele) to really know when to hold a tone, release it, and how to move from one to the next so that the piano sounds like a band of vibraphones, chordophones, idiophones, aerophones, etc. Pedal can sometimes help the piano's inbuilt potential for resonance to be accentuated at just the right moment so as to invoke the sound of a bagpipe, but other times it can destroy the nuance as to render our finger's effort meaningless.

Jarred Dunn super helpful; thank you so much for sharing all this excellent information and your thoughts on the subject! Since you now have mentioned in many different comments the various instruments that Chopin would/might have had in mind when composing these mazurkas and that we are supposed to think of and internally hear when playing them, are you at some point going to show us some examples of what they are and what they sound like? :-)

Alexander Weymann We have a WINNER. I have been waiting for that exact question! I'm now going to post in all groups now a guide to the PL folk instruments.

Jarred Dunn Thanks for mentioning the specific instruments. I'm an ethnomusicologist, and although I'm less familiar with Polish music, my focus has been SE Europe (mostly Croatia, Serbia, and Hungary), where similar instruments can be found. It's perhaps beyond the scope of this class to delve into the specifics, but I would love to know, for example, what folk instruments Chopin is likely to have heard and in which combinations. For example, you can hear modern Polish folk music bands where fiddles, bagpipes and plucked bass play together, but would that have been the case in Chopin's time?

It's an intriguing creative challenge to imagine what instruments Chopin might have had in mind for specific passages and try to find corresponding sonorities on modern pianos. Doing so would seem to be faithful to Chopin's attention to the nuances of sonority as you've characterized them here. 

Jarred Dunn and Alexander Weymann , thanks for mentioning "finger pedal", I hadn't heard the term before. I've been using the principle to wean myself away from overreliance on pedal in Bach, but it hadn't occurred to me until recently to attempt the same with Chopin. I love this notion of brining out the subtleties of Chopin's nuance with a balance between pedaling and no pedaling. So many creative and technical challenges -- I guess that's why we all play piano ...  

Mark Forry  finger pedaling is mentioned many times in Ekier’s performance commentaries and the introduction to the National Edition (do you have this?). It affects the technical work of Chopin's music. You can find many passages in etudes and build antennae for this skill in every type of Chopin piece.

Mark Forry over the summers of 1824 and 1825 (age 14 and 15), Chopin had summer vacations in Szafarnia (https://szafarnia.art.pl). In his letters, Chopin writes about the "squeaky, semi-tonal, off-key voices" of the lady singers during rowdy dances (24 Aug 1824). Chopin colourfully reports an evening of dance and music after vodka drinking, having heard basetla (cello), three-string bass, fiddle, monochord (25 Aug 1825). It is not impossible that other instruments were part of the dance gatherings, we assume he heard most or all of Polish traditional instruments.

Jarred Dunn Once again, my sincere thanks. This TWI is completely changing my understanding of Chopin in general and mazurkas in particular. So grateful!