Musical Coordination

There are many challenges in playing the piano – playing fast, playing octaves, playing big chords with many notes; but playing a different rhythm in your left hand from what is going on in your right hand is something that simply defies the way our brains work.

When I was probably about 12, I first encountered this in Franz Schubert’s Serenade, which is just full of 2 against 3. I just learned from Google that this is called a polyrhythm. This means that while your left hand is playing two notes, your right hand is playing a triplet or three notes. This is infinitely harder than playing 2 notes or even 3 notes for every one in the other hand.

Way back when, I resorted to using fractions to teach myself how to play this because it really is counterintuitive to your brain. If you think of this in terms of 6 beats, you play the left hand on 1 and 4 and the right hand on 1, 3, and 5. I tried to explain this to my piano teacher, Mr. Lightburn, who I learned years later was an alcoholic. He came to my house at 8:30 a.m. every Saturday morning, after a long night playing jazz at the Elk’s Club. He always smelled of after-shave lotion, which was probably to cover up the stale smell of alcohol. Anyway, when I offered up my mathematical approach to 2 against 3, he looked at me like I was from outer space and just wrote the word “slow” in the music. But you see slow really doesn’t work, so I just counted my 6 beats and nodded my 12-year-old head at him.

I have a new version of this now in Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu that is much worse for my poor befuddled brain: 3 against 4, more like what is in the picture above. Mathematically I now have to think in 12 beats, with the left hand playing on 1, 5, and 9 and the right hand on 1, 4, 7, and 10. This does become somewhat more intuitive with practice, but it is a slow process to make our brains think in two speeds at the same time.

Now that I have time to practice, I hope to really learn this difficult piece that I have loved so much since the first time I heard it. It will take a lot of work. I have no delusion that I will ever play it up to tempo.

I’m wondering how they teach polyrhythms at a musical conservatory. There must be a standard approach to this sort of thing.

You are probably saying to yourself, if this is what I had to do in retirement, I would just keep working forever. But 3 against 4 is actually keeping me quite busy as it challenges my brain to think in a new way.