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I am actually still confused by that first part of the piece 😂 the second part is much more like a common Sarabande. I am sure I have seen other English Sarabands with that notation though. I wonder if it should be played more inegale, like a dotted note pattern. I need to experiment more. Or Sarabandes were conceived differently in England at the time. Or someone made a 'collage' between two pieces. I need to investigate. I think that a lot of people didn't really care about spelling back in the day, they just wrote it like it felt like. It could be a typo, or at some point a typo started the whole SarabRand thing.. quite a few of them around.. just like some 'Almonds' 😂

Thanks Glenn :-)

Those metronome numbers of the 19th century are a great objective reference to work our way back to this earlier music. We might get it wrong, but we won't get it THAT wrong.. which is irrelevant anyway. What hooks me into this way of playing is the fact that the music assumes that rhetorical quality of speech with all notes becoming like syllables to be pronounced clearly.

Once I played a short recital to a mixed audience, some people were familiar with 'harpsichord music', some were not. Some, at the end, came to tell me that for the first time they really liked the harpsichord! I played well enough but far from my best. I believe that my tempo choice allowed the music to speak for itself, even with the odd wrong note! That day I played, amongst other pieces, an Allegro by Galuppi, unknown to most, even the connoisseurs, which at my tempo would have been classified by modern standards an Allegretto at the most, but more towards Andante. That piece generated an enthusiasm that even to me was surprising! Obviously because of not knowing the piece, there was nothing to compare it with. I do think we are only the beginning of a big musical revolution :-)

The only one that I could find with this sonata, Schott, Galuppi 10 Sonatas. There are a few mistakes. Bar 9 shows a trill on a' and g' which does not appear in any of the 18th century manuscripts I could find on IMSLP. Those trills are awkward because they come after a trill of a lower note, from which one then needs to jump up to trill again.. I have not played them, only the trills on the lower notes (minute 1:06). Then bar 13 has a d in the Alberti bass that is obviously supposed to be a c# (minute 1:45), given that the previous bar has the same notes in both hands, with the correct c#. Then in the succession of trills at the end.. the edition has all the dotted notes with a trill, the 18th century manuscripts exclude the trill from the first dotted note of the groups in both bars 42 and 43 and so I played it (minute 5:45). Which edition do you play from?

@ i play from a 20th century edition which is full of problems… I may make an edition myself based on the manuscripts if the complete sonata is available

Looking forward to your post-exam recording :-)

Stainer & Bell, William Croft Complete harpsichord works in two volumes. This Prelude is in the second volume with some suites and other short pieces stainer.co.uk/shop/k31/ I am not sure whether it is in IMSLP, but you can dig in there and see if you find it.

@theclavierist thanks!!! (Pd. I love your english harpshichord)

@@ana-ch3ie Thanks! It is a nice instrument :-)

Prefiro essa musica sem firula :-)

@@theclavierist cuidado pra essa pureza nao virar purismo hahah

Thanks :-) If someone requests something I can never promise to do it and if I say yes it might take a long time. It is just because harmonising 'one video a week' with the rest of life can be a tricky thing to do logistically, at least for me at the moment. I often (if not always) need to compromise between time required to learn a piece, time required/available to record it and time to dedicate to my 'behind the scenes' musical practice. It also depends on the complexity of the request. I had requests in the past to which I did not say no but postponed to an unknown future time and they exist in a list. In summary, taking into consideration all of the above, I am happy to hear requests :-)

@@theclavierist could you possibly perform Michelangelo Rossi’s toccata VII? It’s a peculiar piece I enjoy. Would it also be possible if you could learn a piece that I composed? If you can’t do either that’s totally okey.

Rossi's toccatas, in general, have been in my radar for a while. Number VII has that jazzy section towards the end :-) the 'stylus phantasticus' is however a keyboard language that I have just started to approach in playing. I have been looking at Frescobaldi's Toccata III. So, yes.. at some point (it might take months) I will put out my interpretation of Rossi's music, but you might hear the Frescobaldi first. My concept of that music is totally different from what one hears in pretty much all the recordings that I know.. but that is usually the case with whatever I play anyway. For each style or 'era' I take time to find my own connection with it. Send me an email to theclavierist@gmail.com with your composition. I will have a look to see if I can do it.

@@theclavierist I emailed you my score. Sorry for the delay.

It was a pleasure to dedicate time to this piece of yours at the clavichord :-) thank YOU!

@@theclavierist I think it sound perfect on the clavichord. One day maybe I'll have one of my own!

@@musicalintentions check out the website of the Boston Clavichord Society, it has a list of builders based in the United States. Also you can keep an eye on the Harpsichord Clearing House website (also US based), even though you are unlikely to find a bargain there, but one never knows!

