Weekend Repertoire: Barber Excursion No. 3

At my weekly library excursion last weekend (we call it “Wafflelibraryfriday” at our house – each Friday we try to cook waffles and visit the library – fun tradition!) I decided to pick up a few classical CD’s to peruse. I am a lover of many types of music, but somehow I always come back to classical.

I picked up a CD of Barber’s Excursions, and apparently I was not familiar with Excursion No. 3, because it was a new, beautiful discovery for me! The gorgeous harmonies and beautiful flowing melody drew me in, and then I was pleasantly surprised by the fun, syncopated rhythms. I think I may need to add this to my “Repertoire Wish List!” Take a listen!

Pin It

Weekend Repertoire: La fille aux cheveux de lin

Today’s piece: La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair), by Debussy
Level: Early Advanced
Teaches: sound, color, impressionism, attention to rhythm, playing big, interesting chords
Listen: to this video of Michelangeli performing this piece (such a beautiful recording!); or, how about a gorgeous violin version?
Find the music: in this great collection of Debussy’s Preludes, Book 1
Debussy -- Preludes, Bk 1 (Alfred Masterwork Editions)

This gorgeous piece is one that is close to my heart, as it is in my mind the first “real” difficult classical piano piece I learned. 
I began piano lessons while in the first grade, and took for about six and a half years from a wonderful woman in my neighborhood who taught me to love the piano. I loved piano lessons, but as I progressed quickly I soon outgrew her experience and training. I played through ALL of the levels of the Schaum and Eckstein method books while taking lessons from her, and then near the end of my time taking lessons from her she found me a book of piano classics. 
I am ever grateful for my Dad, who always listened to classical music at home and even played a little by ear on the piano. He had a “favorite song” that he encouraged me to learn on my own – Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin. Really it was far above the level of the pieces I was learning at the time, but I was ready and loved the challenge. I learned it quickly and memorized it on my own. When I auditioned to study with my new teacher while I was in the seventh grade, I played this piece for her. I remember her smiling after I played it and saying something like, “How fitting – the girl with the flaxen hair is playing The Girl with the Flaxen Hair!
So, I count this piece as the piece I have known the longest. I absolutely love it and it means a lot to me! Its beautiful harmonies are gorgeous and so fun to play. 
When teaching this piece, it is so important to help our students learn how to produce a beautiful sound. Concepts such as tone and color can be introduced or developed using this piece. It is a great piece to use to teach impressionism. I think it is helpful to listen to versions of this piece played on different instruments (such as the violin version linked to above) and to have them listen specifically for tone colors and sound that they can strive to produce on the piano.
Aside from all of these important sound qualities of this piece, I think that RHYTHM is very important when learning this prelude. If we are not careful, it is easy to get lazy with the rhythms and not hold notes at the end of phrases long enough. In fact, I have the tendency to shortchange some of these rhythms myself, having learned it a bit incorrectly in certain places. I like to have my students learn this piece with the metronome, paying strict attention to the rhythms and counting out loud. Try it out – you may be surprised at some of the rhythms! After the rhythms are learned correctly and solidified, the student can then add in their rubato and expression on top of the framework of the correct rhythm.
I just love this piece! What piece is near and dear to your heart?

Weekend Repertoire: Album Leaf by Gliere

Today’s piece: Album Leaf, Op. 31, No. 11, from 12 Children’s Pieces, by Reinhold Gliere (who, by the way, taught Prokofiev at the Moscow Conservatory)
Level: Late intermediate
Teaches: Artistry, including beautiful phrasing, graded dynamics, sound production, playing with expression, rubato – you name it, this piece is very Romantic with a slightly modern twist!
Listen: I wish I could find a recording, but I can’t!
Find the music: I found it in this great Repertoire book by Lynn Freeman Olson. I have also seen it online here  and here.

So I found this great little piece while playing through some music I have. It is perfect for the late intermediate student to work on artistry. It is the subtle nuance, the slight change of color and sound, and the careful phrasing that will make this short little Romantic piece, or break it. If you can help your student to achieve a truly beautiful performance of this piece, the audience will be on the edge of their seats, enchanted by the beautiful harmonies and use of dynamics. I think the thing I love about this piece are the beautiful dissonant harmonies that resolve so subtly and beautifully. It makes me want to watch some old classic romance, like An Affair to Remember. sigh….

