SUCCESS - 'Keyboard Sonata in D Minor' by Scarlatti

You may have seen my previous blog post on the subject matter - not but one week ago - in which I was so so so close to perfecting this piece.

Well, I feel that as far as my current standards will allow (although I am always striving for improvement) I have.

Purists may wince slightly at my rendition of a Baroque piece in that I added a handful of pauses and rits across the music so as to live up to my strengths, as sadly my fingers aren't quite as agile as they once were and need at least to be teased of a break every now and then. However, this keyboard sonata - whilst, as ever, with room for improvement - can finally be heard performed properly in its entirety by me here:

So, what steps did I need to add to create such a performance? -

Get the Bad Performances Out of My System

This was by no means a first take, although in my defence it didn't take as many as it could have done. I think I probably had about fifteen minutes worth. Maybe twenty. Granted, even if I'd have reached the end of each the piece for each take then that would add to a lot of takes, being a reasonably short piece, but it made me consciously aware of things I needed to do each time.

As always, I found myself becoming more and more stressed which inevitably led to more and more mistakes. And guess what? This take you see is the result of just a five minute break following the peak of my frustration. Not only did I feel calmer anyway, but evidently it reflected in my performance.

(It was practising this piece that inspired this blog about the trouble with recording!)

Sustain Pedal

Being a Baroque piece of music, there is no pedal marking on the music and it is debatable as to whether or not you ought to incorporate at all (I wrote a blog on pedalling where I referenced Baroque music - have a read!).

Being rapid passages - especially with the majority of them being consecutive notes - pedalling would have made this all a tad muddy in my opinion, so I opted against it.

EXCEPT for at the end of each 'movement' (the ends of page 1 and 2, both of which are repeated).

This allowed for me to take a pause whilst ringing out the last note prior to immediately going back into the repeated / new passage at speed. It's doable without the pedal, but I would either have had to:

• embrace a pause of silence

• hold the note on manually and then jump quickly to my new position

Neither of these options sounded quite as desirable to me!

Rit.

The romantic in me coming through (not literally - I'm referring, of course to the Romantic era musically). I added a little more rise and fall in the tempo, such as the aforementioned ends of passages.

However, I also did this at the very beginning for the first two bars. It allowed my fingers to settle into a more rapid passage and also perform the introductory bars evenly as playing evenly was something I was struggling to do at speed. It is, of course, something I can still work on, but for this performance I think it works just fine.

Controlled Trills

Every rendition I've heard of this has quite intense trilling, and it isn't one that I particularly enjoy listening to, let alone performing. I prefer the much more deliberate sounding root-up-down-up-down approach, which allows the finger to breathe for a slight nanosecond before its next trick (usually a rapid semiquaver passage, so the breathing time is extra vital for my precious fingers!).

Head Movement

In the second movement, there is a repeat of the theme from the first movement. However, the left hand jumps from a quaver bass note quite low down to vamped quavers in the rest of the bar two octaves higher. The first instance of this passage is at 1:21 (as this movement is repeated, remember!).

Naturally, going slow was one important practice technique here. But also, working on my head movement so I could know exactly where and when to look lower down to best aim those notes. There is a lot of instinct in piano playing that many professionals streets ahead of myself would be able to employ whereby they wouldn't even need to look. However, for me, because there is nothing relative in the two octave jump (such as the previous bar working down the the first note), I need to look.

Fortunately, the right hand is not only a direct repeat of the first movement that by this time was well practiced, but it is also very scale based. This means that it is of lesser importance that I look at the right hand as that should be able to do its thing without being watched. And it did!

Embrace the Repeats

I can't for the life of me fathom what it is, but if I do a perfect take of the first page which then repeats, I get more nervous about doing it again. Why? I can do it, clearly. Maybe I thought it was a fluke and I feel it at least now needs to live up to it if not be better?

I had to shift my mentality somewhat - which is rather hard, not going to lie - to realise that actually the repeats are a good thing. If you've done them once you can do them again. It's not difficult and it's not cause for concern. If anything, Scarlatti has given a substantial length of music for half the practice time because of the repeats.

Still, it's done now and I do enjoy playing it!

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#classicalmusic #piano #pianopractice #practicejournal #baroquemusic #scarlatti #domenicoscarlatti #pianosonata

Committing Music to Memory

If you've been following my practice journals recently, you'll know that I am getting quite well along with at least two pieces that I haven't yet published. For me, the final stages of learning a piece of music is the committing it to memory.

I must, therefore, kick off this blog by first stating that committing music to memory is an optional move. As I stated on a previous blog, there is no judgement for those that prefer to or have to use music each time they perform a piece. However, there are advantages to taking this extra step;

Aside from not having to worry about page turns in extremely rapid passages (because page turns are never anywhere convenient!), you can perform music much more confidently without being distracted by other things...such as the music itself! (I'm not going to spend the whole blog post repeating what I put in the aforementioned link, but little things like watching the keyboard at a time you normally watch the music or vice versa can be distracting!).

So, the question remains - how do you commit to memory?

Read on...

Chunk it up!

Unless you are trying to memorise a spectacularly short piece, you won't do yourself any favours by just endlessly playing through the piece of music. You need to give yourself a reasonable phrase (or few phrases) to crack on with.

