Miniatures

These little miniatures are what you might call pedagogical pieces, because while I let my thoughts wander while writing, I still thought of combining the useful with the pleasurable. For example, the first, Tout en staccato, calls for a particular attack technique. The second, quite the opposite, Tout en legato, calls for a phrasing style of playing like a stringed instrument with its bow.
The third and fourth, La main droite s’amuse and La main gauche s’amuse, call for great independence between the two hands. The sixteenth-note hand has to be very equal, while the other hand does everything else: glissando, repeated quavers with accents or, in the fourth, difficult crossings with big leaps that require great agility and knowledge of the keyboard. The fifth, Les deux mains s’amusent, goes from one second to the next in the extreme tessituras of the keyboard. The sixth, Passe le temps (Pass the time), is of a completely different difficulty; it involves counting silences or long values, taking care to count scrupulously in the right tempo without shortening the values. The seventh, Alterné, is of a more classical difficulty, but a passage from eighth note to eighth note, from binary to ternary, requires great regularity in this alternation, which must be perfectly observed. The optional Post-Scriptum only comes into play when all the students in a piano class, having each played a piece, come together to take their bows with enormous fortissimo clusters across the whole range of the piano.
Graciane Finzi