Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Learning a minuet: add mordents before or after HT?

Started learning Minuet in G Major BWV Anh.114 by Christian Petzold and the mordents in the first few bars seem to be quite difficult and I can't get them sound right. Perhaps above my skill level

Any tips as to how to practice them? And the other thing I'm thinking about is just skipping them altogether, but in that case it will probably be very difficult to implement them later if the muscle memory for HT is in place.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/thyi5egrlhv9gzd/piano.html

Fingering that seems to be decent for the first one:

Seems pretty straight forward...

Steps to help would be to isolate the mordant, isolate and include a couple of notes before and after , and i would certainly practice hs aswell as ht.

Try not to leave till the end, and dont see the challenge as being able to play the complete piece porrly and then improving everything together.

If you can figure out the difficult sections of a piece, work on these from the start as they will need more practice than the easy bits....

Devide the piece into sections... and look at improvement in days and weeks rather than getting difficult things sorted in a session... sleeping on a small number of good repetitions of difficult sections, repeated over time, will sort things out better than getting frustrated over repeatedly getting it wrong..

Good luck!

Mordants are quite enjoyable to string together... vary the speed, note lenghths... dynamics... just play with it and enjoy the swinging feel...

Sooner than you know, it should click!

Good luck, dont believe a word i say, its only my opinions...

I don't know if they are above your skill level or not, but if you decide to include the mordents, then the way I learn them is to make an exercise out of them. There are 7 octaves on the piano, so repeat the mordent over the 7 octave up and down the piano as an exercise several times a day. Remember to relax your hand while learning them.

I would not change the hand position immediately after a mordent that is part of a run.

I have no piano available right now but I would suggest

212345 for the mordent and 3 subsequent notes in the run upwards. You can then change hand position on the first beat of next measure which seems more appropriate also because that first note can use some accent.

Second mordent seems no problem, 323 4321 for that measure?

3-2-1 seems to be the preferred fingering for the mordents in M3, M5 and M11.

Skipping ornaments is recommended for the first few plays until the basic rhythm can be realised.

If we continue the verbal prosody from the Scales Bootcamp thread, the first two bars are plum, huckleberry, cu-cum-ber and the second two become plum, and-a-huckleberry cu-cum-ber. Does that help at all?

Thanks for the replies, very, very helpful.

zrtf90: I've now used that way of counting for the parts other than the mordent and like it, but the mordent I find impossible to count properly because it's very rapid even at a slow tempo.

Here, I played the mordent a few times at 90 bpm and I think the rhythm is starting to sound right.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/uue4g0etxkd3bdg/piano1.html

Paul, you're absolutely right, patience is the key, I remind myself of that more often.

Do we see something wrong here?

Wow, I hadn't expected such close observation, Polyphonist, even from a fellow Latinist! I am truly impressed.

Yes, this is written in the French style, not the Italian and should be Menuet.

You seem to have the rhythm, raikKU.

And there's also a more obvious mistake.

Ornaments seem to be one of those things best learned through mentoring. Both my piano and my recorder teacher developed ornament playing as a separate unit with it's own exercises and snippets to apply them to. There are books about developing ornaments, you might want to follow the lead of my teachers and develop facility before trying to add ornaments to pieces.

The space between the full stop and the 114?

I remember there being some confusion on Youtube if the piece is by Bach or Petzold, that's probably what Polyphonist is referring to.

This piece is generally accepted to be by Petzold, a friend of the Bach family. In the grade 3 RCM repertoire book, it shows Christian Petzold as the composer.

Well, sort of. I was referring to the fact that a BWV number is still used for a piece not written by Bach.

Maybe because it's in the Anna M. Bach notebook, so it sort of qualifies to have a BWV. No, actually, the BWV was assigned before the discovery of Petzold's contribution. While I was a child, this piece which every child learns, was clearly taught as something by Bach.

I never learned it when I was a child.

I never learned Fur Elise either. I guess I just had a weird teacher.

(No, probably I was too stubborn and wanted to get to "the good stuff" right away; I couldn't waste my time learning pieces by crummy composers like Bach or Beethoven. )


Well then, they should have changed it once they found out.

I guess when I was a kid, I thought Bach and Beethoven were the good stuff, so luckily I was an adult before discovering this little trivia or I would have been devastated.