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Man, I'm getting so frustrated!

I'm working on Chopin's Prelude in C Minor, Op. 28, No. 20.

http://www.amclassical.com/midi/chopin_op28n20.mid

In the first measure, there are 18 notes in chords, just on the right hand! Then the second measure has *19* notes. Some of these chords are 5-note chords for one hand. I spend a lot of time squinting at chords and going slowly, and sometimes the piano won't sustain long enough for me to find the next chord. Aaaargh!

I already tried to talk my teacher out of this piece. She's not having any of it because I did swear to her that I want to get to the point that playing chords is not like going over big speed bumps.

Is there anyone else coping with some really hard piece, or is it just me?

Cindy -- who had hoped to go to lesson on Monday and surprise her teacher with the whole piece, but who now sees this as hopeless

quodlibet of goldbergs (var 30), it sounds so simple but has so many voices.

my bach obsession is my passion and my nemesis, because its all too hard.

so on top of the usual simple tunes (sonatinas, minuets) i work on impossible things for my level.

why not, dare to live dangerously...carpe diem and all that stuff....

Cindy,

I just went down and tried it to give an informed opnion. Took several minutes to get through the first two measures, badly. For three years this is pretty tough stuff.

I think you can learn to play chords without starting in this particular key and 4-5 note 9ths.

Right now my problem is getting up to speed on the Clementi Sonatina 36, all three movements.. Alla Turca is not terribly difficult, but these seemingly much simpler pieces.. yeesh. Some days I fear that I will forever be consigned to playing slow, beautiful pieces (which, all things considered, is not all that bad... )

:gulp:

Goldberg variations. Yep, that's next up in the rotation, says teacher.

Any thoughts on what makes the Goldberg variations so difficult? Everyone talks about "voices," but I don't really understand the nature of the problem.

Michael, you have nerves of steel if you're willing to have a go with Alla Turca. I just went down and looked at it. That thing is wicked! My daughter played a simplified arrangement of it, and even that was hard to play to tempo.

On a brighter note, I tried and abandoned Moonlight Sonata last year. I decided to dust it off this morning, and guess what? It's not that bad. Well, the first page isn't that bad, anyway.

Are you playing from a converted MIDI score or something? This is one of the easiest preludes - not difficult at all!

Edit: OHhhhhhhh, I mis-read that as 18 note chords!!

The piece is very slow so the chords should not be that much trouble.

No doubt hard to sight-read for a beginner though.

//Sorry if this seems a bit rude, I've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.

Bach mainly wrote "contrapuntal" music, which is music made of several melodies played at the same time, as opposed, for example, to a "melody and accompaniment" form where you might have melody in the right hand, and harmony (chords) in the left hand.

With contrapuntal music, both "hands", or more accurately, the voices are roughly equally important, so you have to concentrate on all of them equally, rather than concentrating mostly on the melody in the right hand. That's why it is hard.

Good luck with the piece, you should actually find this one fairly easy once you learn the notes.

Everything I'm currently learning seems too difficult for me. Not nearly as difficult as yours Cindy, but I've only been playing for a year.

Both of the Christmas songs have three voices (Christmas Time is Here and Do You Hear...). I can play them easily with just the melody and bass line, but they sound so much better with the harmony added in. That middle section of Fur Elise is a bear to nail down consistently without mistakes. Every day I get closer, but I'm not quite there yet.

A few weeks ago my teacher pulls out Beethoven's Pathetique--all three movements. Then she played a recording of the first movement. Holy cow! I thought she was nuts!

I had been working on the second movement on my own b/c it's so beautiful, but the book I was using didn't have the other movements, so I didn't know it was such a huge piece.

The first movement is killing me. With a few exceptions, the notes aren't particularly hard to work out--it's the speed and endurance that's demoralizing! I'm about halfway through the first half of the first movement (at about half the speed and stumbling all over the place!) and walked away from it yesterday after practicing ready to give up! I am going to try it again today with more patience... *Sigh*

Cindy: Hang in there with your piece. I feel your pain!

