Sunday, August 28, 2016

Hate Mail - 1

Who would sight-sing the Mikrokosmos?  

Well, if you open to page 4 you will read the account by the person it was first written for, Peter Bartok, in which he says.

His teaching program did not follow an accepted "piano school" technique.  At first I was to sing only.  .... In the course of our lessons he sometimes asked me to wait while he sat down at his desk, and I would hear only the scratching of his pen.  In a few minutes he would bring to the piano an exercise, or a short piece, that I was to decipher right away and then learn for our next lesson.

So were born some of the easier pieces in these volumes.  

So, if you bothered reading the front material in the New Definitive Edition of them, the answer would be, apparently, someone the composer taught them to.   I've followed his practice ever since that edition replaced the older one without Peter Bartok's account (Good, Lord, already almost thirty years ago!)  but with his father's foreword that mentions the desirability of the student singing the vocal pieces as they play.  The first two volumes make excellent early sight-singing and ear training exercises, especially if you play the part you're not singing.   I always teach fixed do in the form in which each flat, natural and sharp have a specific syllable assigned to them.  It's more useful and less confusing.


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