- Download the score of music for petit allegro by Auber (free pdf)
- Read more about my Year of Ballet Playing Cards
Music for petit allegro: time to put that rag away for once
Several times since I started this “playing card” project, I’ve found myself looking for music that solves whatever problem turned up in class that week. Last week it was finding music for those twiddly allegros that need exactly the music that you don’t really want to play – the continuous semiquaver solos that seem to characterise a lot of French 19th century ballet music (see a related earlier post). Most of the time, I’ll try to play anything but that (rags, jazz standards, fiddle tunes and so on) but there are times when nothing else will do – in one class, the teacher made it clear she exactly wanted what she’d asked for, not some more entertaining alternative, and as it turned out, she was right – it did work better.
I’d already heard a couple of things that I rather liked while I was going through the Auber Gustave III score, so I decided to make a little medley of them. In fact, it’s only a medley on paper, you couldn’t play them in a row for class. In the third one, only the first 8 bars is even – you’d have to find a way of cutting/fiddling the last section. I started to do it myself, and then I remembered that other pianists often find much better ways than I do of finding cuts, so I’ve left the material there for you to make your own cuts in. You’ve been warned.
It’s easy to think that this music is so simple and lacking in harmonic/rhythm interest that you could just make it up as you go along. But actually, it’s not that easy to do, and you’ll find this isn’t that easy to play either. Maybe why this works so well as music for petit allegro – it’s tricky for the musician, as well as the dancer.
I picked the first one, which starts at 9’47” because it has a half-bar anacrusis, and that’s my new favourite trick for class, experimenting with what William Rothstein calls “Franco-Italian hypermeter” (see earlier post). You could start it on the beat if you wanted, but I’ve found that these half-bar anacruses things bring a lightness to duple meter things that works like magic. In this case, there’s also a forte-piano dynamic marking from the weak to the strong beat, which creates even more lightness. Little touches like this are counterintuitive but look perfect with the right exercise. Try it and see.
The second one starts at 5’19” and is the most usable of the three perhaps.
The third one starts at 12’18” and isn’t really a “running 4” at all, but I like it, and I seem to be short of things that go like this. Be warned about the second section (see above).
