Hi all, I'm Sarah, just signed up last night since my friend said I would like it here. I'm glad to join this forum because I am trying to get back into this piano thing. I took many years of lessons as a kid, quit in high school, and haven't played much for the last 10 years. I don't have good memories of my early playing because my teacher made me cry a lot and people were generally negative about my playing.

But despite this, lately I've been playing again on my Yamaha digital piano late at night and it's all coming back to me, much faster than I expected. I might even post some songs soon to get feedback from the piano community.

For now I'm working on Chopin Minute Waltz and I had a question.

Question: Coming down on the right hand, for the first set of trills, it goes F - Eb - Eb (trill). Actually it doesn't say "tr" so I guess it's not a full trill, but there's a lightning thing above the second Eb. Do I plays F - Eb - F - Eb? And what about the second set? That goes F - Eb (lighting). What notes get played on the second set? That's got to be a full trill right? Cuz otherwise I would play something like F - F - Eb which is just plain weird.

Thanks in advance for the help.

The little lighting thing is called a mordent, and it is just a very short trill.

So on that first one there, where you have the mordent over the Eb, you play very quickly Eb F Eb. (for that measure, it says F - Eb - Eb (mordent), so what you play is F - Eb - (very quickly) Eb F Eb - ...)


(Welcome to the forums! )

It's not really a trill, but is called a mordent.

I play the mordent the same way in both spots, on the note of the mordent I'll play (Eb-F-Eb)

So for the first, I repeat the Eb as:

F-Eb-(Eb-F-Eb)

Then for the second I don't need to repeat, because the mordent comes after the F

F-(Eb-F-Eb)

Hope this makes sense and helps!

EDIT: pianojerome gives good advice too!

Thanks for the explanation. I get it now.

It's a lot harder than I expected.

Check out the Adult Beginners' Forum. We're there for people just like you, adult restarters. We've also got a bunch of raving Chopin lunatics just dying to give advice.

Thanks Frycek. I took Adult beginner to mean beginners only. If it includes restarters then I might belong there as well.

It's got pianists of every stripe and ability there, we just seemed to gell. Some of us have been playing since childhood, some started last week. Most of the posters are restarters, many of which are far from "beginners." We've also got a few late starting teenagers. There's a Chopin study group there of late intermediate/early advanced players. Right now we're working on Nocturne 55/1.

Sorry to split hairs, but terminology should be mentioned, because there could be misunderstanding about what's being described. Older pianists (like myself) tend to regard the mordent as the ornament that dips down and is indicated with the short trill squiggly with a vertical line through it. The ornament that flips to the note above we old fogeys call the inverted mordent. The subject of ornamentation itself is a hot topic (yes, entire books are written on it), and there can be disagreement about the execution of even something as seemingly trivial as your inverted mordent.

At least according to Wikipedia, the current accepted terms to avoid confusion are "upper mordent" and "lower mordent".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordent