Piano Forum

I am sure everyone has a lot of tips since this is something you can work on for the rest of your career.

I attached one example in particular from the first Partita in B-flat major; this is the third movement, Corrente, or Courante.  This is a good example to show one way to achieve a dance-like rhythm in Bach.

As you can see, example A shows the right hand in the opening bars.  This is a fast moving piece and there are a lot of notes.  You have to search for the important notes, and find the dance rhythm hidden inside.  The dance rhythm is not only contained in the larger beats: it's found in the smaller ones as well (example B).

Performance, while not too exaggerated, should resemble example C.  It's the rhythm which is hidden inside all the notes.  When you play it like this, the audience will be able to comprehend everything, because instead of playing everything equally, and instead of phrasing all of the notes together you are phrasing the internal rhythm principally, and the rest of the notes fulfill their function as glittering ornaments.

If you try and play all the eighth notes as one melody, it will be incomprehensible to the audience.  It will just sound like a lot of up and down.  You need to balance the ranges of parts, and find the internal dance rhythm.

This is the trouble a lot of students have in Bach, that they try and play it in too much of a linear fashion.  They think, well, first the pick-up note, then going up, then down, then around, then up higher, etc; but this leads to homogenous performances with no sense of the internal music.  Rather you should find anchors and phrase those; then the other notes logically fall into place.

What I illustrate in this example, can be applied to the rest of the movement.  Do not neglect the left hand; it follows the same pattern, and in fact has very interesting and beautiful phrasing unto itself.

I hope you find this interesting.

Walter Ramsey