Arabesque-euqsebarA

A useful twist on Arabesque by J.F. F. Burgmüller, Op. 100/2

This twist is useful in two ways: it’ll help your student practise some of the position changes in Burgmüller’s popular Arabesque, and it’s also a great introduction to the idea of music played backwards (the technical term is “retrograde”).

Bars 3-6 of Burgmüller’s Arabesque can be played backwards. This is a useful practise exercise that improves the fluency of the position changes.

When explaining retrograde to your student, you can point out they’re actually already familiar with playing in retrograde, because the second half of any scale is a retrograde version of the first half.

There are actually several other places you can use retrograde in Arabesque but I want to keep this post short, so I’m just going to mention that it sounds great when you add a retrograde version of the final two bars to the start of the piece:

A retrograde version of the final two bars of the piece, added to the start of the piece. It sounds great (and it’s great practise for the final jump).

Since my university days I had associated the use of retrograde with the dissonance of composers like Schoenberg, Berg and Webern (aka the Second Viennese School) but it has a much longer history in tonal music, and I was totally delighted to discover that Haydn, one of my favourite composers, wrote a really charming piece for piano which uses retrograde. It’s the second movement of the Sonata in A major, Hob. XVI:26. See the video below. I love it! It’s so simple yet so effective.