Hi everyone my name is Liz from flutesoundscapes.com and today i’m going to perform Allegra assai from the Australian Music Examinations Board grade 2 syllabus which is list B number four. So I’ll play the piece first and then I’m going to go through some practice tips for you.
[music]
The first thing i would say when approaching learning this piece is to break it up into around three sections so you don’t feel like you’re having to to tackle the whole piece all at once .
When it comes to the styling of this piece I see it as light and lifted rather than the notes being long and drawn out so what i mean by that is rather than [music] I would just lift the notes up. So nearly staccato. Staccato in those descending quavers down and the the opening of the four crotchets give them bounce, just so you’re making a confident statement at the beginning of your piece .
What I find when I’m teaching this piece to many students is the technical problems creep in when the rhythm is isn’t exactly precise. What I mean by that is often after there is quavers and then two semiquavers the following quaver after that is not coordinating with the tongue and the fingers. and I’ll play for example bar three- I’ll play it slowly [Music] so you’ve got to land on that G with perfectly coordinated tongue and fingers for the rest of those notes to to still be in time and and also it affects the whether the notes are going to split or not. You can practice this with a metronome on in quavers because this rhythmic figure comes up so often within the piece it’s worth isolating this rhythm by itself and practicing it in all different ways so you’d practice it all time [Music] and then you might put in the slur but stop on the G. So just to make sure that G is really crisp and clear and then of course putting it either on quavers n your metronome or crotchets and being exactly in time.
So learn it at a slower pace- and as always I say break it down and put it at say 50% speed so you can actually learn it faster. You can also say the rhythm so however you pronounce your crotchets and quavers and uh when when it comes to ‘ta taes’ and tee tee’s [demonstration].You’re just really aiming for crisp rhythm and clarity of the notes.
And finally, with the dynamics-you want to make a big difference between your louds and your softs. This is known as ‘terrace dynamics’ and in this earlier style of music it’s used to really bring out the contrast in the piece. So where it says ‘forte’ you might consider playing ‘fortissimo’ and where it says ‘piano’ you might play ‘pianissimo’ so long as the notes are still coming out clearly-just to expand and give the illusion of the expansion of the range of the dynamics.
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