How hard are Arabesque No. 1 and Clair De Lune?

ShiroKuro

When I start the uni course in the fall, I’ll have to pick pieces in different styles, and I would love to do an impressionistic piece.

So let’s talk about what makes these two Debussy pieces challenging.

Arabesque No 1:
Polyrhythms. I have played lots of pieces with polyrhythms, but I always have to do serious, targeted practice before getting them to flow. So I think I can do it, but this would be one of the challenges of this piece for me.

Chords. How are the stretches? I haven’t sat at the keyboard with this piece, just casually looked at the score, so it’s kind of hard to tell without sitting down to try it.
On a good day, I can play a 10th in my LH but not really in my RH. It looks like this piece does not have big chords so much as stretched out arpeggios, and I play a lot of music where the LH travels up and down the keyboard, so hopefully that part will be do-able, but am I underestimating it?

What else?

Clair De Lune
To me, this piece looks harder than Arabesque. Is that right? I’ve listened to and looked at this piece less than the Arabesque, so I actually don’t have a sense of where the challenges might lie, what should I look at?

Other impressionistic pieces?
Other pieces by Debussy, or Ravel for example, seem harder to me. Are there some others that I should consider?

keystring

I've done the Debussy Arabesque I. I went at it one year, dropped it, and then managed to do it the following year. My initial difficult was above all the 2 against 3 polyrhythm - I'd only done short passages with that rhythm and they were slower. Both the "not-difficult" and "1 2&3" (other note comes in on the &) didn't work for me. Doing a lopsided rhythm for one hand and then evening it out also didn't work. I found a teacher teaching this on-line who thought the "not difficult" type of count doesn't work with faster music. He proposed playing a section of one hand; then the other hand - putting one on automatic while consciously playing the other. That finally worked. i.e. I changed approaches the 2nd year.

ShiroKuro Chords. How are the stretches? I haven’t sat at the keyboard with this piece, just casually looked at the score, so it’s kind of hard to tell without sitting down to try it.
On a good day, I can play a 10th in my LH but not really in my RH. .....

Maybe a rethink of how to see these chords - not as stretches but as movement. I relearned movement primarily via the Chopin op. 10 no. 1 at the extreme end. You don't stretch into a 10th for example: you move or sweep into that 10th. I think that professor Mortensen has videos about this. If you've not done this, maybe there's occasion to experiment with it ahead of time. I know you're in an odd teacher - no-teacher situation. If you did land a good one, maybe they could guide you in this.

pseudonym58

You could also look at the Menuet from Ravel's "Le Tombeau de Couperin".
Yes, "Claire de Lune" would be likely more challenging than the 1st Arabesque, but no (unarranged) Debussy is really easy.
The girl with the Flaxen Hair and Heather are both 2-page Preludes that you might find playable without too many obvious technical challenges.

ShiroKuro

pseudonym58 the Menuet from Ravel's "Le Tombeau de Couperin"

Thanks! I recognize the title but the piece doesn’t come readily to my mind’s ear, I’ll give a listen.

pseudonym58 too many obvious technical challenges

I’m not trying to avoid technical challenges, and in fact a certain amount of challenge will be good because that will help me progress of course. But I also want to make sure the technical challenges are not beyond me.

To a certain extent, that’s almost impossible to gauge without actually getting into the piece. But I need to be careful in my selection because I’ll have to play at least one piece for a jury, so that’s one reason I want to choose carefully.

keff

I found them both very difficult and before starting this reply have had both scores open on the piano.

My first teacher as a returning adult introduced me to Clair de Lune far too soon meaning it took many months just to learn the notes and musically I was far from satisfied. It must have been five or six years later when the first teacher had retired and I was attending an adult class for intermediate pianists that I made a second attempt. This time it was better such that the class thought I was playing well enough to receive an applause (applause was seldom given) but again personally I thought it wasn't good enough. Something then occurred that I left the class feeling that I couldn't play piano at all and I dropped out and temporarily gave up playing.

I found consolation in the score of Clair de Lune and for six months played nothing else. At the end I concluded could play piano and found my long term teacher that I was with for almost twenty years.

Arabesque no.1 was on my bucket list and we started looking at it perhaps five years ago. By this time I was more experienced but the polyrhythms still required a great deal of practice before teacher was satisfied. Playing two against three etc is a good thing to do because once it is learnt it is useful elsewhere.

I find Arabesque 1 the ultimate piece composed for piano and really should revise it as not been played for too long. I don't feel the same for Clair de Lune but perhaps I have just played this too much in the past.

