Etude in D Minor: Artistry

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and in this lesson we're going to talk about how to play "Etude in D Minor"
by Cornelius Gurlitt with artistry.
What does it mean to play a piece with artistry?
For me, an artistic performance is one that tells a captivating musical story.
A story that sparks my imagination keeps me on the edge of my seat.
Some pieces have a dramatic and exciting story to tell.
Other pieces have a more peaceful beautiful story to tell,
but as a pianist, whenever you play I want you to remember that you are a storyteller,
and you are an artist.
Instead of painting with colors, you're painting with sound.
There's always an artistic way and there's an ugly way to play any piece.
Let's take "Etude in D Minor".
You could play it like rampaging rhinoceroses.
But music like that makes me want to turn it off.
Or you can play it with artistry.
There are several important musical elements that will help you play with artistry.
The first I'd like to talk about is phrasing.
Let's take a look at the score.
The most important tool a composer has to show a phrase is the phrase mark. This long curved line is a way that the composer shows the beginning of a phrase,
and you'll see that it goes off the edge
of the staff here, which is a composer's way of saying this phrase isn't done yet. I ran out of room.
But the phrase is still going just like when you're reading a book sometimes a sentence goes off the edge of one line.
You just keep that sentence going on the next line.
A phrase is just like a musical sentence. It has a beginning, middle, and an end, but all of these notes are telling one idea.
So as you play artistically,
the concept of phrasing is taking a phrase and making it beautiful.
Making it feel like all one idea.
How do you do that?
Well the most common shape for a phrase is to start soft and grow
as the phrase
expands. Often a phrase may be going up. You see that the pitches of this phrase are going up.
And I would put the climax of this phrase right here on beat 1.
Often the highest note of a phrase is the climax. This B-flat is technically the highest note of the phrase, but even more important sometimes than the highest note is falling on a downbeat.
Remember how beat 1 in music is naturally the strongest beat?
4 1 2 3 4 1
So I'm going to put the climax right there,
and sometimes in my music I like to mark the climax of a phrase with a star symbol,
or you can just put like a little sparkle symbol around that note to somehow show that this note is
like the climax of my story.
It's where all these notes are headed.
And then after you hit the climax, that phrase is going to decrescendo.
Now a composer isn't going to mark every single crescendo and decrescendo for you. The composer may just show you the phrase, and then it will be up to you
to add in that crescendo and decrescendo because you know how to play artistically.
You know how to do phrasing.
Whenever you see a phrase, your job is to make it interesting.
You're not going to play every note
just the same as the one before it. That is the worst
form of artistry to just make everything exactly the same.
You want to show some growth in the phrase.
You can make that very interesting.
Now what about this phrase?
When a phrase is going up that's a natural time to crescendo. So we're going to go
Going to get louder, louder, louder. I put the climax of this phrase right here. It comes pretty early in the phrase
since we dropped down there.
I'm going to already start thinking of my decrescendo starting
And then the last note of a phrase is almost always one of the softest notes of the phrase.
That's just a general rule that's going to happen 95% of the time or more.
Same idea here.
Now we're crescendoing again, and
in the score we've got a crescendo marking so not
just because of the phrase, we're also going to think of just like turning up the volume in general and building up.
So maybe this crescendo will be even more, and maybe this decrescendo
will be less
than we did up here because we want this feeling of building up
to this mezzo forte.
Right? We started at a piano,
but now by here because of this crescendo,
we're phrasing within that crescendo so there still will be a little coming back down here.
But overall we're getting louder and louder to come up to a mezzo forte here.
And then remembering that also we've got this added tension
from this second.
Remember, anytime we have those seconds that's creating some dissonance in the right hand
which is going to add to the excitement
of this climax note,
which then resolves by coming to this consonant third in the right hand.
The left hand drops an octave.
Listen to that.< ...