And now for something completely sextuple
This variation by Mozart on “Ah, vous dirai-je maman”, K.265/300e has turned out to be a real life-saver in class for one of those ballet exercises where you need a…
More on “truly triple meter” – are Chopin’s waltzes really mazurkas?
I’m not saying that Chopin couldn’t write a waltz, or that his embodied sense of waltzing was too fragile to be able to incorporate it in music. But I wonder…
More on the rareness of the truly triple waltz
In my last post, I said “Truly triple waltzes are an impossibility. They shouldn’t exist, and they don’t”. Less than 48 hours later, while I was playing Ich weiß nicht…
Playing for ballet class tips day 19: read the feet, divide the beat
In petit allegro, it’s a useful rule of thumb to listen to the rhythm of the exercise as the teacher sets it, and look very carefully at the feet as…
Playing for ballet class tips #4: Forget about time signatures in ballet class
Time signatures in ballet class: don’t get precious about them There’s no polite way to say this—pianists, don’t get pissy about time signatures in ballet class. In other words, if…
Dance rhythms fight back: the 9/8 hornpipe
A while back I started collecting examples of ‘dance rhythms to annoy your music teacher with’. Nothing makes me more frustrated than the term ‘dance rhythms’. There are several generations…