That is a very somber piece, Cindy. Lots of big fat chords to sink your arm weight into -- and then repeat again as if it were a sigh. Perhaps your teacher also wants you to learn more about dynamics?

I, too, am struggling with a piece. 'Duetto' from Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words. It took a while to find a clip to post but here is a mediocre partial clip that I managed to locate on the web: (note: it's mediocre but still WAY better than I can play it at this point! )

http://macflach.cs.bris.ac.uk/~flach/music/duetto.mp3


As you can hear, there is lots of voicing going on and lots of undulating voices under them. Mendelssohn should have named this song "Stretch Those Fingers!" because that's what I'm doing at every twist and turn.

However, the piece is so beautiful and I've wanted to play it for so long, that I don't care how long it takes me to learn it well.

Good luck with your prelude!

i've worked on pieces for decades... they must be too hard but I don't care.. the journey is as much fun as the destination, tho I imagine many would argue with that point.

Me, too. (With huge lapses of decades). But the bigger the challenge, the more joy there is in getting it done. I figure I'm working my way backwards through the literature. By the time I'm old and--well, anyway, by the time I'm feeble--I'll be ready for those little one-treble, one-bass-note melodies. While I can still see well enough (if I squint) and while my fingers still bend (if I crack all the knuckles for an hour in prep) I want to work on the more complex stuff.

I started with Lecuona's "Malaguena" and it's only recently that I've been able to get through it all truly confident of my fingering and really knowing all the notes (but reading and playing always). It was an insane place to start, but I've learned a lot from it that let me play many other pieces to a point of finish as I went along. And I've even played it in its entirety a couple of times to my own satisfaction on a good day, and it was a thrill. Not that my feeble fingers and feeble mind let me play it everyday the way I know I can on a good day.

My next awkward leap off the high board will be "Rhapsody in Blue". Very nearly pulled it off the shelf Thursday. I have sight-played the first couple of pages recently. I find the learning process totally absorbing, so the more challenging, the better. I may still enjoy playing a piece once I can do it in my sleep, but I really enjoy the learning side more than even that ease with the familiar. If the whole process were entirely easy and I could sight-play anything without much thought, with technique that was second nature, I think the whole thing would lose its appeal to me. It wouldn't be the same absorbing diversion from the tedious world.

It IS the journey, not the destination. There is no destination for my playing, except my own joy. It's a good thing I enjoy the journey.

"If the whole process were entirely easy and I could sight-play anything without much thought, with technique that was second nature, I think the whole thing would lose its appeal to me."

Rick this is quite possibly true, on the other hand you might very well be a first rate professional pianist playing for your supper. Would that be so bad?

If reincarnation was a reality and only one memory could be brought from this life to the next it would be that passion for music and no Dad, I don't want to be the next Benny Goodman, would you settle for Art Tatum?

Cindy I'm working on "Manha de Carnival", a lovely Brazilian piece. There is a quite nice recording of it sung by the late Suzanne McCorkle. Not out of my reach but there are a few really tough cords with an 11 key stretch that my tight fingers are really having problems reaching, accurately.


Will

Cindy - I've always been guilty of doing things that were too hard for me. But I like hearing that others have worked on things for decades. I'm actually in the 2nd decade of playing the Chopin Nocturne 72-1 because I started it way too early. Maybe it's time to go back to the Schubert Impromptu that gave me tendinitus years ago! I think those chords in the C minor are difficult too. I played with it a little bit just trying to get a feel for the structure of it. What I have been finding lately is that I will start to learn something and it almost always seems too hard - unless it's those little simple single-note things Chick talked about. Then after awhile of working on it - hopefully not more than a few days - all of a sudden it starts to get do-able. It's like my brain kicks in and my fingers start to get their muscle memory. I guess it's all part of the learning process. Right now I'm working on the B minor Prelude, which I just learned is the original "Raindrop" and trying to perfect the Mendelssoh Venetian Boat Song #2. I do like that C Minor! Good luck!

