There’s one spot in the second etude that I just haven’t quite unlocked, and it’s given me some cuticlebiting moments (how I wish that were a metaphor) this week. Here comes some nitty-gritty about that, with the acknowledgment that in these crazy days it’s a luxury to be frustrated about a musical moment. I know I’m lucky that I can go deep into practicing and try to shut the world out.
I’ve been thinking so much about this Yehudi Menuhin quote—in fact stop me if you’ve heard this before--where the famous violinist said:
“There is no such thing as a difficult piece of music. A piece is either impossible or easy. The process where it migrates from one category to the other is known as practicing.”
Right now there’s a section of Agnes’s second etude that is, for me, by that definition, impossible.
There’s a lot going on*:
There’s a big rolled chord, where the left hand has to jump hand positions to fit all the notes
The top of the rolled chord is the melody, that will continue in the next rolled chord
After the rolled chord both hands jump to the middle of the keyboard and then
The sustain pedal goes down
Both hands play fast repeated notes with neighbors and then
The sustain pedal comes off and then
Both hands jump out again and then
Both hands play another big uncomfortable rolled chord
And do the pattern again on different notes. Also
It’s all supposed to be quiet.
And then when the whole section repeats, the pedaling is different so that you catch the top note of the melody sometimes, and sometimes you catch the bottom note of the bass.
The rolled chords have been bugging me. A rolled chord—the marking is that wavy vertical line—means you play the notes of the chord one at a time, fast, first the bottom, then the next to the bottom, then the next one, all the way to the top. Do you play both hands at once like that, or play all the left hand notes first and all the right hand notes after that? It depends. Often composers will write one big ribbon (that’s how I think of that wavy vertical line) from the bottom note to the top note, and then you know it’s all the left hand notes then all the right hand notes. But sometimes they write two separate wavy lines, and it still makes sense to do it that way. It’s often really beautiful to roll a chord all the way from the bottom to the top. But it takes extra time to play all the notes one at a time in a rolled chord, and it often makes more sense to roll the left hand and the right hand at once. That’s what I’ve been doing, and I think it’s right: there’s not time to do the slow roll the other way. And the left hand chords are really awkward: I just can’t reach all the notes in one hand position, so I have to do a big fast motion to get all the notes in. That wouldn’t be so bad if it just went rolled chord, rolled chord, rolled chord (which in fact is one helpful way of simplifying it). But somehow, doing the awkward big roll and then immediately jumping in to do the fast repeated notes and then jumping out makes it all feel really uncomfortable. I think I’m not opening and closing my hand fast enough.
Yesterday I thought I had found a breakthrough, and I thought I was going to write triumphantly about it. I changed where I split the left hand positions and it felt like it was going to be much easier to play it that way, even adding in the calculation about the time it will take to relearn it. I’ve been mostly playing the bottom two far apart notes before changing positions, but yesterday I tried jumping after just the low note, and it felt like it was going to be easier and make sense. I was really excited to come back this morning and practice the new way in, make it a new habit (I love knowing what specific thing I’m going to be working on before I start practicing—it’s the best feeling). But then today it fell flat. Yesterday’s discovery just didn’t work. It sounded clunky and bumpy and it didn’t feel good and the old way, where I play two far apart notes and then change positions, is clearly what’s going to actually work. But it doesn’t feel good yet, just less terrible than the other way. I’m figuring that out, but I don’t have it yet. It’s not easy.
The next thing that I haven’t quite grasped is the sound of the fast repeated notes with the neighbors, in between the rolled chords. According to Agnes’s very specific pedal marks, all the notes ring during the little dissonances of the repeated notes. It’s hard to know what effect she was going for. On the modern Steinway, pedaling over those notes makes them sound loud and muddy. This morning I felt sort of desperate about it, so I went to try it on our fortepiano (a copy of a Mozart-era Walter made by Thomas and Barbara Wolf), and that made much more sense in a way: the pedal made the left hand notes sustain enough to sound melodic, but the dissonances all died out before they completely took over and got obnoxious. I need to figure out what sound Agnes was going for so I can try to replicate that, and I’m thinking I may have to find a piano like the one she played on to find that out.
It’s the kind of situation where it would be incredibly helpful to go listen to twenty different recordings and hear what people do in that spot and decide what I like. That’s what I told two different students this week who are working on pieces by Beethoven and Chopin, and I know they’ll come back with clear intentions about how the music should sound. But there aren’t twenty recordings of this music: there aren’t any recordings of this music.
I *will* figure something out, even if it’s a compromise where I play what I think sounds good instead of what the composer wrote. But since I’m the first one playing this music in this century, I feel a responsibility to be true to the composer’s intentions so other people can know what they are. If there were already twenty recordings I could just do what I want (okay, after agonizing and researching lots) and make lots of changes with a clear conscience. But I don’t quite feel like I can do that. Maybe in twenty years there will be twenty recordings, and then I can change my mind and do another recording, like Glenn Gould’s two recordings of the Well Tempered Clavier. I like that idea.
*My beloved, nutty, much-missed aunt Meg once looked me up and down and said “you’ve got a lot going on in that outfit” when I was wearing a multicolored striped dress and pink textured tights and a blue cardigan with purple buttons. So whenever I think or say that something has “a lot going on,” I think of her voice and that outfit (which, for the record, was fabulous and I stand by it).