To Lift or Not To Lift: Baroque Articulation for Pre-College Students
Baroque performance practice for the average piano student
How can we help our piano students play their Baroque pieces expressively? What can we do to help form an emotional connection between our students and their music of the 17th and 18th centuries?
Articulation is one of my favorite ways to explore creativity in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries. But, given that most of the music for keyboard from that time has no slurs or other articulation markings, how can pianists decide what to do?
If you pick up Henle urtext of the Well-Tempered Clavier or the Henle urtext of the Inventions and Sinfonias, you’ll quickly see that the edition does little to help you with decisions about articulation.
Earlier in my teaching career it became obvious that one of the simplest guidelines I could give my students was the following:
Smallest rhythmic note values should be played legato, or relatively connected.
Anything larger should be played generally detached.
For instance, if a piece contains quarter notes, eighth notes, and sixteenth notes, the sixteenth notes are the smallest note values and should be played generally legato. The quarters and eighths should be detached.
This rule of thumb helped my students play in a way that sounded appropriate for Baroque style, and if intermediate students leaving my studio don’t remember anything else, I’m happy for them to remember that as a starting point!
However, I needed more guidelines that I could teach by and give to my students. After years of consulting various student editions, listening to professional recordings and conference presentations on Baroque music, and asking a lot of questions, I came up with a longer list. This list contains guidelines that can help a teacher and student creatively discuss what articulation choices help a student play expressively, according to the individual piece and affect the performer desires to create.
Want access to this list? Join my short online course titled Teaching Historical Style. In it, I equip you to help your piano students play their historical repertoire accurately and expressively.
Click the image here to learn more and enroll! ⤵️
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