The Bear: Hands Together

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and today
we're going to learn how to play "The Bear" by Vladimir Rebikov with hands together.
Let's come to the piano to get started.
You'll see that the first note of "The Bear" is a really low ledger line note in the bass staff.
So, how do we figure out really low ledger line notes? Well, I like to use my ground G line as a reference. That's the bottom line of the bass staff,
and then each ledger line remember, is just one skip down, because line notes go every other note with the space in between
each line note. So here's the bottom line of bass staff,
here's ledger line number one, skip down, and you can see if you count we have to go down four ledger lines. So let's just count down by skips. Here's ledger line one, skip down, skip down, skip down, that brings us all the way down to F.
So, the first note of this piece is the lowest F on your piano if you're on an 88 key piano.
By the way, for this piece you will need an 88 key piano to get down low enough, and then what's this next note?
Well, you can see it's just a step below ground G, so it's also an F.
We are moving the distance of an octave between these first two notes.
Now, scan through the piece for me and tell me if the left hand ever changes.
Remember, you have to double check every note. Sometimes a composer might trick you or surprise you by changing things up.
It's not really trying to trick you, it's just what music does. Sometimes we like to have variation. So,
press pause and scan through the piece, and then press play when you're ready to say if the left hand is the same all the way through or not.
If you look through the piece carefully, you'll see the left hand does this same pattern the entire piece.
Until I guess you could say the last note, where it plays a two note chord.
Now, if your hand can't reach a full octave,
if you have a smaller hand, you might not be able to reach all the way from F to F, and if that's the case, just play the low note you can omit
that key if you need to.
Now, when you have a pattern that repeats through an entire piece or a section of a piece,
that's called an ostinato an ostinato.
An ostinato is simply a repeating pattern in music
often in the accompaniment.
Okay, now you'll notice this is marked staccato,
so we want a nice light sound like this.
And because we have to move an octave, I want you to kind of think of moving your hand
in a little bit of an arc or a rainbow shape as you move from note to note.
So I don't want you to stretch and really be uncomfortable for the entire piece
with this, you know, a stretching approach. Let your hand just kind of gently glide back and forth in a little
mini rainbow going from F to F with finger 5 to 1.
See how I'm doing that? Just a gentle rainbow motion. Your hand should feel comfortable and open,
and you're just falling on those two notes with a nice, light staccato sound.
Press pause, and I'd like you to work on that motion
for a couple of minutes, you know, take a break, always keep your wrist really loose and relaxed,
your fingers relaxed. Again, just use gravity and
drop back and forth on those two keys. Press pause to work on that motion, then press play to go on.
Again, it's really important that you don't get tense and as you play this.
Keep your hand light and flexible.
Make sure those notes are staccato.
Now let's take the first phrase and look at putting this hands together.
Your left hand is creating kind of this steady pulse, and well, let's slow it way down. 1-& 2-&, 1-& 2-&, then the right hand starts,
and you notice I'm playing my right hand louder than my left hand. That's on purpose, because this is the accompaniment.
This is the melody.
You might have also noticed that my right hand is not staccato.
We've got these tenutos.
See, it's not:
That would be both hands staccato.
My left hand is staccato, while the right hand is playing tenutos.
It's kind of hard to do.
It's hard to have two different articulations. One for one hand, one for the other.
So you have to go really slow, and imagine this hand being sticky, and this hand being bouncy like the keys are maybe hot.
I want you to go into super slow-motion style.
1-& 2-&, 1-& 2-&,
1-& 2-&, 1-& 2-&,
And work on playing the right hand sticky tenutos, the left hand staccato,
and if you can, a little bit quieter in the left hand too, but don't worry too much about that at first.
If you just play a nice light staccato, that would be great.
So, press pause to work on that first phrase hands together, then press play to go on.
Okay, let's try the next phrase hands together.
So now remember, we have this slight variation in measure eight. Don't forget about that slight change. We have B B C-sharp B B
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