Piano Video Lesson: Impossible Notation: How Can You Connect Notes Through Rests?

You're watching LivingPianos.com and I'm Robert Estrin. The question today is how can you have a slur over a rest? As you well know, a slur tells you to connect notes smoothly.

A slur in a wind instrument means you don't use the tongue to articulate the notes. It's all done on the breath.

On the piano, we kind of fake slur as truth be known. There's no way to get the notes between the notes, which when a singer sings, a true slur is slurring those notes between the notes. I'm also a French hornist and that is the same way on a horn on a wind instrument. Violinists and string instruments can do that to some extent. On the piano, what we do is we overlap notes slightly to get the illusion of a slur.

Well, getting back to how can you possibly have a slur over rests, rests tell you you have silence.

Well, the answer is it's an effect. It's an idea of phrasing and a musical concept that the rest, even though it's slurred, you have this difference in the way the music is executed. I'm going to demonstrate for you because there's no way to really explain it without hearing it.

I've got the last movement of Schumann's Scenes from Childhood, his Kinderszenen.

It is the movement The Poet Speaks. I'm going to play the end of the movement for you.

You'll see that there's slurs over rests. I'm going to play it with how I believe these rests with slurs should be executed. Then I'll explain why and I'll play it a couple of other different ways so you can hear the difference. All right? Here you go.

So, I'm going to play it with how I believe these rests should be executed.

Truly a theory of music, isn't it? It's the closer to a glorious collection of small musical statements, scenes from Childhood of Schumann.

So, why would he put rests there? Well, how would this be played if it didn't have the slurs? I'm going to play now pretending it just has the rests without the slurs and this is how I would probably play it.

So, that would be if it didn't have the slurs. Suppose it had the slurs but not the rests. This is how I would probably play it.

I don't know if you can hear that subtle difference. Now I'm going to play it again with the idea of slurs with rests.

So, there's a little bit of energy lost during the rest but a continuity because of the slur.

This is a very abstract concept and there are many different ways to execute this and I encourage you to listen to different performances of this piece and you'll be astounded at the range of different expressive possibilities that this music offers and in no small part because the ambiguity of the contradiction of a slur on rests and other aspects of this glorious piece of music.

I hope this is interesting to you. Again, I'm Robert Estrin. You're watching LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks again for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/impossible-notation-how-can-you-connect-notes-through-rests/

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