Posts have been a bit light recently as I was involved with performances with the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music Orchestra over the weekend. There were intense rehearsals in the week leading up to the performances and I was frantically learning my piano part in the weeks leading up to the rehearsals. As is often the case, there wasn’t much time to learn a huge amount of notes.
Of the three works the orchestra played, I only played in one, The Warriors by Australian composer Percy Grainger. I found it to be a rather unique piece, and not just because it required three pianos. The orchestra rehearsed and performed in the Iwaki Auditorium and in the setup we had three Steinway D’s lined up next to each other all with their lids off which was pretty magnificent to see.
It was challenging, but I learnt a lot. I’m getting better at telling whether I have something truly prepared or not. By our first rehearsal, I was fairly comfortable with most of the work, and while I’d expected that it would be challenging to keep an eye on the conductor as well as the music while maintaining awareness of the rest of the orchestra, I still found myself quite thrown, messing up my entries. So I worked even more intensely to get it to a much more secure stage where I could maintain awareness of everything else that was going on around me.
The other lesson came from a section of the score I was struggling with. What I learnt was more of a reminder of something I already knew and was something I should have picked up in the music fairly straight away. When I finally figured it out after struggling with it for an embarrassingly long time, I was truly kicking myself for not having spotted it sooner. So here’s the lesson for your benefit.
The part of the score was this:
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This repeating pattern wasn’t hard to play, but it actually was hard because I had to play it fairly fast, and it went on and on for over two pages. As the bars ticked over, it got harder to keep track of where I was in the pattern and to keep it going smoothly without interruption.
At first glance, I thought the pattern repeated itself every three bars. You can see how bar 1 matches bar 4, bar 2 matches bar 5 etc.
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I hadn’t practised it at this point, but was showing a friend the score and she pointed out that the repeating pattern was shorter. There were three repeated notes:
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Followed by three alternating C’s:
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Great, I thought. Two groups of three notes was a short, repeating pattern that was easy to learn and easy to play. And it was. But the problem was that grouping the notes into threes like this made playing it feel like a compound time signature:
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But the time signature (at this point in the score) was simple quadruple. So I had to play a repeating pattern that felt like compound time but keep track of the beat and emphasise the beat hierarchy to make it simple quadruple.
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And that was hard.
I could keep it up for several bars, but then I’d lose it. My fingers would get into an automatic rhythm, but the flow could be easily disrupted if I started to think too hard about where I was in the pattern, and I would stumble to get the flow going again. And it was even worse at the first orchestra rehearsal where I found it even harder to track the conductor and the rest of the orchestra. And the first few bars are quite exposed where it was just me playing before the rest of the orchestra slowly comes in.
So after the first orchestra rehearsal when I was trying to practise it in my own time in a variety of ways. With a metronome slowly getting faster. Then very fast, then bringing it back down to normal speed. But it wasn’t really helping. This was a very monotonous repeating pattern and endless repetition didn’t seem to be the answer.
So after all that, I took a closer look and found an even simpler pattern. Did you spot it? This is the point where I was kicking myself for having not figured it out sooner. Had I practised the right hand by itself at the start of the process, I would have spotted it straight away. The right hand plays two C’s in succession: high, then low. Then nothing for a semiquaver.
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Then is plays it in reverse: low, then high. Then nothing for a semiquaver.
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And then in between those right hand alternations, the left hand plays the same C:
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And that’s it. The pattern then simply repeats.
And with that realisation came my paradigm shift, and the entire passage became amazingly easy to play, giving it a naturally simple time signature feel rather than compound one, and giving me the headspace to keep an eye on the conductor and track where the rest of the orchestra was up to.
I couldn’t quite believe I’d succeeded in taking something so simple and turning it into a difficult and stressful exercise. I’d made the same mistake I constantly tell my students to avoid.
Sometimes when I’m teaching my students, I can see that they’re reading the notes but can’t see the underlying patterns, and are thus playing the notes painfully slowly, unaware that they’re making it much harder for themselves.
So, I pretend to switch tasks and have the student play certain chords, then in a certain pattern. Then I tell them they’ve just played the left hand (or whatever) of the piece they were playing before, and they’re totally taken by surprise. But the lesson sinks in for them because they realise how much easier it can be as long as they search for patterns and get into the habit of analysing whatever they’re playing.
And now hopefully the lesson has sunk in for me too.