Weekend Repertoire: Fairy Pieces from Prokofiev’s Cinderella Suite

Since we’ve been discussing ways to motivate ourselves to practice, I thought for Weekend Repertoire this week I’d share a piece I am working on a bit!

Actually, it is four pieces – they come from Prokofiev’s Cinderella Suite, op. 97, which is his piano arrangement of music from his ballet Cinderella. I first discovered this work in college, and immediately loved it! The four pieces that caught my attention from this collection are the four fairy pieces – Spring Fairy, Summer Fairy, Autumn Fairy and Winter Fairy.

These are short pieces which are so fun and imaginative, and I love how they really evoke distinct feelings about each of the different seasons. For example, Spring Fairy is fast and full of life, while Summer Fairy totally sounds to me like a hot, sunny, lazy summer day (speaking of which, I am about to experience my first San Antonio summer, and I’m getting a bit nervous with April temperatures already being consistently in the 90’s….and I am just about to enter my third trimester of pregnancy….wish me luck!!).

If you are not familiar with these pieces, they are so fun to discover! You can listen to some mp3 samples by pianist Frederic Chiu here.

Prokofiev: Piano Music: Romeo & Juliet / Cinderella

The sheet music seems a bit hard to come by – amazon.com says it is currently unavailable, but it looks like you may be able to purchase it from sheetmusicplus.com.

View the orchestral/ballet version of Summer Fairy here:

Weekend Repertoire: Teaching Fugues

For this week’s Weekend Repertoire feature I’d like to discuss teaching (and learning!) fugues! Fugues can be some of the most beautiful and rewarding pieces to learn as a pianist, but are also some of the most challenging to learn and to perform well. A pianist who is able to learn a fugue well is a pianist who is a careful and efficient practicer and a musician who has trained their ears well to listen to the sounds and dynamics coming out of the piano. One must possess good independence of hands and fingers to play a fugue well. All of these more advanced skills are difficult to learn, but are so important to the development of a fine pianist. I’d like to share a few tips on how to teach (and to learn!) fugues; hopefully some of them will come in handy, and hopefully others will have tips of their own to share!

First of all, what are some good, easier fugues to start out with? Although not necessarily fugues, the Bach Two-Part Inventions and Three-Part Inventions are excellent to start with! Because many fugues have four or five parts, it is great to begin with only two parts to keep track of. I started learning inventions in junior high – I’d say they are probably late-intermediate (depending on the invention!). Some collections of Bach’s Inventions:

J.S. Bach - Two-Part Inventions (Hal Leonard Piano Library)Bach 2 & 3 Part InventionsBach: Two- and Three-Part Inventions for the Piano, Vol. 16 (Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics)Two-Part Inventions (Alfred Masterwork Edition)J.S.Bach - Inventions and Sinfonias: Two- and Three-Part Inventions (Alfred Masterwork Edition)

Listen: Bach’s Two-Part Invention No. 1, performed by Glenn Gould

Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is an excellent collection of preludes and fugues that every pianist should be familiar with. I would say that a good one to begin with would be either Fugue No. 2 in C minor (Book 1) or Fugue No. 21 in B-flat Major (Book 1). Of course there are many other fugues out there by Bach and other composers.

The Well-Tempered Clavier: Books I and II, CompleteThe Well-Tempered Clavier, Complete: Schirmer Library of Musical Classics, Volume 2057 (Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics)J. S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol. 1THE Well-tempered Clavier - Revised Edition Part I, BWV 846-869 (Henle Music Folios)

Tips for Learning a Fugue

  • Analyze – find the theme and mark it whenever it appears in any voice with a colored pencil or highlighter. You may also want to mark any thematic material that is similar to the theme, but not the theme exactly. Since there are so many different voices going on at once, it is imperative that you know which voice to bring out at any time. You want to be able to hear the theme whenever it appears, not just the top voice in the right hand.
  • Listen to recordings – I always find this helpful when just starting out learning a fugue. I like to listen to a good recording while following along in the music and marking different voices and statements of the theme.
  • Write in the fingerings! – I like to go through the piece and decide from the very beginning which fingerings to use. There will be so much going on during the piece that you want to have solid fingerings right from the beginning. This will help you to learn the fugue so much faster and more efficiently. Always use the same fingerings, each time you practice!
  • Start learning the fugue! – Oh yes, did I mention that it is good to have all of these things done and written in before you actually start to practice the piece? With a fugue especially, it’s good to have a solid plan before getting started.
  • Learn in very small sections – this will help you to learn correct notes, fingerings, rhythms, and phrasing as you go. A fugue can be a little daunting to learn, but if you take it in very small bites it is very doable!
Analyzing a Fugue

So, for the purpose of this post, I made a copy of Bach’s Fugue No. 2 in C minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 1) and pretended like I was about to learn it (I actually learned it years ago…). Here is what I might do if I were to start learning this today. Here are the first two pages for your enjoyment 🙂 Oh and my analysis is, of course, very technical (not!) – but I basically just wanted to give you some ideas.

