My Sister Playing Bach

OK! Finally I'm back to HK and can touch the real piano and take some videos to put up here. Before I post myself, here's my sister playing Bach. She started playing at an early age. I could see her hand evolving in recent years. She's lazy on reading, so the evolution is largely due to natural adaption to difficult pieces. Sorry about the wrong notes...I have some comments on her playing, but I would like to see what critisim Alan might have and see how much my judgement agrees. She doesn't mind any harsh critisim. By the way, she teaches piano and most of the "craft of piano playing" DVDs I got here were sold by her to her students.

Hi Alvin, I can't speak for Alan but here are my impressions for the sake of discussion while he's gone. She has lots of capability for speed and dexterity. The sound, however, is harsh. The left hand, should produce its own musical line; currently it is a series of disconnected points that interact with the right hand like a ping-pong ball going back and forth. I believe much of the problem she is having, both in the harsh sound and in making mistakes, comes from hitting the keys, a bit as if she were typing. She will do better when she learns to use the keys as extensions of her fingers to contact the strings via the playing mechanism (more about this in my recent "Peter Feuchtwanger" post in Technique and Methods). She cannot get the right leverage for a nice tone when she plays as if her contact with the piano ends at the surface of the keys (just as you could not pick up food with chopsticks if you put all your attention on the place where your hand touches the sticks). Then, because she doesn't have quite the right leverage, she makes those mistakes in the fastest parts. My two cents. I look forward to Alan's take on it. --Rush

I'd say your sister is using a tempo she can't handle for the moment.In my taste to fast anyway. Maybe I'm wrong but the staccato-portato-playing might be a way to avoid (fear of) tensions the recording could be totally misguiding it sounds like without pedal and in that case a staccato becomes a staccato. A cure for this could be "taichiwalking" in slow tempo listening carefully to the sound after the key is gently pushed down by the fleshy part of the finger. A good excercise is to release the key really slowly and listen to exactly where the sound stops.Let the key push up the finger so to speak. Who plays Bach better than Glenn Gold? Watch him playing and how he uses almost no energy to gently press down every key with his fingerjoint and let the tone sing even in fast passages. He did a lot of "tapping" which I find useful especially with Bach. Personally I'd say that working for a while on a clavicord (a real one not digital) will give a new understanding to playing the piano. Your sister has done all the tiresome work now the nice part is left... Eric

Hey, I like your sister's playing! I wouldn't work with her as either of my fellow posters has recommended but musically. She needs to give her phrases more direction and shape. It's difficult because there are syncopations everywhere, and yet each note of the left hand can't simply pump out the beats off which the syncops bounce, because that left hand is a melodic line as well. I like the detache, but don't like the overinvolvement of the left arm in the detache because it leads to inexactitude and a lack of sense of the line. The crux of the matter is, there is a constant rhythmic and melodic tension between the hands in this movement that she hasn't really worked out. Each hand in itself succeeds in being playful, but it's the play the hands I miss. AFF

I apologize in advance if my questions are too basic, I am still a beginner and trying to figure out what "phrasing" and "sense of line" mean exactly. I like the detache, but don't like the overinvolvement of the left arm in the detache because it leads to inexactitude and a lack of sense of the line. AFF Do you mean that there is too much space between notes? Or maybe that the dynamics are such that they don't feel connected - every note is a new unrelated attack? I find it much more difficult to phrase a detached line compared to a true legato, probably because the hand has nothing stable to "stand" on. Is tai-chi walking and overholding the way to go in these situations even though we are eventually playing detached? Another thing I was wondering - since this music was probably composed for organ or harpsichord, should we use dynamics at all for phrasing? Zack

EXCELLENT question! Very difficult to answer. By phrasing and sense of line, I not only mean, how would it sound if you sung it to yourself and then tried to reproduce that singing. I mean, does the way you sing it reflect the polyphonic tension between the voices, the sense of where the suspensions are and how they resolve. On the harpsichord or organ this sense of ebb and flow of tensions caused by the flux of dissonance and consonance was achieved through articulation and rhythm because they didn't have crescendo-diminuendo. But on the piano we cannot avoid it entirely, because the phrase is created by inner feeling. On the earlier instruments this feeling resulted in changes to articulation and rhythm; on the piano these same inner phrase impulses will result in some dynamic changes. My chapter on the Bach B minor prelude in The Craft of Piano Playing fleshes this out in a nice way... AFF