Triplet Polyrhythm

I think I bit off more than I can chew this time. Beware people, this is an OCP blog post, so all of you who wouldn’t tolerate national geographic for more than a couple of minutes on end, this blog post is NOT for you. Ok, usually when you play an instrument, you hear a piece and you know exactly whether it’s within your ability or not, and you know exactly which parts in that piece are gonna take up the most time as you practise, sometimes even knowing exactly how long it’s gonna take. With Debussy, just to put into perspective, professionals dare not play any of his compositions without a year of pre-practice, just to get the feel of it and not make complete and utter shmucks of themselves on national television or whatever. Now, It’s still duable for all of us average Joes out there. What one man can do another can do. SO, with passive provocation from a fellow piano player, who’s younger and certainly a virtuoso, I’m nuts enough to start off on Debussy’s 1st arabesque. Besides the idiosyncratic elaborate progressions, the chromaticism, the inhumane tempo, the unpredictability in the improvisational flow of that composition, that defies patterns and tedium, that  actually led the probing of classical musical into new age, but that’s not the point…Point is, after all of that, it is actually the triplet polyrythms that are a pain in the ass. To all of you non instrumentalists, I’ll try to bring a little light on it. Music Theory is simple. Music consists of beats. Sometimes 4 notes take two beats, meaning that 2 take one beat, so each has half. Now there’s that little thing called triplet, where 3 notes take one beat. So, try to synchronise it in your head so that the 2 different beats coincide into, bringing the triplets together with the 8th notes aforementioned. What happens is that they don’t go together, imagine putting your fingers together, just so that the fingers of one hand fit into the spaces of the other, but with the first two fingers meeting. Now accelerate that into high speed, cancel thought and give it a moment’s notice, now double that and triple it, that’s how hard it is. No probably it’s even harder.

Moving on, just because I can hear your brain cells screaming out to me in anguish to stop. And no I’m not a snob. Green bug feel, suck it up for a bit. I’ve been practising the first two lines for 3 days, just the finger exercises, because it starts of in two progressions then the actual intro, that’s when I got to the triplet polyrythms part. Aside from the fact that the right hand alone, or more professionally speaking the treble clef partition, required a lot of syncopation not to mention all the fingering and getting used to it, because practising is all about getting the piece to sink in beyond your conscious level of control so that your hands know what you’re doing without you having to think beforehand, because there won’t be time to think as you play a piece with that tempo, your motor control handles that for you. If you’ve watched Wilhelm Kempff play and you’ve seen how he seems to stare into space then your jaw drops with the cam as it shows that the two hands playing are actually protruding from his detached face. And by detached I mean has nothing to do with the rest of his body, because you can’t pack any more feeling into those wrinkles than this.

It explains the perverted “Your-hands-know-what-they’re-doing” part. So besides that, the fingering is just horrible. And no, not THAT kind of fingering. I know this blog post is a mine for all of you with a “That’s what she said” passion. Cut me some slack guys. Fingering as in knowing which finger plays what so that the other one gets to reach there. On top of all of that, I’m driving my teacher nuts. Last time, his “I-didn't-sign-up-for-this” vibe was pretty potent, even more potent after I named Chopin's nocturne opus (Op.) 9/2 by ear that he was showing me to brag, my identification of it cancelled the boasting effect. lol. Well, he’s stupid, he had to pick Chopin’s most famous nocturne and my favourite of his besides the posthumous ones to brag? Pfft. I was really embarrassed though, he was uncomfortable that I chose to work beyond the limits of the curriculum, especially at the part that he stumbled on as he showed me, so the criticism wasn’t exactly nice. His “danty fay2a” was a bit too grudgingly given off than I thought was polite. That’s when I decided I’m gonna make him fret even more by practising right then and there. God I love driving people nuts. :)

Triplet Polyrythms kind of remind me of something a friend dared me to do a couple of weeks ago. He said hop on one leg while rubbing your tummy and tapping your head. lol. Needless to say, no one can quite copy a chimp unless they are genetically predisposed to regression into the ape they once were. So, All I have to do is reach in for that little musical ape within me, get down with it and wish for the best. And don’t go TWSS on me.

If you give a shit, there’s the link.