First, I have highlighted the themeevery time it occurs in its full form, in yellow. I want to bring that out so you can hear it in each voice.

Next, I bracketed or highlighted other thematic material in blue. Sorry it’s a little hard to see – there is some on the last line of page 1, some on line 2 of page 2, and other random bits of it scattered throughout. These are sections that are very close to the theme, but that vary a bit.

Then I discovered this little secondary theme made up of eighth notes in a pattern of three notes slurred and one note staccato (know that this articulation will vary a LOT depending on your edition or on the pianist who made the recording you listen to!), and marked it with a purple star whenever that occurred. Although secondary to the main theme, this stuff is also important and should come out a bit, especially if there is no theme going on as well.

And lastly, there is a bunch of other stuff going on, such as long sections of sixteenth note material, which I marked with a brown bracket. At a lot of these sections, I would probably bring these sixteenth note phrases out with some graded dynamics and nice phrasing of some sort.

Anyway, you get the general idea! I would listen to several recordings of this to hear different interpretations, because they will vary so much depending on the pianist.

What fugue-learning-tips-o-awesomeness do you have to add to the list? 🙂

Weekend Repertoire: Schumann’s Arabeske

As my son went up to bed tonight (at the time of writing this post…yes I write a lot of these in advance – as a mama you’ve got to take the time when it’s available!), he called down the stairs, “Mommy, play me some music!” Which really warmed my heart because he doesn’t often say things like that. He usually tries to pull me away from the piano instead of requesting it. I played through a few pieces, and then picked up Schumann’s Arabeske, a piece I have loved ever since hearing it for the very first time, and one that I performed at my sophomore recital in college. As I played the familiar notes it was almost like seeing an old friend after many years. There really is something so beautiful and transcendent about this piece, the harmonies and the colors that simply rekindles my love of music and the piano.

If you are not familiar with this amazing piece, please take a few minutes and watch this amazing video of Horowitz’s performance of it in Carnegie Hall. Pay close attention at 5:58 – this little “benediction” is just heavenly. Who else is just amazingly grateful for music after hearing this piece?

Weekend Repertoire: Ravel’s Prelude

I am excited to re-introduce my Weekend Repertoire feature here on the Teaching Studio! As pianists and teachers, shouldn’t we always be discovering and re-discovering repertoire to teach our students and to broaden our knowledge of the piano works of great composers?

Today’s piece: Prelude by Ravel, written in 1913
Level: Early Advanced
Teaches: expression, advanced phrasing techniques, crossing of hands
Listen: there are three recordings of this piece available to download or listen to at pianosociety.com

This week’s piece I discovered just yesterday while sight reading through some wonderful pieces by Ravel. In fact, I would highly recommend this great collection of Ravel’s piano pieces (which includes the Prelude as well as eleven other piano masterpieces). According to Hinson, they “represent some of Ravel’s finest contributions to the pianist’s art.” I had never heard this short, simple prelude before but I immediately loved its simplicity, its beautiful haunting harmonies, and the interplay between the right and left hand lines.

Preview of music from everynote.com

Although very simple and relatively easy to learn, this 27-measure piece requires much use of expression, as well as great attention to detail in shaping the phrases and bringing out the melody, particularly when the hands cross over one another.

According to the notes by Hinson in my book, this piece was composed in 1913 as a sight-reading piece for the Paris Conservatory to use in their piano competitions. Hinson says this about the piece, “The Prelude involves some interlocking of the hands and contains a few unexpected harmonies. Its gentle lyricism, relaxed tempo and interesting inner voices affirm Ravel’s gifts as a superb miniaturist.”

In my studio I put a lot of emphasis on musicality and artistry, and I am so excited to use this piece with some of my more advanced students to teach advanced phrasing and expression. I hope you enjoy discovering this wonderful little piece!

