Bach

[pianisten1989]

Some preformances of bach, or baroque music in generall, is so very.., I don't know the english word, but you can really see ppl dance in front of you when they play. And some preformances is the complete oppisite.

I play bach's first partita, and I know noone can dance to these movements, but do you have any tips for creating this "dancing" feel while playing?

[kay3087]

Stop using the damper pedal (if you are), and play in a strict rhythm. See if that works.

Otherwise, I think what you're hearing is the "colour" of the performance, which can only attained by having a good musical ear, practicing, and careful study of phrases, textures, middle voices, &c. And a Steinway also helps.

[ramseytheii]

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

[alessandro]

From me, no tips or tricks...
A link, for some side information...
(indeed it's the second partita, not the first as you mention, but for me they have both in their opening-dance, for the first the praeludium, this jazz-and-swing feel.   That feel is very hard to explain, but you will certainly recognize, by playing them loosily, with a lot of rock-jazz-swing feel to it, the parts that are really appealing.  In my case it's maybe in one out of the ten attempts, that I succeed a little in creating this fun-thing to it)
For me, Argerich is truely a very original Bach-partita-performer.   Unfortunately you can't hear the whole movement very clearly, but I think that it can give you a tiny little idea of what it could eventually sound like.
Good luck pianisten1989

[slobone]

Certainly with Bach's dance-based pieces you can use accents to bring out the rhythm without violating the spirit of the Baroque. Often it's the left hand that keeps the rhythm while the right hand does its thing.

For example in the Courante, the first and last triplets should have accents on the first note. Within the measure, the primary accent is on beat 1, secondary accent on 3, and less on 2. Where the left hand has a strong beat, you can strengthen the corresponding note in the RH.

Left hand would be DUM ---- da Dum, da DUM etc. Not clunky but gracefully "swung".

Don't know if I've explained that very well...

[sashaco]

I recall thirty years ago being shown by my teacher a scholarly article which argued that baroque music should not be played with the smallest units equal.  Based on old letters (including one to a music-box maker, if I recall correctly) the writer suggested that much of the baroque repertoire ought to have a gently dotted feel to it- two eighths ought not quite become a dotted eight followed by a sixteenth, but  a slightly lilting (dancelike??)  feel should be present.  I worked on this at that time with one of the 3 part Inventions.  It was very hard for me not to fully dot, which produces an irritatingly mechanical sound, but there were moments when I thought I went a bit of the way towards what the writer  was looking for.  It's worth experimenting with- anything in music is worth trying!  I wish I cold remember more of the argument- I certainly can't reproduce my efforts at that time.  Does anyone who reads this site recall anything similar about inegal playing?