Training Bach Pieces & technique

[mozbee]

Hello everyone~! I have always seen teachers teaching Bach pieces starting from short pieces , then, inventions , then sinfonias , then the famous well tempered clavier(WTC) pieces..
But when i started playing the WTC pieces , i suddenly felt a limit toward melody direction(Hand direction) and my hands usually become lost in playing the lines. Just like pieces with 4 voices.. Am i playing bach's pieces that are too advanced for my current skills and techniques? If yes, Am i following the correct order of difficulty?
On the other hand, Playing Czerny opus 299 was still okay for its demanding techniques, But when i moved on to Opus 740, I suddenly felt a Drastic Change in the difficulty. How do those pianists play those types of etudes that require high demand of Powerful techniques that are hard to achieve? Just like chopin's etude opus 10 no 4 and opus 25 no 11.
How can i overcome these difficulties?

[gustaaavo]

If you've mastered a sinfonia or more, it would be a logical step to go for one of the easier P&F of WTC (e.g. C minor or D minor of book 1).
But, for example, it'd be crazy to jump directly to C# minor (book 1).
By the way, some preludes (as, precisely, the aforementioned C and D minors) are very beneficial technically.
As a final point, do expect to dedicate some serious time to whichever one you study. One page of a Bach fugue may take as much time to master as a couple or even more of something as, say, a Chopin piece. But I guess you've already realized this studying the inventions and sinfonias. Nevertheless, time spent with old Bach is most valuable.

[indianajo]

The basic method works on everything.
You start one hand at a time, very slowly, so slowly you can make no mistakes.  You beat steady rhythm with learning the piece at this level.  Expressive meter variations come later.
If you ever get to where the hands are note perfect, with approaching a normal tempo, then you put the hands together.  Usually by this time you have memorized the hand motions and are not looking at the music in detail anymore.  You slow down when you first put the hands together, and stay that way until the execution is note perfect.
If you don't ever get to note perfect, the piece is not learned yet, more practice is in order.
Some hard pieces take me 20 years to get note perfect, but life is boring without a challenge IMHO. 
Some pieces are too hard to sight read, but not too hard to learn with this method.  Some new techniques are "too hard" and require special practice.  I'm trying to perfect 3-4-3 finger crossovers in a JSB piece, very difficult but apparently necessary for correct multiple line execution.  One teacher suggested helping a line out with the other hand, but this leads to bits of melody being played on two different organ manuals with different sounds, so I'll try to do it the hard way.   

[mozbee]

Thankyou very much for the reply. You mentioned about practicing the Bach pieces separately with one hand until it can be played without any stops or mistakes but in fugues, I'm always confused for the parts that right and left hand must separately play . How do you play these parts where it's really confusing? In the case for the first P&F of book 1 the fugue part has 4 voices and the book doesn't really have a clear distinction for each hand because the playing of the right and left hand are kinda mixed up which sometimes the right hand will play the parts of the left hand lines. Is the solution just to find out and investigate by my own?

[j_menz]

A voice in a fugue may move between hands, but surely you are familiar with this from the inventions - especially the three part ones.

Hand separate practice for these is completely pointless.

If you must, practice each voice separately. It is at least useful to identify them - which is a prerequisite for doing this.  In practicing them separately, it is important to use the fingers (and hands) that you will ultimately use in the full version.

[indianajo]

A voice in a fugue may move between hands, but surely you are familiar with this from the inventions - especially the three part ones.
Hand separate practice for these is completely pointless.

I disagree with the pointless comment.  What I do, is mark up a copy of the score with lines showing myself which notes I intend to play with the other hand. I make something like a parenthesis pointing up or down at the score normally associated with that hand.  Down for left, up for right.   Then I practice it that way.  After the two hands are learned properly, then I put them together.  A polyphonic piece doesn't sound like much with bits and pieces of a theme coming and going into the one hand alone, but one doesn't practice to entertain oneself, One practices to train the brain to play the notes written. I do the artistic part and perhaps analyze the themes etc, after I get the mechanics of playing learned perfectly.  On a keyboard other than piano, the breaking up of the themes to different sounds available is quite an effort, and never really done permanently.  One may go back later and change which hand is doing what, but with the basic notes already learned, this is not the effort that it would be to arrange the piece at the same time one is teaching the brain the proper movements.  If you guess wrong at first and put some notes in the wrong hand, learning two ways to do perform the piece is not totally wasted effort.  You're not going to run out of brain memory circuits unless you quit using it as many do.  
Organ players have to do this re-arranging of the parts to the different manuals, every time they prepare a performance on a different console.  They do typically take an hour or two to familiarizze themselves with the particular console scheduled for a performance, before the performance.  The more you do it, the better you get at it.  Take Tocatta & Fugue in D minor, E Power Biggs recorded at least three versions of it.  About 1958 "Bach's Royal Instrument" on the Electric console in Boston Symphony Hall.  Another version about 1962 on the Flentrop tracker organ at Harvard.  The two versions are quite differently arranged.  Then about 1975, in his eighties I believe, EPB played the same piece on a pedal Harpsichord with one keyboard.  Another totally different arrangement.  The more you do this rearranging, the better your brain works. 

[bernardliszt]

i am almost done with prelude in C-major by Bach from WTC

its easy to play . i recommend it to you

Bernard

[gustaaavo]

I agree with j_menz here. Indeed, when studying fugues I write a new score with one staff per voice (it's a good oportunity to practice the C clef also with some inner voices). On that score I mark detailed phrasings, dynamics, ornaments and, precisely, fingerings (in the inner voices you'll need some convention to distinguish which hand is playing it).
I would not practice hands separately. Instead, practice each voice (with correct fingerings), as suggested by j_menz. With the middle voices you'll need to be really aware of how you pass them from one hand to the other, it must be impreceptible. You can also choose two or three voices and practice them likewise.
Finally, mental practice is fundamental, you don't want to rely on muscle memory alone. Writing the separate score helps a lot in this aspect. You should understand what each voice is doing always (it is only rarely unrelated with the theme and countersubjects).
Again, it is difficult, but very rewarding to dedicate yourself to these masterpieces.

[brogers70]

I agree with j_menz here. Indeed, when studying fugues I write a new score with one staff per voice (it's a good oportunity to practice the C clef also with some inner voices). On that score I mark detailed phrasings, dynamics, ornaments and, precisely, fingerings (in the inner voices you'll need some convention to distinguish which hand is playing it).
I would not practice hands separately. Instead, practice each voice (with correct fingerings), as suggested by j_menz. With the middle voices you'll need to be really aware of how you pass them from one hand to the other, it must be impreceptible. You can also choose two or three voices and practice them likewise.
Finally, mental practice is fundamental, you don't want to rely on muscle memory alone. Writing the separate score helps a lot in this aspect. You should understand what each voice is doing always (it is only rarely unrelated with the theme and countersubjects).
Again, it is difficult, but very rewarding to dedicate yourself to these masterpieces.

This is all excellent advice. I also write out the fugues on a separate staff for each voice. One more thing you can do with that score is to listen to a recording of the fugue many times, each time focusing on a separate voice, either by just listening carefully to that individual voice, or by singing along with it. Between that and the original work of copying out the individual voices you will really understand how the fugue is put together.

The only advice I slightly disagree with is on hands separate practice. I find it helpful. The fugue may be in 3 or 4 (or 5) voices, but you have just two hands, and it helps to practice the voicing of different lines played by the same hand. There are also sometimes tricky fingering or finger-swapping issues that are best worked out one hand at a time.