There are a couple of other pieces by Debussy that I have studied; Cakewalk and Girl with the Flaxen Hair. The latter is the most difficult of all these pieces written by Debussy (imo).

Choose the piece that you like best.

ShiroKuro

keff left the class feeling that I couldn't play piano at all and I dropped out and temporarily gave up playing.

That’s awful! I’m glad that isn’t the end of your story though!!!

Thanks for all your comments! Just looking at the scores, and thinking about other pieces I’ve played, I think Arabesque will be more do-able for me than Clair De Lune. I’ll listen to those other pieces you mentioned.

Re polyrhythms, and the discussion of technical challenges… If I’m going to play Arabesque, I think I might benefit from doing some pedagogical prep work with polyrhythms. For one thing, I can’t sight read polyrhythms, for example in an easier piece that I could otherwise sightread easily and almost at tempo.

So one reason to articulate the technical challenges is to do that kind of prep work…

pseudonym58

(Note: This might be obvious to you already)
A good preparatory study for the 1st Arabesque would be to play twos against threes, alternating hands, but always without changing any kind of hand position so that you minimize the difficulty and can concentrate just on the juxtaposition of the duplets and triplets.
One way I found that I could more easily get used to it was to think in terms of further subdivision:
1 2 AND 3 4 5 AND 6

ShiroKuro

pseudonym58 not obvious, thank you!

And that sounds exactly like what would be very helpful for me.

Whenever I play something with 2 against 3, I end up having to do all the little tricks like “hot cup of tea” and drill it into my brain and fingers. After working on it, I can “feel” the beat. But I’d like to be able to feel that beat without having to do that every time I play something with 2:3 in it!

twocats

Did anyone mention Reverie? There's still some two against three but the piece is pretty slow and I don't remember there being any big challenges. At the end there's a hand crossover section.

ShiroKuro

twocats Thanks! I forgot about that one!

Yeah, the first minute and a half is pretty easy, but where you started it, it's a little more dense....

But listening and reading along, I would guess this is easier than Arabesque No 1. It's a little more chordal, but it's so slow, I think the challenges would be easier, and probably the 2 against 3 parts here are easier than the polyrhythms in Arabesque... Just going off the score of course. I might feel differently once I get the piece out at the piano.

Also, it's been a long time since I looked at Debussy scores, and I've never tried to play him. But after all these years, and all the contemporary pieces I play... Looking at Reverie and Arabesque, the technique I've developed over the years seems basically like it is exactly the technique you need for this kind of music.

In fact, if I was my teacher, I probably wouldn't let me play these because they're too close to what I usually play.
😆 😆 😆

twocats

There must be tons of videos out there on how to approach polyrhythms! It's a bit free (not strict timing) when it comes to Romantic pieces and you just have to let your hands operate independently without overthinking it. I do hands separately and then eventually when I put them together I try not to freak out and just let it happen.

twocats

ShiroKuro I looked up and Arabesque is Grade 10 RCM and Reverie is Grade 9, so it should be slightly easier!

I think the difference between these works and what you typically work on is that there's a driving rhythm behind a lot of the pieces you play and with impressionistic pieces you just have to relax and let it flow lightly and beautifully! And learning two and against three is a crucial skill 🙂

So I would say that it's actually a perfect thing to try, because you have a lot of the technical skills already but you're adding a new skill of polyrhythms and a very different musical approach!

ShiroKuro

P.S. for the record, I'm thinking one of my other pieces should be Bach. And then the other pieces should be easier....

Of course, this may all change when the fall semester rolls around. By the way, sometime by the beginning of August, I have to send a video of myself playing to the piano program head so they can place me with a teacher. Stay tuned for a thread about that!

ShiroKuro

twocats Arabesque is Grade 10 RCM and Reverie is Grade 9, so it should be slightly easier!

Interesting! I wish I had a sense of what some pieces I play would be graded as... I know some grading systems do grade some contemporary pieces, I'll have to poke around and see what I can find out.

twocats a driving rhythm behind a lot of the pieces you play

Oh yeah, good point. I don't think too much about it because those are the pieces I play, but if I do take on one of these, it would be good to articulate more of those differences.

And re polyrhythms, I think another difference is that, for example, the polyrhythms in an Einaudi piece I played super repetitive, whereas just looking at the score, in Arabesque, they are moving up and down the keyboard. Or, the 2 against 3 and 3 against 4 rhythms in a piece by Ffrench showed up in sort limited ways, like one polyrhythm note-grouping at the end of a measure. This happened in several spots across the piece, but that's still much more limited than the way the polyrhythms are sprinkled throughout Arabesque... So again, the Debussy would be harder, but not a huge leap from what I've been playing. That's kind of encouraging.

