Slow Practice: Chopin Nocturne in F Minor

"The Transcendence" (my title for it), cut and pasted for the blog.

This morning, as I practiced the section of the Chopin nocturne that I call "The Transcendence," I became momentarily overwhelmed by a sense of profound gratitude: gratitude for Chopin and his music, gratitude for the miracle the is the modern piano, and gratitude for my ability to practice and play this magnificent music.

I also realized something I'd never thought about before: As pianists, we get to experience the music up close, in a way that mere listeners never do. Sure, they can listen to Rubinstein on their earbuds and feel like the pianist is right there with them. But the pianists themselves? We can slow the music to a crawl, practice the inner voices only, gain a greater understanding of all the parts by playing hands separately, etc.

Non-pianists can't really do that. A non-pianist can listen to multiple renditions of Chopin's F Minor nocturne and they can wonder at the beauty of "The Transcendence," but they will only hear it at the relatively fast clip that Chopin tells us to use. Here is Rubinstein's recording, where the Transcendence runs from 4:33 - 4:50.

One thing I've noticed about Chopin, and I don't think this is true for all composers, is that his music sounds amazing no matter what tempo you're using. You can play the fast passages slowly, or the slow passages fast, and both will sound beautiful.

I thought about this today as I worked on The Transcendence. Here is that same passage as I played it this morning, slowed to a crawl (one minute and nine seconds, as compared to Rubinstein's 17 seconds!). (Please excuse the puffy jacket; I had just run outside to start the car so it could thaw out for a few minutes.)

Slow practice is so important! Even so, it usually hard for me, and for many piano students, to keep with the slow practice. It's too tempting to speed up and play at tempo. But with this Chopin? I could slow-practice this section every day. And I think I will. One of these days I'll have it at tempo. And when I do? All that slow practice will have been worth it!

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