How am I supposed to play these measures?

[tjinaz]

Hello everyone - I'm new to this forum. I haven't played much piano in 10 years but I've restarted a couple weeks ago.

I am working on Chopin's Concerto #1 and I'm not sure how to handle passages where there are, say, 5 notes being played in the left hand while there are 14 notes in the right. A couple examples of such measures are shown below. One is 5 against 14 and the other is 6 against 21.

For the moment, I'm just fitting in the notes in a way that sounds okay to me, but can someone tell me the correct way to handle such passages?



Thanks in advance for any insights.

[iansinclair]

Chopin does love that sort of nonsense.  It shows up time and time again.  Ideally, of course, the sixteenth ornamentation would be lovingly and flowingly played so that it just happened come out even with the steady pulse of the eighth notes.  Given time -- and a lot of practice and a certain level of genius, and the moon and planets aligned just so, that might happen.

In the meantime, what you are suggesting will work quite nicely, thank you.  At least I hope it will; it's what I do with things like those passages...  What is essential is to keep the overall pulse going evenly.

[tjinaz]

Thanks Ian. I am pretty sure when it's sped up it will sound just fine. Right now I'm practicing slowly so it kind of bugs me that I'm not playing the passage 100% accurately, but you're right that it is the flow that matters and I think that will come when I start speeding it up.

[j_menz]

Chopin does love that sort of nonsense.  It shows up time and time again.  Ideally, of course, the sixteenth ornamentation would be lovingly and flowingly played so that it just happened come out even with the steady pulse of the eighth notes.  Given time -- and a lot of practice and a certain level of genius, and the moon and planets aligned just so, that might happen.

In the meantime, what you are suggesting will work quite nicely, thank you.  At least I hope it will; it's what I do with things like those passages...  What is essential is to keep the overall pulse going evenly.

I think Chopin had a quite specific purpose in these figures. They are normally just one more or one less than what would be a straightforward alignment. If it were straightforward, certain of the notes would be accented - by being just that one off, no note, bar the first, falls on an accent, so the whole thing has a brief independence from the pulse.

@ OP - make sure you keep the tempo strict in the bass, and then let the top notes flow above them, unaccented, so they form a nice effect. Don't sweat the alignment too much.

[iansinclair]

I think Chopin had a quite specific purpose in these figures. They are normally just one more or one less than what would be a straightforward alignment. If it were straightforward, certain of the notes would be accented - by being just that one off, no note, bar the first, falls on an accent, so the whole thing has a brief independence from the pulse.

Hadn't really thought of it that way, but you are right, of course.  That is certainly the objective of the exercise!

[senanserat]

No need to leave it all to chance. Practice slowly while counting the right hand notes then left hand separate then together.

I assume the metric is 4/4 (because of the dotted white in the firts bass's pic)which means the sum of the notes in a given measure is 4. Thus count the right hand as:

One and Two and Three And Four And.
One and Two and Three And Four And.

In which each word i.e one, and. Its the lowest note used, but because there are sixtheens there and we don't want one-a-and-two-a-and-three-and.

Each word should represent two sixtheens, in case of the first picture.



Same for all of them, in the end of that one you will notice that there is one note for one word, thats because the last note its a eigth which is double of the sixtheens thus it takes a whole word, if the note is a quarter it will be 'one and' for that note and so on as it goes up.

Regarding the bass you have two voices one dotted white which you have to hold/sustain and the other that you have to play at the same time.  If you do that slowly HS then HT (Hands together) counting you will get to a point where not only you need not to count but you can play at tempo.

Hope it helps

[j_menz]

Hope it helps

No. The bass line should be in strict time, but the RH is free to flow. Counting won't get you there.

[iansinclair]

No. The bass line should be in strict time, but the RH is free to flow. Counting won't get you there.

Absolutely.  As j_menz pointed out earlier -- and I implied earlier, the whole purpose of this type of figure (and there are numerous other examples in Chopin, never mind other composers -- I can think of half a dozen on one page of the Op. 72(posthumous) Nocturne alone) is a very very free ornament -- and it really is an ornament, if you examine the structure of the music (use that Nocturne as a really good example) -- over an absolutely regular left hand line.  As J_ also pointed out, there must be no accents in the ornament, just a free flowing and at least seemingly effortless movement.

[chopin2015]

Try more nocturnes.

[iansinclair]

Try more nocturnes.

Always a good idea!

But it's this sort of free embellishment or ornament (whichever you want to call it) which is part of why they are so beautiful -- and why they are so fiendishly difficult to play really well, even though they are deceptively simple at first.

[timothy42b]

There is another way you may not have thought of.

Type it into a notation program.

Computers don't care how hard it is to count or play 3 against 4, they just play back what you type in. 

Then when you have the feel of it, play it like it sounds.  You're playing by feel or by ear rather than strictly counting, but that's the way you do most rhythms anyway. 

[nyiregyhazi]

No. The bass line should be in strict time, but the RH is free to flow. Counting won't get you there.

agreed. that method is just asking for trouble. the left hand rate is the constant which means it must lead. using that method will make it very unlikely to fit into the whole with a consistent sense of a tempo. also, for both musical and technical reasons, the only internal feeling of accentuation needs to come where the hands meet. anything else distracts with too much complexity and breaks both physical and musical flow.