maybe it is not qualified as "way too hard", i mean tempest 3rd movement i am currently working on. i am on the 2nd page now, while most of the 1st page learned last year. i guess the hardest part is mainly on the 2nd page, because after that, similar patterns and even repeats or alternative repeats will follow. it is relatively hard, because the big problem with it is its tremolos and octaves. although it is not too hard to play, but because RH is fully streched over those passages, it is hard to relax RH in between and i feel tiresome on my R shoulder, R forearm and RH after running through 1st 2 pages a few times. i almost done learning 2nd page, and expect the next few pages to be little easier. i absolutely love playing this, and that's why i dropped some other pieces and focus mainly on this one.

Cindy


voices...well translate that as independent melodies, say typically 3 or 4, and remember God gave us only 2 hands...

on rosalyn turecks goldebrgs CD, there is a function where when u play the CD on computer, and u can see the score as u go along, and there is a function which allows the computer to color code each voice, then u can visually see which note goes with which voice.

and appreciate just how impossible it is...

my teacher says that, people like Bach (there are others like this??!!) could probably hear in their head the voices independently and simultaneously, like a chess player playing blind many games at once, he just knows what is going on always...us lesser mortal can only guess at it.

yea cindy that was a tough one when i first started it. id only been playing piano for about 7 months when i learned it. i have fairly big hands I guess( since my teacher says i have a better reach than her). One thing that will help those 5 notes cords if your sheet music dosent show it. play the first 2 notes with your thumb. that way you will be able to reach with your 5th finger alot better. good luck and dont give up with the piece

Hi Cindysphinx,

This is a testing piece - Chopin Prelude op. 28, no. 20 - because of the 4-note octave chords.

Take heart - everybody struggles with the sorting out of 4-note chords. We all manage 2 and 3 chords but go haywire with the 4's.

Chopin rarely crowds his chords with more than one intermediate note but this is the opus where he felt that the "Largo" tempo called for more definition in the RH.

You must have observed that the bass involves
2-note octave chords - no problem - with a set octave finger-spread you only have to identify one note in each hand - easy.

Why not build up confidence by playing the Prelude
(in octaves) omitting the intervening chord notes - I've just played it over to hear the difference - it's "passable".

Like adjectives being added to the octave nouns, you can later include the intervening chord notes and warm to the subtle extra dimension which they bring.

Instead of 19 RH notes in the opening measure you could be looking at a manageable 6.

Great advice, btb! I'm going to try that myself.

Cindy, Alla Turca is easier than it looks. Try it sometime! It is a dicey thing to look at a piece and determine if it is difficult. Personally, I find Clementi Sonatina 36 harder than Alla Turca, although it looks much simpler. I have always found that some pieces 'make sense' to me.. in that in learning them my fingers seemed to go where they belonged almost instinctively.

It is the journey.. but I hope to reach many wonderful destinations along the way.

Learn it measure by measure rh only. If your hands are small, and your right hand gets tired, switch off between rh and lh. Once you've learned the first measure rh only, play the chords backwards (end of measure to first). That way you will reinforce the feel of the chords. learn each measure this way. Once you have a couple measures learned, combine two measures. Begin by playing the last chord of the first measure into the first chord of the next measure.
If all of that is too difficult, do the same but in 1/2 measure groups.

Another thing: once you play a chord, start going to the next chord right away.

It's difficult because it's really long, and has a lot of the things that make Bach dificult - multi-voice textures, etc. Also, there are a couple variations that are very difficult technically. Finally, it's not an easy piece to hold together as one piece. Those are some of the difficulties.

but the aria from the goldbergs is playable by anyone, on a completely different level, much easier then the variations,

remember its part of anna magdalena's original notebook, which means, its playable by people who are not professionals, AMB collecetd easier short peices for novice players to enjoy, also first prelude of WTC is there...

nothing like a beautiful young wife with an appreciation of easy keyboard peices...