Jan 6 (Var 1)

It's another late night practice session, but this one went much better than yesterday's. I'm feeling confident that with a lot of work tomorrow I can put this first variation behind me and move on to the new stuff! I'm sure you, the listener, are looking forward to that too!

By the way, I like to drink tea while I play and this is where I put the shoutout to Harlan & Megan for some delicious evening herbal tea. I would thank them for the peppermint bark too, but I don't want anyone to know I have it... 

One topic of focused work today: keeping hands from interfering with each other while crossing over. This piece was written for a harpsichord with *two* keyboards on it; one for each hand. That makes "crossing" hands trivial. But when you have just one register, as on a modern piano, it can be much trickier when the right hand needs to play notes below where the left hand is working. The solution here is to arch my right hand significantly, poking at the notes with an outstretched finger, and to play those note far toward the back of the key.

I'm of two minds stylistically here. Near the end of the piece, there's a place where the left hand is playing 16th note runs while the right hand is playing 8th note arpeggios; as I mentioned previously I've been trying to contrast those parts, playing the fast part smoothly and the slow part less so. Well, like I said near the end that's happening, and then the hands switch - now the right hand has the runs and the left has the arpeggios, and I just feel this need to play *both* hands smoothly there. I can't decide if that's good or not. It won't be super noticeable in the recording because I made a mistake and started playing the left hand an octave lower than it's supposed to be, so I had to restart there. But if you listen closely you should hear it, and I would welcome your comments on it.

OK, here is a pretty good, at-tempo recording of Variation 1:

Jan 5 (Var 1)

Boy, today was an *off* day.

 I want to start by apologizing to my volleyball team. Wow. Sorry.  Also, Senator Tina Smith was really disappointing tonight. She spoke for just a few minutes and didn't really say anything. I couldn't even see her. I am not fired up or ready to go. And I realized the League of Women Voters never got back to me.

 Oh, and I had a horrible practice session. Not even going to attempt the second half of Variation 1. The good news is, Georgia (the dog) joined in tonight. She features on the squeaky squirrel in the following recording.

Jan 4 (Aria FINAL & Var 1)

Had a very productive session today! After listening to yesterday's recording of the Aria, two thoughts occurred to me. First, I was playing too fast. Second, I was not happy with that recording. Here is what will be my final recording of the Aria, at least for now.



I mentioned in passing the other day that there's an "impossible" spot in the Aria. With the help of my coach (aka Rosie), I have discovered that it's only impossible if you believe the editor. Check out the following image:

The editor wants you to hold that top note in the bass clef, while playing the three descending notes, starting with your *thumb*. How on earth?? OK, but here's later in the piece:

Either the editor or the composer made a mistake. I'm going with editor. So I'm not holding that top note, although I have found a couple of ways to make it work.

The first variation, which I mentioned yesterday I've already worked on a bit, is coming back very quickly. The first part I'm pretty happy with already, though I'm landing really hard after the "opposite arpeggios"; as you'll hear, the second part still needs a lot of work.



Let me reiterate that I'm a rank amateur at form and analysis, but I want to talk a little about the cool things happening here anyway. You might have heard it said that Bach plays little games in his pieces; there's a famous song where he spells his own name with the notes several times (H being a B natural, naturally). Here's a quick rundown: WQXR.org There are details here, too, that suggest a kind of playfulness. 

First, full disclosure: I *do* think that top note is meant to be held; I think only the '1' is a mistake by the editor. I think Bach is playing with the performer here, by setting up expectations and then shattering them. 

There's also some lovely parallelism happening here. The above images show an 'echo'; something happens in one key, and then later something similar happens in a different key. There's a lot of that in this movement. See for example the first bar of each half:

The top image is the first bar of Variation 1, the bottom is the first bar of the second half. Similar, but different, and in different keys. I'm pretty sure that's what the Goldbergs are all about, in a nutshell. We'll see if I can do that theme justice as we move through the variations.

