Wow, thank you for your replies. This has opened an entire can of worms, I didn't know that polyphony music was actually written in any special way like this.But I am still lost, how do I distinguish between the different voices? How am I reading them, down from up, or left to right? What groups them together? How do I know what is the uppermost, does that mean the highest on the lines? Do you see what I am trying to ask?
Sorry if this is a little blunt, .....
You're not sorry in the least; bluntness is your modus operandi. But with a little practice you could convey the same, helpful information in fewer words and with no bluntness at all.
bluntness is not my norm at all. however, it's necessary here as the poster is putting a kind of destructive humility and desire to bow down to what a rulebook only appears to be saying before his own common sense. I'm sure he already noticed that the notes are aligned and I'm not saying he has no sense. He just needs to TRUST his own intelligence and put that first and the rulebook second. you don't develop good reading skills without doing so. The overwhelming majority of sound reading comes from use of contextual clues- which actually make it far easier than trying to start with the reams of incidental rules on how to notate different parts. Remember that you only need to know all the advanced rules in order to NOTATE something. In order to merely READ that notation, it's a matter of knowing only the most basic rules and then using context in reference to individual beat locations and alignments. Many composers don't even bother with the type of rests written there- because the meaning will be clear to anyone who observes alignments and is wise enough to trust their sense over some unnecessary desire to be trying to add up every note that they see, in reference to a rulebook. giving him the more advanced rules will only confuse all the more. The poster need merely throw out that mindset of adding up all the notes (rather than pinpointing beat locations) and he'll soon figure out how it really works for himself.
Goodness, my brain. Sorry if I sound stupid, this is obviously way out of my depth. But in simple terms, how do I know which voice contains which notes? How do you look at that bass measure in the variation and work out 'Okay, so voice 1 is playing these notes and voice 2 is playing these'?. I want to trust that I am holding the right notes for the correct duration.
There are two things I am cautious of regarding your method when applied to people starting out with reading polyphony.Firstly, some assume that the beats will be evenly distributed physically across the bar, and this (as you will be aware) is often not the case.Secondly, to read polyphony, one needs to read primarily horizontally, which is often rather different than the more usual vertical reading involved in piano music. Whilst your method doesn't preclude this, it also does not encourage it - and most people need all the encouragement they can get in this regard.If the OP wasn't susceptible to both these issues, I doubt he'd have asked the question he did in the first place.
This is wrong... that he can't work out which voice is which is a serious problem. He's doing the right thing by addressing them now. If you can't identify the separate voices in a polyphonic work then you have no hope of playing it correctly.
It's not quite as complicated as you might think, and the edition you have helps...
Also, when you think in voices, you don't always strictly need to count long notes - as long as you are clear that you MUST hold it until you either see it being replaced by another note or by a rest. I'm not saying to always think this way, but it's often far easier than trying to independently count out the length of 4 or 5 independent voices. if you can understand when a note finishes based on context, counterpoint is far less difficult to grasp. in the second example given there, for example, I wouldn't even think about the length of dotted crotchet in the lower voice. If I merely note that it's long then context tells me when it moves to the next note and the length sorts itself out. I'd look to length of the first note merely for confirmation- not as the primary piece of information from which I calculate when the next note is due. it's a process of working backwards AFTER pinpointing beat locations for the whole bar- not simplistically going from left to right a note at a time and adding them up. The latter is what textbooks imply, but it's not an intelligent or practical approach unless you start using your own logical processes.
Any time you have multiple voices represented on the same staff that do things at different times
Just one additional point- foundations are always grounded in vertical reference points even in the most horizontal playing. something as simple as a strong beat is a purely vertical event. .
Every bar has vertical reference points that represent the beat. Each voice is calibrated to these reference points. I don't see the need to further calibrate them against each other, as if they are correct with the beat, they are correct with each other. If your students are getting out of alignment, they are playing one (or more) of the voices out of alignment with the beat - not a case of too much independence, but merely that one or more voices is rhythmically incorrect.
Your logic doesn't work for a pianist. For five separate players, sure. All you have is beats to align notes to and the rest does itself. But a pianist cannot simultaneously run five lines as independent physical coordinations. That logic simply won't hold up. A pianist needs to be acutely aware of relationships- in order to integrate many things into a global coordination. It's a very different thing to the sum of its parts. The illusion of five independent lines owes a huge amount to how a pianist sees something in a global fashion. For a start, you cannot find a good fingering by practising voices separately, but only by looking at the relationship. Voices can be understood rhythmically on their own, but it doesn't mean that you're truly running five independent coordinations that only meet because they happen to share beats. Music is always vertical and horizontal.
.... you have a polyphonic work.
It could be considered homophony if there is one primary melody and the other voices are supporting it, which applies to quite a lot of music.
Whether you are one pianist, five pianists or a string quintet, five voices are five voices. Independent, but related - not just harmonically and temporally, but also in more complex fashions (questions, answers, inversions, retrogrades, double time, half time etc). In order to play it, you have to play each of the five voices on it's own merit, bearing in mind it's relationship to the other voices.yThe job of the hands is to give a physical way of doing that, wherein lies the problems of co-ordination and fingering. These, however, are merely means to the end. It's not a case of five independent physical co-ordinations, It's one physical co-ordination giving effect to five independent voices.2And if you cannot mentally co-ordinate five independent voices, no amount of merely physical coordination is going to produce an acceptable result.