It's also very interesting to think about the intersections, or technique similarities, between these contemporary pieces and more traditional piano pieces.... Although, to be fair, Debussy is relatively recent! 😅

Speaking of technique intersections... It occurs to me that Bach would be good for some pieces where the same line (or voice) is distributed across both hands, like the Ffrench piece I have currently put aside...

hebele

For what is worth, Piano Syllabus rates all three about same level:

In their home page you can search for "Debussy" and sort the pieces by difficulty. They also have some suggestions on each page. Looks useful.

ShiroKuro

hebele thanks! I can never get that site to open, unfortunately....

BartK

The easiest Debussy piece is Page d'album. It's only one page and is listed as RCM level 8. I played it as a quick study and although it has some typical tricky Debussy-isms it's still relatively easy.

A notch above that is La fille aux cheveux de lin. It's pretty short (2 pages) so you can learn the notes quickly and work on musicality.

Arabesque and Clair de lune are a level above that still. They are significantly longer so you'll need some time to learn the notes. I only messed around for two weeks with Arabesque but it felt about the same difficulty as Clair de lune. Both of them have some ticky fingering in places.

The easiest Ravel is the one page prelude in A minor. It's all slow and the only technical difficulty is the overlapping hands in the middle section. I didn't play the Menuet or the Valses nobles et sentimentales but I did play another piece called À la manière de Borodine and it's significantly harder.

pianoloverus

I think you should approach your teacher with three to five suggestions for a piece from the impressionist period and discuss the relative difficulty of each with him or her. All these pieces being discussed are reasonably close in difficulty and you shouldn't be concerned if one of them is just one level above another.

ShiroKuro

pianoloverus All these pieces being discussed are reasonably close in difficulty and you shouldn't be concerned if one of them is just one level above another.

You may be right... Although OTOH, there are always those pieces that are of similar level, but one ends up being much harder for Person A, while Person B finds that one to be the easier one...

What I mean is, after a certain point, I'll just have to sit down with the score and decide how it feels to me, and then figure out if it is do-able, especially in the context of a semester with a defined end point.

ShiroKuro

@twocats btw so are grades 8-9 RCM called late intermediate? What about grade 10?

I'm googling around and one Einaudi piece that I find quite easy, Nuvole Bianche, is apparently said to be Grade 8 RCM. I wonder why, I would think it's much easier... it's sightreadable, fairly repetitive, not challenging harmonically... 😅 Does length factor into the grades? Because it's longish, but to me that shouldn't be taken into account in grading technique. Maybe because the repetitiveness means you have to have a very quiet hand??

Alexis Ffrench pieces are showing up in the grades 6-8 range, depending on the piece.... One of his (IMO) harder pieces isn't graded. Some Ffrench is more harmonically complex than Einaudi... Oh and it's Ffrench who I think of as being most relevant (technique-wise) for playing Debussy, for what it's worth (which probably isn't much).... (And for the record, I don't mean something super easy like Wishing)...

Anyway, not super relevant, but it might be helpful for me to have an idea of where I fall in the RCM grades, just for reference. Ultimately, some popular music requires different technique and it may be of limited benefit for me to try to attach a traditional grade to myself...

twocats

ShiroKuro btw so are grades 8-9 RCM called late intermediate? What about grade 10?

I'm googling around and one Einaudi piece that I find quite easy, Nuvole Bianche, is apparently said to be Grade 8 RCM.

ShiroKuro Anyway, not super relevant, but it might be helpful for me to have an idea of where I fall in the RCM grades, just for reference.

I would say RCM Grade 8 is intermediate to late intermediate and Grade 9 is late intermediate to early advanced, and Grade 10 should be solidly advanced. But grading is very subjective and I find that there are pieces where I'm surprised about where they fall, and sometimes if it's an easier piece I think it's often about the difficulty to play it well musically and not just about the technical difficulty to play the notes. So sometimes it's about the musical maturity needed to play certain works as well.

If I were to guess, you've typically been playing stuff in the RCM Grade 8-9 range, with 10 sprinkled in.

And when you do RCM exams you're required to have pieces from all different time periods because the musical approach is different and you have to demonstrate your range. Playing classical is a completely different beast from the kind of music you've been playing 🙂