Weekend Repertoire: Le Cimetiere

In honor of Halloween, I’d like to share a great piece I played at my senior recital. Le Cimetiere, or The Cemetery, is from the four-piece work Clairs de lune by Abel Decaux, a French organist and composer who lived from 1869 to 1943. I believe this is the only piece he ever published, and is very modern for his time. Make sure you keep listening for the awesome chords in the second half of the piece – I just love it!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN from The Teaching Studio!

Weekend Repertoire: Good-Humored Variations

Easy Variations on Folk Themes, Op. 51: Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics, Vol. 2060I just discovered a great little set of theme and variations and had so much fun playing it that I had to share! I can’t wait to teach this one to a student.

Today’s piece: Seven Good-Humored Variations on a Ukrainian Folk-Song, Op. 51, No. 4 by Dmitri Kabalevsky
Level: Mid-Intermediate
Teaches: oh so many great things: theme and variations, staccato at a piano dynamic level, accents (including tenuto and sforzando), marcato, leggiero, alberti bass, arpeggios, left hand melody, syncopated/off-beat rhythm, cantabile
Preview the score: here
Buy the score: here
Listen: here, on YouTube

So I had to laugh at the title of this piece, but these variations definitely are good-humored and playful. This would be a wonderful piece for a student looking for something fun, a little bit showy (would be excellent for a recital), and challenging enough but totally doable. The theme itself is super simple. The thing that makes this piece so great for teaching is that it uses a great variety of articulations and musical markings – soft, staccato & leggiero; loud & marcato; smooth and flowing and cantabile; and basically everything in-between. The final variation and coda includes lots of octaves, accents, sforzandos and fortissimos.

My advice in learning this piece would be to:

  • Learn it one variation at a time, hands alone.
  • Figure out the basic chord progressions and write them in. Learn them well because the progressions in each variation are very similar. 
  • Learn the details right from the beginning – have fun with it! Make your dynamics very contrasting, play staccatos very short and crisp. Make the legato sections very smooth, connected and beautiful, to contrast the many staccato, marcato, and just plain loud sections. Figure out what the character of each variation should be, then work on listening to the sound of each variation and creating a unique sound and character for each.
  • Practice with a metronome – go for accuracy and control, especially on the fast sections. They will sound much more brilliant and energized when you can play each note clearly at a controlled tempo.
  • Again – have fun with it! Make it sound like a dance

Image credit

Weekend Repertoire: Sunday Afternoon Music

Music Pathways 5B RepertoireA few months back I was at my local thrift store in Utah. My husband and I always love to browse through the books, especially music books, to see what great things we can find! On this particular day I happened upon an old piano repertoire book from the Music Pathways series by Lynn Freeman Olson, Louise Bianchi and Marvin Blickenstaff. This great little book is really a gem! So it is one of these great little pieces that I want to discuss today….

Today’s piece: Sunday Afternoon Music by Aaron Copland
Level: Late intermediate
This piece teaches: control at a very slow tempo and at a very soft dynamic level, clarity and control of 32nd notes, phrasing, artistry, tenuto symbol, triplet rhythm, double-dotted eighth/32nd rhythms, listening to the sound produced
Listen: This little piece is kind of obscure, but I found a 30-second clip that you can listen to here. It is a pretty good preview of the piece, and you can hear some of the 32nd notes, as well as the triplet rhythms. Kind of lazy and mesmerizing, yes? You can also listen to a preview of it or buy the track on iTunes for $1.
The sheet music: Looks like you can buy the Music Pathways Repertoire book 5B (which includes Sunday Afternoon Music) here on amazon.com for about $4. It may be in other collections as well…

This is a piece that truly exemplifies a “Sunday afternoon,” in my mind. It is so much fun to play because (I think) it is so relaxing and laaaaazy (like a nice, long Sunday afternoon nap). Copland, of course, added in some cool jazz harmonies to this little piece (it is 22 measures long), making it very fun, indeed, to try and bring out those neat harmonies while playing at a triple-piano dynamic level.

Playing very slowly and very quietly is actually a tricky thing for a lot of students! This piece is an awesome way to teach that. The very soft chords can be tricky to pull off – challenge your student to play as quietly as the absolutely can!

The 32nd-note runs should be played quickly, of course, but the student should make sure to not blur the notes together. Have them practice slowly at first to be able to hear each note individually and equally….like taking a stroll around the block on a Sunday afternoon while running a stick along a white picket fence, hearing each individual click…

Image credit
1 2
Verified by ExactMetrics