Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner How do I play these measures??

I have been playing piano for a long time, but admittedly my theory is lacking I cannot for the life of me figure out how to play these excerpts.

The first one is in half-common time (2/2 I guess) and the second is in 3/2. I just don't know where the right hand chords are supposed to line up with the left-hand notes. Shouldn't a right-hand eighth note have the same value as a left-hand eighth note? How can you have eight beats in the right hand but 12 in the left in 2/2 time? I don't know. I'm just very confused...

The right hand is playing four notes per beat and the left hand six.

The tricky bit here is 3 against 2 -- do you know what I mean by that?

Every beat is divided in 3 notes for the left hand and at the same time only 2 notes for the right hand. The left hand triplets aren't marked as triplets, per se, but that's exactly what they are.

The good news is, you only have to deal with that 3 against 2 on the 1st and 3rd beats. Whenever you have a quarter note in the right hand, just play the triplet underneath as normal.

Didn't see your post before mine... there is of course a difference in feel between 2 against 3 and 4 against 6, and you're right that the latter is more 'correct'. It's a matter of preference which one is easier.

Ok, so it's sort of a Fantaisie-Impromptu type thing where the right hand plays slightly faster than the left. So can I rely on the note positioning to help me stay on beat, as in where the left and right hand notes line up perfectly occasionally? It looks pretty hard to stay perfectly at tempo in both hands, unless I grab a calculator and figure out precisely where each note fits and use a ruler to draw a line...

Thanks again for the help.

OMG good luck

Your hands play together at the beginning of every quarter note beat.

Someone here once described 2-against-3 as a "triplet inside of a triplet"... kind of a neat description. First you play both hands together, and then you pause, and then you play a triplet (first and third note in the left hand, middle note in the right hand), then you pause, and then that's it... start the next one.

This is the ossia to the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 cadenza. Not your average stroll in the park.

It's really 4-against-6, but I'd practice it slowly as 2-against-3. Not too confusing...

It looks pretty hard to stay perfectly at tempo in both hands, unless I grab a calculator and figure out precisely where each note fits and use a ruler to draw a line...

Sometimes it does help to mark on the page where the notes line up. You need to keep the rhythm as 4-against-6 throughout.


Mary