Story time:
The other day I was at my locker in the music building pulling out my two pages of Chopin to sightread when one of my colleagues, Scott Troyer, came up to me grumbling something about not being able to compose choral music in the manner of Eric Whitacre. He is composing a piece for our choir to perform next year (which I'm looking forward to!) I say to him, "Scott, it's not that hard." I then tell him to follow me into a practice room and I have him sit at the piano. By this time he's thoroughly confused, especially when I grab his hands. I then drop his hands on they keys and say "there you go, that's your first chord." I walk off as I hear him laughing behind me.
As I said in one of my earlier posts, I started sight reading a few beginner piano books so that I could feel good about myself while I try and make it through these etudes. The books are, for the most part, in chronological order. One thing that I've noticed is that I really enjoy classical and romantic children's pieces rather than 20th century or contemporary children's pieces. The more classical pieces in general make so much more sense and make for better one-page pieces than the later pieces. Playing a binary piece comprised of mostly I, IV, V, a few sevenths, and maybe a modulation makes for a more coherent and whole piece, with a beginning and end, than a more modern through composed work with almost atonal dissonance. From the perspective of a child, the classical pieces would make more sense and would probably be less frustrating to play and practice. One of the pieces in the book was titled Penguin March (or something like that) The left hand was playing I V I V I... etc. in the key of Db, however, the right hand had a melody comprised of only white notes, thus the penguin (black bottom, white top.) Cute idea, but I believe it was poorly executed and too dissonant for a children's piece.
Etude 8 was a decent sight read, although I was not a fan of the constant 16th notes in the right hand.
Etude 9, however, was a lot of fun to play. Even playing it slowly I was able to get a feel for the piece. It has a beautiful melody with a constant 16th note bass figure outlining the chord. Being only three pages long it is shorter than some of the etudes, but it still remains very expressive (trading off between f pp p f pp ff pp and finally ppp at the end.) Chopin wrote expressions into the piece in great detail using words such as "with passion, a little agitated, very smooth, like a whisper, with force, and leggierissimo - meaning very light."
Total time spent sight reading: 1 hour 20 minutes
Total time spent writing: 40 minutes
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