FEELING THE TRILL

Rhythm is in the body. It's dance, heartbeat, waves, little vibrations. This morning I played around with feeling that rolling motion in the left hand trill in Two Part invention #7.  I realized that I had become so focused (yeah, I over focus) on synchronizing the primary accent on the upper note of every other triplet with the click of the metronome that I wasn't feeling the secondary accent on the lower note of every other triplet.

OK, that last sentence needs some explanation. Here's the basic pattern of the trill, the smallest unit into which it can be broken down:  cbcbcb. That's two triplets: cbc bcb.  To get the feel of it rhythmically, there has to be an accent (emphasis) on the very first note of the pattern, and that accent is synchronized with the beat of the music, the metronome click: Cbc bcb.  And there also has to be a lesser accent on the lower note, the first note of the second triplet: Cbc Bcb. 

DAH da da DAH da da.  Feel it?  It rolls when I'm feeling both accents -- really feeling them in my body.

I'm playing the trill with the index finger and middle finger of my left hand, or fingers 2 and 3 in the convention pianists use to number the fingers (the thumb is 1, the pinky is 5). To play the trill in a relaxed way, I have to allow my forearm to rotate loosely at the elbow.  It's in this motion that I feel -- or don't feel -- the rocking and rolling accents of the trill.

Maybe I should rename the blog "The Obsessed Pianist".

A Yeats poem comes to mind: The Fascination of What's Difficult