Journey so far with Play It Again Piano
I’ve been progressively charting my progress following Melanie Spanswick’s Play It Again Piano course. I bought Book 2 (aimed at a late intermediate and beyond level) and am having a great time working through it. At the moment, I’m looking at pieces 4 and 5.
If you missed the earlier posts, you can find them here:
- First post – general overview plus piece 1 : CPE Bach’s Solfeggietto
- Second post – piece 2 : Fur Elise
- Third Post – piece 3 : Song Without Words
How different can you get … ?
Number 4 is a Study by Hermann Berens and number 5 is a Romantic style piece called Lavender Haze by Elena Cobb. What really struck me whilst practicing is that these two pieces couldn’t really be much more different.
- First, Lavender Haze was written in 2015 wheres Hermann Berens died in 1880
- Secondly, the Berens study is quite a lively little piece (Allegro Scherzando) whereas Lavender Haze is much more relaxed and free-flowing
- Thirdly, the skills you need to play either of them convincingly are completely different!
Study in F Major
Let’s take a quick look at the Study. Melanie highlights this as being good to develop your Staccato and Accent playing – it has basically mostly staccato notes, interspersed with longer, accented notes both in the left and the right hands.
Another feature of the piece is that you need to rapidly change fingers and, as Melanie states, “often in an unexpected manner”. Here, she’s definitely not joking!
As always, Melanie provides great tips for approaching your practice of this. She has written out a set of practice exercises to help get the feel of the finger changes – these are very useful. She also recommends starting with legato practice initially. This is something of which I doubt I would have thought left to my own devices.
One thing I can say is that this piece is so far the hardest in the book I’ve tried to master. I think it’ll probably take me longer to get this to a standard I’m happy with than the C Sharp Minor prelude at the end!
My major challenge
I think my major problem here is staccato playing … I always avoided it as a teenager and certainly would not have learned anything with lots of staccato in it. My excuse would have been that I didn’t like the sound whereas the fact was that it’s a touch I never mastered. However, I set myself the challenge of working through every piece in the book and so I’m now finding I need to go back to basics on Staccato.
For solutions on how to practice this and any other piano touch, I recommend getting hold of Graham Fitch’s eBook series – that I have reviewed previously
When you start practicing this Study, something I have noticed is that you can play it end to end Hands Separately as the melody passes from hand to hand as you progress through it. This can be useful for letting each hand rest a little successively whilst working at it.
For more practice ideas, please refer to my video
Now for something different – Lavender Haze
Now let’s move on to Lavender Haze. This piece is completely different. Not a sign of staccato anywhere – in fact very legato in every respect. It’s an example of a piece where you hold a lot of sound in the piano using the pedal. It has a beautiful, yet simple melody over an arpeggiated accompaniment.
For me, there is one principle challenge here and that is the tenuto notes in the first two bars. I had always considered that my ability to voice chords properly was actually quite OK. Indeed, for the first 6 beats of the piece I’m fine. However, you’ll notice that the tenuto marking changes from being on the top note of the chord to being on the bottom note of the chord in beats 7 and 8.
That caused me to discover that in fact I’m reasonably proficient (far from expert) at voicing the top note (pinkie). However, far less so when trying to voice the bottom note (thumb).
The use of ‘Anticipation’
There is something else that I noticed with this piece. I noticed the other day that I was tending to anticipate some of the melody notes. That is to say I wasn’t playing them strictly in line with the accompanying arpeggio – I was playing them slightly before. … I wasn’t really thinking too hard about it – it just seemed sort of appropriate. At the time I remember thinking to myself ‘I wonder if that’s allowed’.
I was then amazed to see a tweet a few days later that linked to an article discussing this in detail. According to this article, it used to be the norm, then fell out of fashion, but should be used when appropriate. So I think I’ll stick with a little anticipation. Here’s the link to the article.
If you want to see my practice ideas and hear my version of it, you’ll also find them in the video linked just above.
Personal Preferences
Lavender Haze is the type of music that I would typically choose – quite probably because I find it much easier to play than something like the Berens Study. However, this of course means that I’m not really developing a balanced technique.
The stark contrast between the two pieces here made me reflect on the benefit of following a set of pieces like those Melanie proposes in Play It Again Piano. This approach obliges me (in the nicest possible way) to avoid skimming over things at which I’m not particularly good (or find more challenging) to ensure I can build a more balanced technique.
I believe we all have different challenges with our piano playing. I’ve heard many people play who are the exact opposite to me … they would rattle through an impressive rendition of the Berens study without really giving it a second thought yet on something like Lavender Haze they would fail to impress.
So, again, I continue to be very happy with my Play It Again Piano journey … I think I will move on to piece 6 which is Seahorse Dream written by Melanie herself, but I’ll keep working at the Study for a few weeks longer until I feel like I can control it easily.
Let me know what you think!
If you’ve also got hold of this book, let me know how you’re getting on either here or on the YouTube comments of my videos.
