There's are a couple of particularly tricky bits in Two-Part Invention No.1, one where the left runs down from a Bb and the right up from a C#, and it's the fingering mainly that I struggle with, and the other where the two parts are both playing quarter notes, but the direction of travel isn't the same.
....HS also lets you build speed you can't work on HT.
You can if you acquire the trick of not being constantly aware of the note coincidences implicit in notated music. Surely this is precisely the difference between slow and fast playing and why the former cannot guarantee success in the latter.
However, I find something peculiarly enervating about this mental data stream of regular pulses, inculcated in all of us by early musical training. It is an artistic option, but is neither omnipotent nor essential, and forced coincidental playing of hands together reinforces it, perhaps to a destructive degree.
...Perhaps because it's difficult to do...
Anyway, I suppose we had better allow the discussion to revert to helping the original poster.
In the back of my mind - having read something emphasizing the importance of HS practice - was the thought, maybe if I just kept playing HS long enough, my brain would assimilate the two hand movements so well that HT would hardly cause any problem at all.
There is probably something to be gained in reading skills by overcoming that and just reading what's written on one clef, but it is often harder to do.
Trying to play just some notes of a contrapuntal line as in Bach seems like more work than just playing the notes.
Trying to play just some notes of a contrapuntal line as in Bach seems like more work than just playing the notes. The is especially true in my case, because what I trip up over is discovering that I've missed a crucial finger change and am now running towards an impossible switch...or, sometimes, towards realising I've just found a much better fingering! In some of the Bach I'm learning, for instance, the trills will have a 132 marked in the score, and, although I kind of get the logic and could learn it that way, I find an easier fingering that really doesn't cause any problem in the following passage, even allowing for increasing speed.
Right now, I appear not to be able to play even the right hand of Invention No.1 on its own.
I gather from reading that this is one of the purposes of going through scales and studying music theory, so that your fingers are already trained to deal with the runs you'll encounter in pieces. I'm a little sceptical, because of the number of times I see patterns in pieces where the fingering doesn't seem like it could possibly relate to how you'd play the scale that the notes are from. Decisions are clearly made on the flow of notes and the biology of the hand (and, as you say, because different fingerings may give different accents). Of course, there are plenty of examples of partial scales in musical lines, but a heck of a lot that are all over the place.
Scales are great because once you learn the fingering, which should only take a couple of weeks to get used to, you'll have years and years in which you can use scales to improve your technique.
nd you won't have to worry about what the notes actually are because they'll already be second nature. I've been playing for almost 25 years and I still love working on scales.
You are quite right that you'll only rarely find a piece of real music that contains a four octave up and down scale in both hands, but you will often find scalar passages with fingering pretty well aligned with the daily scales you practice.
Well, maybe a few, but I'm still unconvinced that this is really all that realistic. Short scalar passages are more often the norm, in my experience, with larger interval jumps, chords, etc., all over the place, and since these often start in odd places, I would have thought it is usual for the fingering to be completely different from how it is if you set off to do a scale (even when you practise a scale from somewhere other than the root note, because, IIRC, you're still supposed to play the "correct" fingering for that part of the scale). But most music isn't really scalar. Just as one example, on Bach's Invention in C (No.1), there's a passage where the notes go up two steps and down one again, in what I imagine is a G scale, from E on the bottom line of the treble to the E above, including an F#, and the fingering on my score suggests repeated pairings - 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 3, 2, 4, etc., so that can have no relation to the fingering of the scale of G you'd play.
So I almost can't believe that someone can remember how to play, what is it, 36 major triads (allowing for inversions) - oh, no, it's more than that, 72? - and recognise what they look like on the page! Maybe it is just practice and I've only come back to reading music for the last two months or so. I still find myself saying "grass" or "cows"!
One thing that I've not seen in all the instructions on learning scales, bizarrely, is whether you should be reading them from a score - my dim memory of 45 years ago suggests that I didn't do this when I was with a teacher, just watched my fingers...or then stared into space once I was better at them.
Well, maybe a few, but I'm still unconvinced that this is really all that realistic. Short scalar passages are more often the norm, in my experience, with larger interval jumps, chords, etc., all over the place, and since these often start in odd places, I would have thought it is usual for the fingering to be completely different from how it is if you set off to do a scale (even when you practise a scale from somewhere other than the root note, because, IIRC, you're still supposed to play the "correct" fingering for that part of the scale).
Yes, that's why in the part of my post before and after the bit you quoted I mentioned all the other, better reasons for learning scales.
Scales are great because once you learn the fingering, which should only take a couple of weeks to get used to, you'll have years and years in which you can use scales to improve your technique. By which I mean, you can concentrate entirely on, say, wrist flexibility, or how your arm moves, or getting your fingers relaxed and off the keys as fast as possible, or learning to do different articulations in different hands, or even polyrhythms. And you won't have to worry about what the notes actually are because they'll already be second nature.
...But I lack somewhat in whatever kinds of mental skill are used in learning the dots, and from there (I guess) the skill of recognising chords (in melodic forms or not) and theory elements, etc. It maybe related to mental arithmetic skills, I don't know. So I almost can't believe that someone can remember how to play, what is it, 36 major triads (allowing for inversions) - oh, no, it's more than that, 72? - and recognise what they look like on the page! Maybe it is just practice and I've only come back to reading music for the last two months or so. I still find myself saying "grass" or "cows"!...
There is also the important but often overlooked truth that the name for a keyboard subset, chord or scale, is not the entity itself in the sense of sound, location or grip. I can use myself as an example of what I mean. Say, for example, during improvisation I play the subset known as an E flat ninth. I don't mentally register its label at all, even less its voicing or position, that would be a hopeless and indeed, redundant mess of what you rightly term "mental arithmetic". When playing or creating music I do not clutter my mind with useless facts. I am no doubt going to attract fierce criticism if I say that names and labels are a waste of time for me. Many of the sounds I enjoy have no recognised descriptions or labels anyway and if such do exist I do not know them and have no desire to know them. I know their sounds, keyboard distributions and haptic grips all right but labels ? No thanks.There we are, I dare say that has consigned me to the untouchables with both the classical theory boys and the jazz brigade at one blow !
I come mostly from the auditory end of things. I've written stuff mostly by finding shapes on the guitar neck (my main instrument) or keyboard, often not knowing what chords they are. But you can't read music that way - do you read? As soon as you do that, you've got to know some names, presumably.
Topic: Hands Separate - how useful is it? 