Childhood Memories
Bach’s Air on a G String was originally written for a String Quintet (as part of a larger orchestral suite). You’ll find many transcriptions of it for solo piano – including one by Siloti.
Air on a G String brings back childhood memories for me. There was a famous set of Cigar advertisements that ran for years. No matter what went wrong to the star of the ad, ultimately it didn’t matter as ‘happiness was a cigar ….’ . Generally, as the match was lit to light the cigar, Air on a G String (arranged by Jacques Loussier) would start to play. All was, again, well with the world!
I came across a video of it on YouTube and decided to try to learn it.
Finding a good transcription
In its original form of course, Air on a G String was written for strings as part of the English Suite. So, a good transcription is in order.
When thinking of transcriptions, my first reflex recently has been Siloti. I was introduced to him by Pianist Magazine – I’m a subscriber to their Digital Edition. Pianist Magazine featured his transcription of Saen Sans ‘The Swan’ in the scores section. You can see my recording of The Swan on my Tommy’s Piano Corner Facebook Page.
Siloti’s approach to transcription is to be as true as possible to the original orchestration – neither adding nor removing unless absolutely necessary where, for example, the sustaining power of the piano is not sufficient to render something appropriately.
As you can imagine, I was delighted to find that he had also transcribed this lovely piece.
I was able to download the Siloti transcription from IMSLP so that I could store it within my ForScore app.
Overall structure
The structure of the piece itself is actually very simple. There are just two sections, each of which is repeated note for note aside the final bar. The first section is only 6 bars long (excluding the repeat) with the second section being double the size at 12 bars (excluding the repeat).
I had been learning the notes for a while and as usual focussed on bringing out the melody line. However, to play it well, given this is Bach who is famed for his counterpoint and multi part works, I decided it was very important to consider this as a five part piece. This meant I needed to work out which instrument played which notes in the original.
To help me work this out, I downloaded the original String Parts – again, available on IMSLP.
Five parts
At first sight, it looks like a Quartet – there are four staves. However, on closer inspection you can see that the Bass and Cello both play from the same staff. Due to their difference in pitch, the same note is automatically renders an octave lower for the bass than it is for the cello.
The remaining parts are First Violin, Second Violin and Viola.
Arguably the First Violin and Bass present no real problems in that they are pretty much easy to identify being almost always the highest and lowest notes respectively.
Can I hear the Cello?
However, one of the first things I noticed when listening to a recording of my practice was that I couldn’t really hear the Cello part. This is because my ‘natural’ approach to voicing in a left hand octave always leans towards the lowest note voiced slightly more than the upper one. However, for this piece, I think both need to sound equally.
This was the first thing I set about trying to fix. I spent some time playing through the left hand octaves listening intently to ensure I could hear both the Bass and the Cello. I’m not sure whether its my ears or my piano, but on some of the very lower octaves I’ve never been satisfied that I can distinguish both. In the medium range it seems much clearer with focus.
Siloti marks these as ‘non legato’ – I think both bass and cello ‘pluck’ rather than ‘bow’ their parts. This means you can’t then always rely on the pedal to maintain legato elsewhere.
How to distinguish between Second Violin and Viola?
The next challenge in fact was to distinguish between and then voice the Second Violin and Viola properly.
To help me, I basically read through the original parts on my downloaded copy of the string version. I then used different colour highlighters on my copy of the Transcription to denote which notes belonged to which instrument.
My initial expectation was that I should be able to ‘identify’ both the Viola and Second Violin independently throughout when playing.
One of my main resources when trying to work out how to practice something is Graham Fitch’s series of eBooks.
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I remembered Graham’s idea of practicing ‘strands separately’ so tried it out to see if it could help me here. By Strands Separately, Graham means to practice different combinations of voices separately (so, for example, just second violin and cello – omitting bass, viola and first violin). There are definitely areas where it seemed to work. However, there are other areas where I struggled with it.
Due to the natural decay of the piano, it is difficult (for me at least) to link together anything slower than an 8th note. This is especially true when trying to link notes outside the Melody and Bass. Our brains manage to link these together almost instinctively even though often the current melody note can be barely audible when the next sounds on an instrument like the piano.
Voicing choices
Finally, I stumbled across a possible solution on John Mortensen’s CedarVille Music YouTube Channel. He created a series of videos on how to learn a Fugue. Whilst Air on a G String isn’t a fugue, given the counterpoint element, I decided to watch the entire playlist to see what I could glean.
In one of these videos, he talks about the importance of making Voicing Choices. If I interpreted it correctly, he was saying that it’s not always possible to bring out each individual voice. Thus, you need to make a decision about which ones to feature in your interpretation.
This then got me to thinking that it would make more sense to identify just the ‘important’ bits of the Second Violin and Viola parts and then concentrate on bringing out one or the other rather than always trying to think about both.
Where to focus?
Let’s look at the main areas where we have the different voices ‘answering’ each other
In the first section, the play is largely between the First and Second Violins with a simple little ‘question and answer’ like pattern. This is a nice little introduction to ensuring you can bring out each part independently.
You’ll note in the transcription that some of the second violin notes are played by the Left Hand. You need to pass a voice from one hand, to the other, and back again which can take some practice.
The second section is much more challenging. Here, the Viola and the Second Violin seem to hand over to each other and then occasionally interweave a few notes. However, in general in this section the Viola is much more active than the second violin from bars 7 to 12, with the Second Violin coming back into its own in bars 13 and 14 and then both of them are interwoven slightly more in bars 14 to the end.
The Strands Separately practice technique works much better now I look at the piece in this way. I found it best to break it down into one or two bar segments and then practice just say Cello and Viola, Cello and First Violin, Bass and First Violin, Bass and Cello. This is also incredible mental gymnastics (for me at least) and it certainly does make you focus on each individual part in a very new way.
I’m sure this adds a lot to the overall interpretation and helps focus your practice time in a better way.
You can watch my accompanying YouTube video here:
Why not try it yourself …
This is a beautiful piece of music to learn and, aside it’s popularity, I felt it definitely helped me improve my playing by forcing me to separate out the different voices.
You can see my homage to the original set of adverts on my FaceBook page. I ‘borrowed’ some of the original ad footage and provided the backing music myself.