Thank you for the nice words ❤️

Me too! It might just not be easy to keep it up right now.. but I will do my best :-)

Vielen dank :-)

Something light is good sometimes!

Nice and easy on the ear :-)

Thank you for listening! The drawer is literally a drawer. I keep felt and wedges for tuning in it.

@@theclavierist So cool! Thank you for sharing the secrets of the clavichord, and for sharing your talent on youtube.

Yes it is. Can you play it this slow? I can play it faster. A bit too slow is a subjective judgement anyway, but from the point of view of a 21st century human it is understandable. A bit too slow compared to what? To what the best harpsichordists and professors of today (and all of the previous century) might say is the correct tempo? Music in the past was played slower. I am not saying that I know the correct tempi but I am certainly not afraid of experimenting with slow speeds and to do it for long enough to retune my brain into a frequency other than our frenetic, almost hysterical 21st century one. You should look into the work of Wim Winters, Authentic Sound on youtube. It is focused on the early 19th century but obviously it has consequences that go beyond that period. The evidence is overwhelming and so far the counterarguments I have seen are all irrational or ignore important pieces of information. Fundamentally, I think people should play music however they want, as beauty can be found and be created in everything, but in the past they played music slower than what we mostly hear today. It is a fact.

Vielen Dank :-)

Thank you!

Thank you Riva :-)

Thank you 🙂

It's probably because I don't know anything that the only chance I have is to listen to the instrument and the music to come up with some form of solution. With this approach these slow tempi somehow come naturally. I find that the feelings are embedded in the sounds, so by listening we may perceive them.. if we allow 'time' for the sound to speak we perceive even more...

Thank you for these nice words!

Thank you :-) this week I have been looking at some Chopin.. hopefully, in the near future, I will find the time to prepare and share more of his music, which has always had a special meaning to me, since childhood.

Thank you! I don't have a 'scientific' method. For suites with allemandes, courantes etc.. I use my own internal 'pulsometre' 🙃 Factors influencing it may be the 'Affekt' of the piece, the notation, its intricacy, and then the balance between the different movements of the suite. I have sort of found my own way of finding a tempo that works within the mode in which I operate, which resonates with the WBMP approach anyway. If I find more than one tempo solution for a piece I decide which one to use by trying it out enough times to convince myself of one result rather than another, in the context of that given moment (things could change months later but would always gravitate around the same area anyway). After a while one gets used to certain tempi for certain types of pieces. For pieces (or sonatas) with Allegro, Andante etc.. I use pretty much a similar approach. However, having found some difficulty with specific pieces in the past, I consulted Quantz's table of 'pulse speeds' with their 'translation' into metronome marks (in The Interpretation of Early Music by Donington). Often to find, anyway, that the solution I had 'found' was in the same region of tempo that Quantz had prescribed taking his pulse indications as a double beat. Funnily enough Donington comments that Quantz's tempi are 'problematic and unrealistic' (or something like that..), which shows an obvious single beat approach, and only that, in his mind. In summary, I do things mostly intuitively, with some reference when it is possible to have it. I have found that the more I play pieces of a certain type or style, the more easily I manage to find tempi for them. I guess that accumulating experience, even as little as the one I have, helps. We have to sort of open our own path if nobody else who is playing 'pre-metronome' music (and could be a 'reference') realises that WBMP is a fact and as a consequence the 'older' music also was considerably slower and more rhetorical than what we could define as 'mainstream standards' of today. It is somewhat difficult to explain in words all of this. I hope that some of it makes sense to you :-)

@@theclavierist Thank you very much for this detailed explanation. I think I'm more or less on the same page with you. As a starting point, if I have a tempo indication, like "andante", I typically set my metronome to that tempo and then halve it. But I find that I'm able to eventually arrive intuitively at a tempo that makes sense to me by feeling the piece, which may not comport with the metronome at all. Similar to you, I do return to piece later on to find that I should've played it a bit faster or a bit slower; but usually within the same range. I've been told many times that I play too slowly. It's fine. I do. But that's how I hear the music; and that's how I like to play it. Thanks for the reference to Quantz. I'll definitely look into that. Keep up the great work on your channel.

​@@theclavierist one of the reasons why I keep coming back to your channel is the feeling you play with; I think the stereotype about classical musicians being overly pedantic/conservative is largely true, and it is the reason why people often find classical music boring. And to me, a rendition doesn't have to be quicker to be interesting; it just needs to be authentic. Anyway, keep playing "too slow", I guess. :)

@@thehalf-bakedorganist send me an email to theclavierist@gmail.com and I can send you Quantz's table.

@@its_eis thank you for this nice comment. I guess that my lack of formal musical education and my connections with folk music inevitably influence my interpretation of 'classical music'. I do try to be authentic to myself and I am glad you perceive that :-)