Hello and welcome to the retake of Piano Lesson #15. The previous version got screwed up from my webcam because my original digital camera that I was using broke on me. The power source did not work and everything crashed.
I have tried using my webcam and then the audio randomly cuts in and out for some reason. I am not sure what is going on there. I tried diagnostics and whatnot but that did not work, so I had to wait and get a digital camera. I got a Sony Cybershot DSC-W80. The video and audio quality is better, so I hope you guys appreciate that. It bit my wallet a little bit, but what can you do, right?
With lesson #15, I was talking about composers and periods of music. There are a few periods of music—five, to be exact. They just number them from A to E and A is the beginning of the period. It is the furthest back in time.
List A would be The Baroque Period. The next period is The Classical Period. The next after that, List C, is The Romantic Period. The third is the Post-Impressionistic Period, which is List D. The fifth is List E which is Modern Music, anything from 1900s on.
Music has changed quite a bit between those periods. They each have their own distinct differences between each other. So when you are playing a song in one period and then you play another song in a different period, you actually have to play them differently. This is the whole purpose of this video, so that you get the right impression piece.
If you play a List C song as if you play a List A song, you are going to get bad licks, like if you are in a competition or if you are getting adjudicated, they will totally rip you apart. Also, they do not really know anything about music.
I will try to do a brief explanation of each period and let you want to look for when you are playing that, just so that you can make it sound like you know a lot about the period.
With List A, the technology was not very good, the piano had weak strings, and their action was a lot different from ours. I will not go into everything with it.
With the piano, they had clavichords and harpsichords. Piano Forte came in later and then they just abbreviated that to a Piano.
List A: Baroque Period. Bach was a very prominent composer in this period. He had written a lot of preludes. With this kind of stuff, you want to realize that they did not have a pedal, so they could not hold notes. Also, the way they sustained notes, they could not hold it longer than maybe (Demonstration) that long before they would have to change the note. Anything that they wanted to be hammered out and long, they made a big staccato out of it. (Demonstration)
So, anything long, you can assume that it is going to be short in that period. It is about 1600 to 1785. Anywhere in between those years, it is going to be a lot of Baroque stuff. That is why they called it the Baroque Period. How they get their legato notes together is because they could not hold them for very long that if they wanted it to sound like it was joined together, they had to do it faster. (Demonstration) Anything long would be detached and then they would join the faster stuff together.
Also, their dynamic changes are very robotic. (Demonstration) They are almost like machines. They would go “piano” and then it will be (Demonstration). From this bar over the entire piano and then all of a sudden (Demonstration) it will be lots of Forte, and then it will be Forte.
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