Jan 3 (Aria + Var 1)

Aria:



Variation 1:


Moving on. There is a mistake in the Aria - I'm still freezing up when i hit 'record'. I'm happy with how well I can play it, and I'm going to treat the nerves as outside the bounds of the project, at least for now, so there's your final version of the Aria and on we go...

To a really great variation, right off the bat! This movement is so joyful, both to listen to *and* to play. It's jumping all over the place, it's got stylistic contrast. The hands jump over eachother, too, in more than one place! The main idea of it, I think, is to put smooth 16th notes against shorter 8th notes; the hands take turns with each role. This one also lays bare the idea that Bach is playing around with variations; the two parts of this variation are mirror images of each other. It's a lot like an inverted chord or arpeggio, but stretched out to the length of 60 measures.

We're already reaching the limits of what I've done previously. As you can hear, the first part of this variation is already pretty well under my fingers, but the second is not. I'm leaving in my mistakes and restarts for these recordings. I'm not trying to fool anybody here; my goal is to document the process of learning this piece. I'm hoping it will provide extra motivation for me to get over my recording anxiety as well.

Jan 2 (Aria)

Quick morning session today and a reminder that performing is about concentration as much as anything else. The dog was chewing and squeaking; the cat was flopping... and I let it get to me! Anyway, this is a more-or-less clean take with small errors and I was feeling very tentative. Not moving on yet; tomorrow I'm gonna hit the problem spots hard so we can move on! I expect this will get more interesting when we get to variations I've never even looked at before.

A quick note about the Aria: it's full of nonstandard ornamentation. Here's a nice summary: Bach ornamentation. So part of learning this piece was just learning the notation; sadly you don't get to share that with me since I worked on it a while ago. What's especially interesting though, is that different artists interpret the same ornamentation differently; one of the reasons I like the Feltsman recording so much is the way he weaves these trills and mordants together in a way that feels precise yet natural.

To give you an idea of what we're working with here, take a look:

The image shows the weird ornamentation (and how it's all over the place). It also shows the effect I mentioned yesterday, where a note is sustained manually while new notes are added over top. This also happens all over the place. Bach manages to sound relatively simple and sublime, but is technically so so difficult. This is just the theme; these variations get much harder. This should be fun!

Jan 1 (Aria)

OK, I'm cheating a little bit - I started working on this one about two years ago. There was a lot that I was being sloppy about, though, and my practice time today was spent counting one particularly weird measure and making sure I held down the right notes - and more importantly, making sure I *released* the right notes. There is no pedal anywhere in this piece; any sustaining notes must be done manually, and there are some tricky ones in there. One in fact is downright impossible! I had to fudge it - and I'll need to do some close listening to better pianists than I to figure out how they deal with it.

At any rate, I won't be spending two weeks on the Aria. I did make a mistake at the end of the recording, which I left in. But in my defense, I was wrestling with Garageband and that's not my first take. My first take was actually quite a bit better, but the software stopped recording after 8 bars. Hopefully in the next couple of days I'll be happy with this one and move on to the next one - which I've also already started on.

Thanks for listening, and see you tomorrow!

Hello!

Hi! Welcome to the first of many posts documenting my attempt to learn the Goldberg Variations. This is the piece that turned me around on Bach; my recording of Vladimir Feltsman (amazon) is my go-to work music when I absolutely must concentrate. It's by turns gorgeous, jubilant, technical, and haunting. There are 30 movements (variations), all related tonally and thematically. Some excellent musical writing has been made about this piece, and I'll try to point readers toward it as I go. Suffice it to say, it's fascinating.

My goal is to learn all 30 variations, as perfectly as I'm able, and to document my process and my progress as I go. These are the rules: I have to practice 30 minutes every day, and at the end of each session I will record myself playing whichever variation I'm working on. There are 52 weeks in a year, so at 30 variations that's just under 2 weeks per, so it seems like a great year-long project.

I must credit Rosie's 365 days photo blog for the motivation. If this project is half as successful as hers I'll be proud. Thanks for reading, and stick around!

R