Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Islamey octaves - how do people move their thumb so fast?

I like to pick very hard piano pieces and learn them slowly over time - never to the standard that you see on YouTube videos (does anyone ever play a wrong note?!), but just enough to give myself enjoyment at hearing them, and so that I always have a challenge / long-term goal to aim for.

Islamey has been my latest challenge, and I can play it the whole way through at a slower tempo, but I'm working on getting it faster.

There's one part in particular I just can't speed up - see 1:51 in Paul Barton's version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=111&v=mIggcguNRZM&feature=youtu.be

I can play every note perfectly at a slower tempo. If I play it over and over, I can get it right occasionally, but in particular my thumb on my right hand just seems incapable of playing so many notes in quick succession without messing something up. (And let's not even mention how fast Lisitsa etc plays this piece at).

Any suggestions as to a technique for playing those particular octaves quickly?

I have often wondered the same.

@TripleM - getting a recommendation from someone who has not seen HOW you are playing the passage in question is not something I recommend. Before I would do anything like that I'd need to see you play... from just a bit before that section...continuing on. If you could record a sample and post it to YouTube (or some other video hosting site) and tell us where to find it, we might be able to be more helpful.

One other thing - it would be really good to have TWO different shots of you playing. If you have a cellphone, I'd ask you to put it next to the bass cheekblock pointing straight across the keys to the right cheekblock. I'd also find it useful to have another shot of you with a camera that shows your entire body including your feet at the pedals so I could observe your posture and get an idea of where you are tensing up unnecessarily.

And a final thought: playing Islamey not only requires "proper form", i.e., a technical approach that optimizes what you can do, but conditioning for strength and endurance. What makes it difficult, IMO, is finding ways to relax as much as possible with so much going on. What this means is that, even if you are able to play in a more efficient way, it may STILL take some conditioning before you can do it very fast, for a very long time. At least that's been my experience.

Try practicing in groups.

That's yet another linguistic usage that will not necessarily be understood.

In fact I'd be pretty interested to know how many people hear it one way or the other.

What's confusing about it?

First, a lot of people just don't know about that way of practicing, and if you don't know about it, you can't possibly get that that's what it means.

And, doing stuff in groups (of people) is a known kind of thing....

I would have never thought of it like that. Do people really practice piano together?

No!
But how often do people try to play Islamey either...

What is "too often" for 100 Alex

Groups of what?

I think this is a good idea for youtube record:
find a group of people, assign every body 2 or 3 bars and put them together at the end. Maybe 1 day can get Islamey record done?

You move the entire forearm so as to place the thumb into position. It's almost impossible to play fast when the thumb has to reach for notes. Fast octaves require the hand to do very little.

Thank you all for the responses.

chopinetto's 4 words were surprisingly more helpful than I expected. I know that I'm pretty lazy at just focusing on the bits I need to (ah, that's enough practice, let's play the whole thing through again). But while I hadn't heard of the terminology, a little Googling helped me find an article on the technique with some subtle points that I hadn't realised - in particular that 'groups' should be much, much shorter than I would have contemplated.

I had a mental block that the problem was that I couldn't physically move my thumb fast enough from one note to the next. But after reading the above, I instantly discovered that if I take just four notes in the sequence at a time, I actually can play them much faster than I realised.

So now I feel like this actually may be possible after all.

Also, thank you Seeker as well for your generous offer. I had a teacher for a long time through all of my school years, but it's been a while now that I've just been playing by myself - I'm rather nervous that if I share myself playing, I'll find out that I'm doing absolutely everything wrong now and it will ruin everything Especially when everyone else sharing videos online is apparently perfect.

But I'm going to try out these subtle group ideas a bit more for a while, and if I'm not able to make any progress, I'll get back to you.

The better question is why learn Islamey at all when there are many hard pieces that don't sound like school-yard taunt.

Well hello!

I'm with you on this piece (and nice little characterization there -- really, folks!), but I hope your view of Chopin has come along since we last talked...

... many infinitely better pieces worth working on.

Regards,

Many great pianists have performed Islamey. There are many other pieces that are of similar difficulty or potential as a show piece but they still chose to learn it. So I think for many it has appeal beyond its technical difficulties. I do think it is somewhat overlong.

Sounds interesting - would you mind sharing a link? Thanks!

Good one, Keith, though Islamey never really hurt anyone, other than some of those who try to play it, and sometimes those who listen to it and kill themselves, and those who can never listen to Russian music again, and those whose pianos never recover, and those who love peace, prosperity, and the American way, etc. But other than those things, what have the Romans ever done for us? Wait . . . .

Speaking of damage to pianos, Prokofiev's Toccata has not been kind to mine. I need to talk to you about why two broken strings could throw out the tuning stablity of the entire upper register. Hoping it's not a pinblock issue.