Consider the logicality of what you are performing. If you are trying to remember two bars littered with rapid movement, accidentals, unusual fingering etc., maybe just focus on those two bars. But if you are focusing on ten bars and all (or even most) of them have a logical movement (such as a repeated left hand bass) then it can be more beneficial - not to mention quicker - to focus on the whole passage.

Our memories work best when they are given 'information' that they can process as a result of either familiarity or - not a million miles difference - relating to something else which we are familiar with. Therefore it is essential to pick out bits that don't seem to have any natural movement and consider them as your problem bars, never forgetting to put them into context to ensure the whole piece flows.

Frame of Mind

The play and repeat style is very good, but it won't do much good if you're not in the right mindset in the first place.

What are you playing?

How do your hands feel in this position?

Where do they move to?

If you have ever read a book you'll no doubt be familiar how easy it is to read a paragraph, a page or even more and then be able to tell - literally nothing about what it's about. If the concentration isn't there you can't recall it. You need to focus on what you're doing in the first instance, and if you're not in a position to do so then it's not the right time to consider committing to memory just yet.

You Don't Know What You Don't Know

The importance of not always performing with the music was stressed in that same previous blog post, but regardless it's worth mentioning again that at this time - when we are committing to memory - it is vital to keep playing without.

Don't have the music on the stand in front of you. Put it away and refer to it only when you need to. If you reach a stumbling point, try to recall as best you can, for if you take the initiative and call upon some knowledge that's already there then you are far more likely to remember it than just quickly refreshing the brain by glimpsing in the book.

It can be so tempting to have the music there as a safety net, but in terms of committing to memory it won't do you any favours in the long run. It will exercise the brain's recall more and - besides - you will overlook bits you genuinely don't know because you'll be 'filling the gap' quite nicely by reading it, not memorising it.

Repeat Problem Passages

Naturally this is one of those things that may come into piano practice anyway, however it is worth bearing in mind. Problem passages are those that won't stick, and you need to be able to be fairly confident with them prior to trying to memorise them. If you can't play them with the music fairly fluidly, make sure you get to that stage first.

Then if there are any stumbling blocks, ask yourself why there is a stumbling block. The most likely answer is that you just need to reiterate it a few times to get the fingers working - particularly on their own as now they don't have the reassurance of the music. Once you have that, make sure that you practice it within a couple of bars either side to trap it in a nice, consistent performance, and you're good to continue.

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#piano #pianist #pianotips #learnpiano #pianomusic #classicalpiano #classicalmusic

Practice Journal - "Sonata" by Scarlatti: Part Two

I seem to recall that going back many moons I uploaded my very first practice journal blog post - me practising a Sonata by Scarlatti from a book I purchased in Didsbury!

You might be asking yourself - how's that one getting along?

Well, do I have good news!

Not that it's the biggest achievement per se in that it is a sonata that spans a whopping two pages, this particular piece has caused challenges way beyond taking a lot in, because what it lacks in length it makes up for in technical ability. And it was technical ability that I did not necessarily possess!

That's not to say that I played it badly - it just wasn't as typically Baroque as it should have been.

I frequently bang on about the 'relentlessness' of Baroque music, particularly in keyboard works designed for instruments such as the harpsichord that just didn't have the expression of the piano. Well, this is one of those pieces. It needs to keep moving otherwise the notes will simply fade away to nothingness.

So after my last blog on the matter, in which I tackled page one, I started on page two and played that one a few times round - both with and without the metronome - to see how I fared.

Turns out I was eventually ready to begin committing to memory.

I arrogantly assumed I'd be able to post a success blog on it before another practice blog, in fact, and began trying to record some perfect takes of it but to no avail (it did, however, inspire a different blog post). So instead, I set the new metronome going (I won't always refer to it as new...) and performed the whole piece at a slightly slower speed than I will do when I perform it properly:

Generally I was happy with the performance. One or two careless little mistakes that were a result of nothing more than blips of the mind came across in this performance, but nonetheless I powered through.

It took a while to get it to even this standard, as it is surprisingly difficult to keep even semiquavers going so relentlessly, so of course I have been doing my preparatory exercises daily as well (Hanon is going well. I have come to the conclusion that Schmitt hates me). I do, however, feel that I should start up doing scales again. As much as I appreciate the value of them, I don't know if I've yet found the balance between preparatory exercises, scales, arpeggios, chromatics etc. etc. in addition to practising pieces I want to play. We'll see.

I would like to further observe that my fingers are much more comfortable than in the previous post playing so close together. The progression up the keyboard shook me at first, given that the left hand was playing quavers merely a third below the right hand, all the while both hands ascending. I think there was a certain OCD involved of me not wanting to be touched - not even by myself. But I have overcome this now, perhaps through familiarity.

I will keep practising with the metronome, but when I don't use it I do tend to take more of a pause between the four 'movements', as I term them (Page One is one movement which is repeated, then Page Two is another movement which is repeated, so I make them four). I also think the piece benefits from a rit. at the very end.

As an interesting side note, I would like to add that I quite deliberately introduced my own tenuto markings on the second page on last quavers in the left hand from 1:33 - 1:39 in the video. I felt it added a little extra oomph to the music and added a touch more movement, feeling - to me - a bit static otherwise.

Then again, I do not wish to question Scarlatti.

Hopefully next time will be the real thing!

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