I haven't meant to suggest that the voices in a polyphonic piece are musically unrelated. They are deeply interrelated (and I rather like Ian's sporting team metaphor). The relationship is harmonic (which corresponds to the vertical), rhythmic (likewise), but also more complex - a voice can at a point be an answer to a question posed in another voice, or it can be an echo or development of an idea originating in another voice. The interplay is vital to the operation of the work.To take N's example of playing a single voice of a five voice fugue in isolation - of course it lacks the perspective of those interrelationships. I don't memorise anyway, so I can't really say y what would happen if one were to memorise each voice separately. I suspect part of the process would be to try and form those relationships on the way, but it's outside my field of experience.In reading your post, though N, I am struck that you appear to think through your hands - from the movement to the music, if you like. I think I do it the other way round, so I suppose it is inevitable that we will see things differently here.
the only real test of a pianist who has full capability of independence is to play any single lines from a fugue fully by memory. if you can't do so, your thinking is massively based on interdependence.
Since I don't do anything from memory, I can't say much about this. I can't play the whole thing together from memory either, so that failing doesn't speak to independence.I don't especially like reading more than two staves, though I'm not sure that that's because of a greater difficulty in putting it together or just not liking having more places to look. When I see a score, I see the individual lines anyway, so apart from the convenience of having them already sorted geographically* and all in one easy to see place, I'm not sure it makes any difference. No doubt I have to sort out the mechanics (fingering and movement), but I'm not generally aware of doing so.I still think we see things differently and so risk speaking at cross purposes. Whereas you see movement as being what you do to produce a preconceived sound, I see that preconceived sound as what produces the required movement.
consider that unless you always take fingering from what is written in, you are constantly making associations. Nobody would use the same fingerings for a single part that they will apply to it when they have two parts in that hand. this alone is proof that you're doing all the same things but simply not doing it consciously. personally, what I've found is that the more I understand what I used to do only intuitively, the better I become at avoiding the sloppy moments that were part and parcel of my former intuitive version, and the better my intuitive playing goes even without those conscious thought processes. my execution of such things as Bach fugues at first sight remains unspectacular but has made a marked improvement.
I still find that when you talk about "verticality" in these works you talk about it in relation to fingering and movement. Not about the musical relation between the voices.I;'d be interested to know if you have read through or played any of the Liszt or Busoni transcriptions of Bach's organ fugues; if so, did you perceive verticality operating differently there?
What I was getting at was that in Liszt and Busoni (and others, too, of course) sometimes a voice or voices are doubled (or tripled and other fun things). The relationship between the doubled notes is purely vertical, and seems to me a rather different relationship than the relationship between the notes of two voices would be, even if the actual notes were identical (and employed the same fingering and even had the same relative volume).I use it to illustrate that although the fingers may be doing identical things, and the sound may be, at that moment, the same, the relationship is actually different.I appreciate that I'm taking a moment in isolation, and that that may be somewhat unrealistic.Also, as I have stated earlier - if you take the score away, I'm completely lost regardless.
Much as you say we must be seeing the same thing going on, I can assure you we don't.You speak of chord voicing in a single note multi voice polyphonic work as if there was such a thing. I simply don't see that there is.The volume, and every other attribute, of each note at a single point is determined exclusively by its position in and in relation to the voice wherein it occurs. Nothing else is needed.Certainly the voices interrelate, but that is a matter of harmony and melodic relationship. It is nothing like voicing a chord, where the relationship is purely vertical.
No. Consider a simple example. Two voices, the first doubled at the sixth. The dynamics of the first voice, in totality, are determined by the horizontal working of that voice ( crescendo/decrescendo, pulse etc). The same for the second voice. If the dynamics are correct horizontally, they are correct vertically as well.In the first voice, however, the relationship between the two notes is balanced vertically to give effect to the sound to be produced.The two notes of the first voice act like a chord, but the relationship between that chord and the other voice is quite different.
purely horizontal thinking would mean that you can start the voices in any old way. also, unless you feel that there's literally only one possible shaping for any given phrase, true independence could easily have one part getting carried away with a huge crescendo while the other is fading out.
there is something sadly lacking in at least some music education: an exposure to counterpoint. Not as a strictly keyboard exercise.
We even rationally decide perhaps on dynamics with reference to a vertical context (upper voice vs lower voice).. only the thing is, its not on a note by note basis using each individual chord. its always based on the full line. There's practically zero vertical processing for me.
I'd only add that it may be based on another voice, but at a different time.
fingering ... I'm not sure you can argue that the vertical doesnt matter so far as that though.
But you do need to know what to do with them when you do hit them.
Indeed, which is while all and sundry should learn all 15 inventions (and perhaps some of bach's other works that might qualify as 2 part inventions) before tackling 3 and in turn more voices. ..as we keep saying to people here.
I'd invite people also to have a listen to this:The interplay of the voices is perhaps given a different perspective when played by two people.