Bach Partita in G-Gigue

[pizno]

I'm about to go bald from plucking my hair out one by one over the second part of the gigue.  I've been practicing the trills in time to the counterpoint that occurs in the other hand, as instructed.  All the fingering is figured out and pretty solid, but, I can't imagine getting it up to tempo.  The trills can't quite keep up with the 16ths, as they need to be twice as fast.  Any tricks anyone has learned to get this thing moving?

[pizno]

Oh Piz, don't go bald!  You can do it.  Just practice the trills metered out with the 16th notes.  Keep your wrists loose on the trills, and don't lose the phrasing in the non-trilled parts.

See, we really can help ourselves.  Who needs anyone else?

Piz

[lostinidlewonder]

The difficult thing I have when teaching people to ornament Bach correctly is the lightness in their touch. The actual speed of the trills are arbitrary, they have no exact value. I demonstrate this fact to students studying Bach by playing the phrase with a extremely rapid trill, moderate and with a very slow trill or even simply a turn!

When you practice the piece you can neglect the trills first then slowly add it, what however is most important is that you use the ornament to connect the next phrase of music, not make it sound like a chunk of sound just added in. So targeting improvement of your ornamentation with speed is the wrong way to go, what you have to do is try to undertsand how the lightness of ornaments connect the sound, then we learn to be flexible with the notes that connect the sound (in note value and actual number of ornamental notes).

[pizno]

Interesting - thanks for that comment, lost.  I hadn't really thought of it that way, but I will, next time I practice.

Piz

[bella musica]

Yes, so many times we get stuck in the trap of thinking of an ornament as a mechanical twiddle that has to be played as fast as possible, rather than the beautiful sound it is meant to be (hellooo, you'd thing the word 'ornament' would be a clue!)  I find that once I change my mindset and think of the ornament as part of the melody, not as an extraneaous mutation... it becomes easier to play it, and sounds better to boot!