Piano Video Lesson: How to Learn Schumann: Scenes from Childhood

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin and you're watching LivingPianos.com. I'm going to present to you ways of practicing the first movement of Schumann's wonderful Kindersehn in our Scenes from Childhood. This is a glorious set of pieces that is accessible to people who are not necessarily on a virtuoso level of technique and yet absolutely stupendous piece of music.

Better than that, it's a whole series of small movements so you don't have to take months to learn each one and you don't have to learn all of them. You can learn just select movements. Of course many of you already know like Traumerei.

That's one of the movements from this glorious work. I'm going to focus today on the very first movement from Strange Lands and People it translates to roughly.

It presents a unique challenge that you'll find in other pieces. What I want to show you here is not just for this movement, it covers a lot of things. Any of you who followed me you probably already know how I teach how to practice and how I myself practice which is to memorize first after reading through the piece maybe two or three times, getting right to work, taking very tiny, tiny phrases, memorize the right hand with all the details, get the left hand memorized with all the details, put the hands together. In a piece like this first movement of the Schumann, first of all I want to just play it for you so you can hear what the piece is about, this movement is about and then I'm going to show you what challenges this has with the way I'm talking about practicing.

All right, so usually learn a phrase maybe two measures, four measures, learn the phrase, then learn the left hand, then put them together, learn the next phrase. But the problem is just like in Counterpoint where you have let's say a fugue, where you have a middle voice that is divided between the hands, well that's exactly what's going on here. I'm going to demonstrate for you so you understand what the unique challenge is here and you have at the very beginning basically a melody and a bass part. Now I'm just going to play the melody and the bass and you'll hear it's a nice duet.

And then you have a middle part that is divided between the hands and that's this part.

So if you try to learn the hands separately it wouldn't make much sense, you'd end up with and the left hand would be.

So it makes much more sense instead to learn the inner voices as chords.

So you really want to learn the melody and the bass and then and the middle part almost like you have three hands. Learn those three independent parts, then by all means do the hands separately as I just demonstrated but to understand how the parts are basically a tetrio.

Now I'm going to give you a bonus tip here. How do you practice it so it doesn't sound like this? You want that middle line, those triplets to be quiet.

To control it you want to play with a different articulation in your practice.

A little gentle finger staccato.

Notice I was playing the bass longer even though it's written just as eighth notes, eighth note triplets, because you want to have a little bit more to that to bring out that duet quality. So that's the tips for today for how to approach this piece and anytime you have a piece where you have middle parts and I'm sure you've got lots of scores like this, try to identify the melody, the bass and the inner parts in chords first. Then you can practice hands separately even though realizing you're only playing part of the whole when you're doing that.

And then of course the articulations, great technique for identifying melody from harmony and have your hands be able to recognize it so you can get the beautiful subtle voicing.

So you can have gradations of tone in the melody and yet have that middle triplets, very subservient.

I hope this is enjoyable for you. If you like these kind of videos subscribe here at LivingPiatos .com and YouTube and you'll get fresh videos on a regular basis. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-learn-schumann-scenes-from-childhood/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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