One way my world has opened up recently has been through my Spanish classes. That is to say, I’ve met a lot of non-musicians in my Spanish classes who don’t know the difference between keyboard instruments. Like, what’s the difference between an organ and a piano? What’s a harpsichord? If you can play the piano, can you also play the organ? If you can play the organ, can you play the harpsichord? And so on.
By the way, the Spanish words for these instruments are:
el piano = piano
el órgano = organ
el clavecín = harpsichord
The harpsichord has weighed heavily on me the last few days, as I am trying to prepare for the First Mondays concert on September 6th. As I have written before, the harpsichord is simply not my instrument, although I am called to play it frequently. I just don’t feel as comfortable with it compared to the organ.
More specifically, I am trying to learn the “Violin Sonata in G minor” by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, formerly assigned the BWV number (Bach’s catalog number) of 1020, meaning that scholars used to think it was written by Johann Sebastian Bach. Now, though, they assign the number H542.5 to this work, and say it’s written by J.S. Bach’s fifth son.
Last week I wrote an email to violinist Darel Stark, asking when we might get together to rehearse. I finally heard back yesterday with Darel’s tempos, and I got a huge panic attack when I tried out the pieces with the metronome. You see, I had listened to the tempos of the piece as played by a flute rather than a violin, specifically this video:
I was feeling pretty confident that I could play my part with reasonable accuracy at these tempos. How was I to know that when the piece is played by a violin it’s taken A LOT FASTER?! Here’s Jaccottet Grumiaux playing the same piece on a violin. It takes him only 9 minutes and 52 seconds to play the piece, compared to 11 minutes and 20 seconds when it was played on the flute! Yikes!
Look at this video in how a harpsichord is plucked rather than struck with a hammer as it is on a piano.
What I’ve come to learn, however, is that the harpsichord is not built to play fast repeated notes. . . and boy! do I have a bunch of repeated 16th notes in this piece! I’ve actually been cheating and am practicing the piece faster … but on the organ (!) which can keep up with the demands of playing repeated notes quickly.
Darel gave me the tempo marking of “quarter note equals 120,” which means that every second of time equals two quarter notes. The overwhelming majority of the piece is in sixteenth notes, and there are occasional 32nd notes. That means that throughout the piece, I have to play EIGHT NOTES in the space of ONE SECOND, and occasionally SIXTEEN NOTES in the space of one second! (I think my math is correct!)
Yowsers, that’s fast! That’s a whole lotta notes!
The backfall of a jack can be delayed if the plectrum is adjusted for too much “bite,” in an effort to obtain more volume from the instrument. This limits the capacity for repeated notes at speed. Could that be the cause? My instrument came back from a restringing with more volume, but an unreliable backfall on the front 8′ at quick tempi. A minor readjustment of the plectra for that rank sacrificed a couple of dB, but solved the problem. Another possible cause might be that the felt in the jack rail is too thin, or is no longer resilient enough to provide “bounce-back.” Buena suerte!