When I was just starting to broaden my ears to the brilliance of Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonatas, I heard one of my early teachers, Robert Squires, play through Scarlatti’s Sonata in A Minor, K.54 (L.241). He played all of the trills cross-stringed and his reasoning was that a harpsichord would also perform the ornaments cross-stringed. Whatever the reason, it sounded so wonderful to hear the crispness and clarity of the trills played this way. Since then, I have worked on a lot of sonatas and have found that regularly practicing the following right hand formulas really help to develop and maintain this skill. There is a lot of beauty in playing trills with slurs but in a lot of baroque keyboard music, performing trills and ornaments across strings is worth the work.
I love getting to the point when a student is ready to tackle Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Etude Nº1. There are so many angles to explore and it takes a lot of dedication to master them. At one point during my preparation to perform all 12 etudes, I determined that the most effective use of my warm-up time was to dedicate at least 30 minutes to Etude Nº1, 30 minutes to Etude Nº2, and 30 minutes to Etude Nº3. Following this, I noticed that my hands consistently performed well when I worked on other material.
Over the course of months, I may have played those etudes at least a thousand times, in many, many different ways. I tried everything I could think of to improve them.
The first step in this wonderful journey is to develop the right hand’s ability to play the entire arpeggio comfortably. The great Andrés Segovia suggested a solution that is still used by the majority of students and the one I used for years. However, as we develop our abilities, we find that our hands have an easier time with certain movements, and we find ways to use those movements to harness our strengths.
So, I always suggest putting in your time with Segovia’s solution until you can perform the Etude with that pattern. I find that the weakest part of the solution is moving from m to a, making the 3rd quarter note beat (half note of the measure) sound articulate, which helps to delineate the rhythmic structure of the Etude, so I have come to prefer substituting m with i. However, it wasn’t until working on the piece for many years that I slowly came to prefer it. Explore the possibilities in the practice room by adding in a few alternate fingerings to start the exploratory process. I’ve watched my mentor, Eliot Fisk, play it through in hundreds of ways just as an exercise to develop string crossing—I think I remember him even doing the whole arpeggio with the middle finger and pinky!
Here are some important ways to practice it. Stay tuned for Part 2, and we’ll go deeper.
