Op. 9, No. 1, Measure 73

I learned Chopin's B-flat minor Nocturne using the Schirmer edition, favorite edition of broke college students everywhere. When Deborah and I were going to work on the F-minor Nocturne (which I barely started before I had to quit), she had me get the Alfred edition. So when I decided to do a chord analysis of the whole piece (B-flat minor, I mean), I pulled out the Alfred since it wasn't covered with fingering, jotted notes, and other scribbles.

When I sat down to get the piece from memory a couple of weeks ago, I went back to Schirmer. Here's measure 73, which I'm still working on getting "just right."

So the Schirmer and the Alfred are both lying around. When I sat down to work on measure 73 today, I grabbed the version that was closest at hand: the Alfred. Here's measure 73 of the Alfred:

I have the measure 73 polyrhythms down for the most part, but I'm not confident about them. When they come together properly, it feels like more a stroke of luck than something I've consciously executed. So for today's practice, I wanted to see if I could make that "stroke of luck" be more consistent. So I looked at my Alfred edition, to remind myself of how many RH notes I'd practiced for each LH note.

And ... something was different. The Alfred edition is not like the Schirmer edition. And neither of them are the official Urtext edition, at least as far as I know.

In Schirmer, the first three triplets are 3-against-2 with the LH. After that, we have the rather-hard-to-digest 20-against-6, starting with the Bb in the right hand and a Bb2 (the Bb an octave below Middle C) in the left:

As noted above, that Bb2 is the first note of the second set in the LH, and the seventh note in the measure.

In Alfred, we have "3 against 1" for the initial three-note sets, and then the 20-note run starts on the fourth note of the measure, the Bb3:

Aaarrrggghhh.

So I did what I always do when I'm not sure about something in Chopin: Asked, "What would Artur do?"

Artur Rubinstein, 1962

So I listened. And ... it's kind of hard to tell.

I prefer the version I learned originally. I don't know if it matters that I play this many notes against that one note, or if I'm strict about anything as long as it's beautiful and comes together in the end. I'm just going to go with my instinct here. I'll continue working on having the progression of notes in both the RH and LH feel as natural as possible. This will allow me to think less about this note or that note, this beat or that beat, and just enjoy the flow of the music under my fingers.

Comments

Eureka! Secondary Dominant!

I am such a nerd, and I love being a nerd! Today I was working on Section 5 of You Are My Sunshine, specifically on getting this section up to performance level. In other words, I was practicing being a performer , not an arranger . But then, of course, I came up with another idea. I had just played the delicate sixths and descending rag rolls of "when skies are gray" (I chord) and then moved to the parallel octaves of "you never know, dear" (leading to IV). The shift sounded abrupt to me. Harsh. It needed something. It needed musical WD-40. Something to ease the hinge between textures. And then I stumbled upon it! Right before moving to IV, I can slip in a V7/IV — a secondary dominant! So I tried it, and it sounded so good that I actually yelled "Secondary dominant!" out loud in my house like I was Archimedes discovering water displacement in the bathtub. It's such a small thing. One little chord. But it smooths that transition, leaning the harmony ...

The Rusty Lock and Key

I'm in a room. There's a door in front of me. On the other side of that door is a whole world of adventure and imagination and joy and delight, but for the moment, I'm locked in this gray little room. The door itself has a lock that is all rusted. I've tried to open it in the past, but I've never gotten very far. Sometimes I try to scrape the rust off the lock. I also have a rusty old key that I occasionally try to polish. Each time, after I've made a little progress, I'll put it into the keyhole in hopes of opening the door. It turns a half a millimeter or so, but the brief excitement at my progress dies quickly when I realize, once again, the lock isn't opening. I set the old key aside, and from there I can forget about the door, the lock, and the world outside, for months—years, even. But then something happens—I hear birdsong, or I catch a glimpse of color—and I pick up the key and start picking away at the stubborn rust. That dark little room is my ...

The Tyranny of the Dots

In the Billy Joel documentary And So It Goes , Billy talks about "reading the dots." He didn't want—or need—to "read the dots," meaning the music notes on the page. He had developed his own rock 'n' roll piano style and, after a few years of classical training, he left the dots behind. I didn't want to read the dots, either, once upon a time. As a little kid, I had a good ear and could quickly figure out just about any tune on the piano. But in first grade, I finally started piano lessons, thus beginning my life with the dots. The Wall of Dots Between Me and Music I hated the dots! I wanted to learn them, sure, but it was so hard. If my teacher played what was written, I could play it right back for him. But if he asked me to play it from the dots, I felt like I would pop a blood vessel in my brain. It was so frustrating for my six-year-old self to have the code to a simple tune sitting silently before my eyes and not be able to crack it and bring th...

Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

Search This Blog