About computer games and playing Bach Chaconne

When you fire up a computer game you enter a totally imaginary world. It can be a space odyssey or an empire building game or anything else, and you know it is not “real”, it does not exist. Yet, the world which is presented to you, as fantastic as it may be, lies within a set of logical rules. The game, and the “world”, has to make sense to us and we must understand the settings in which we operate in; how many “lives” we have, how we can make “money” or become more powerful etc.

The same rules apply to novels and books or movies. You will not accept the settings of a science fiction novel if they appeared in an autobiography of a real person and an historical drama set in ancient Rome should not feature cars.

The same set of rules of reality making applies to playing Bach, Mozart, or any other piece. in this case, you, the performer, are responsible to show the listeners the “rules of the musical piece”, the logic in which the piece is played.

The classical world is full of “do”s and “do not”s and each era, Baroque to twelve-tones system, has its own set of rules to be followed (or ignored, according to your personal taste). The important bit is to stay within the rules you selected to follow so as to make sense in the context of the piece. Whether it is the direction of sequences in Bach and where you break them, the aggressiveness of articulation you use in Mozart, the thickness of your tone in Tchaikovsky or the lushness of your sound in Frank, these are the tools with which you present to the audience their reality and like a good novel or an exciting game, these rules should be apparent and consistent throughout the piece.

This is why the beginning of a piece is so crucial musically: your tone, articulation, phrasing, and even attitude should immediately set the boundaries in which you operate an everything you will change as you progress is relative to what your audience experienced before.

About the Fingers

I will generalize and say that most students tend to leave their fingers too much on the strings. This tendency has several reasons: most of us were taught this way as kids and keeping the fingers down to secure intonation, the will to keep the hand position and the wish not to move fingers which are “already in tune”. For example: you can see someone playing first finger, then fourth finger and back to the first without lifting the first. Another example, playing a D with the second finger (on G) then needing to play a fifth(A); instead of lifting the finger and repositioning it, the tendency is to twist the finger and squeeze between the strings.

There is nothing too wrong about those examples except that usually the fourth finger will probably not vibrate and the chances for a good, clean fifth are not very good.

When we press a note and keep on pressing we not only have certain pressure in the finger and hand, we also accumulate tension as well, which means the longer we hold the finger the stronger the tension. By lifting the finger we alleviate the pressure and the cancel tension.

When playing in a slow, singing style it is important to keep the hand as free from tension as possible in order to vibrate freely. This aspect, which falls under “musicality” and “sound” elements (see previous blogs for more about the ‘elements’), outweighs the extra “security” of intonation. Yes, you may have to take more time in practicing intonation and perhaps a few risks but the end result will be better quality music, which is what counts.

Lifting the fingers from the string is incredibly important in fast passages as well.

Since there are so many possibilities for error, I suggest taking some time and play parts of your repertoire in a “finger after finger” mode, in which only one finger touches the string at all times (except double stops and chords, of course). The fingers do not need to “fly up in the air” but be released and off the string unless they are pressing the note that is being played. This is a good way to find where you actually need to keep the fingers down and when the possibility exists to free the hand.