Bass Before The Melody Or Melody Before The Bass

Hi I keep meaning to ask this question but then I get busy with other things and don't remember. I occasionally go for a lesson from a pupil of Fanny Waterman who advocates when playing the melody to slightly ( in milliseconds) delay the bass after the melody starts so as to highlight the melody note. At least I think its this way around because there are others who advocate the bass before the melody. It sounds like the pianst hasnt got the 2 parts together. For example in the case of melody before bass, take the 2nd movement of the Ravel piano concerto in G (not the left hand concerto). After the few bars of bass chords at the beginning the Rh enters with the melody. Here you would play the Rh note at the beginning of the phrase slightly ahead of the bass note in the left etc. Whats this all about - I realise its to highlight the melody but why is this a common method? If you didnt realise this was supposed to be off-together you would think the pianist just hasnt practiced properly or something! I think when done well its not too bad. What do you think about this and who came up with this idea?

I had one English student whose other, well-known and well-pedigreed teacher insisted that one must ALWAYS play the bass AHEAD of the melody in, for instance a Chopin Nocturne, that this was accurate performance practice and crucial to the style. The effect was excrable! What you are talking about is far more interesting and FAR less common in practice. In my experience, very few pianists even know about it. I myself know about it and use it (with discretion) because 1) I figured out for myself that it could be a Good Thing sonically, acoustically and interpretively, and 2) because I often noticed Horowitz doing it to excellent effect. Constanly leading with the bass quickly bores, tiring the ear and lending a heaviness and rhythmic unsteadiness to the music. It tends to detract from musical tightness and vitality. But leading with the melody capitalizes on a point of physics. If you voice one note louder than another on the piano, that voice's key descends more quickly and the note automatically sounds an instant or two ahead. This also helps it ring clearly - its attack is unblemishes by any other distractive sounds, and the bass is then 'snuck in' behind it. Further increasing the space between melody and bass adds a nice declamatory element to the rhetoric, and can be useful in pointing out an interesting harmonic turn. Of course, overusing this is also going to lead to problems, but I find this technique possesses much more interesting potential than the other, far more widely and unconsciously used way of breaking the hands. AFF

I must say that I find this an odd question. Mozart himself said that the hands should not always coincide. He could not have been any more explicit in his comment, yet everyone inisists on the direct opposite for reasons that I have never discovered. I think the real question is who came up with the idea that the hands should always coincide, as it's a very modern ideal (and sadly one that is sadly so prevalent that people seem to think the idea of not playing a chord together amounts to sacrilege). Generally speaking I find left after right to be most effective for voicing bass or tenor notes, but there are some very notable examples in Horowitz's recordings of the F minor Nocturne where he brings out the melody this way. There's a film on youtube somewhere. You can hear it when the melody has an appogiatura from B flat to A flat. I've often found myself doing this very slightly in the opening of the C minor nocturne too.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that breaking the hands is always advisable. Making the keys go down really together is an invaluable practice tool, and true simultaneity of attack creates a certain clarity of tone that is attainable in no other way. It cultivates precision. When you bring this precision of attack to the breaking of the hands, you get into all sorts of possibility for tonal variation based on whether you break them a 100th of a second, a 50th of a second, a 20th of a second, and so on. The possibilities increase arithmetically with your ability to be really precise and incisive... AFF