One of my favorite ways to make sense of music is as simple as simple can be — to follow the up and down movement of the parts.  Bach’s Prelude No. 13 in F# Major from WTC Book One is a fun one for this.  The opening motive is a broken chord that goes up, then down, then skips to the top of the triad into a trill.  The hands then gently follow each other — the left hand steps down or up while the right hand finishes the triplet by outlining the chord of the moment in that same direction.  Quite often there is clear overall movement either up or down but other times the hands settle briefly into opposite (contrary) motion, with the left hand gradually shifting down while the right hand goes up.

As I play this prelude I enjoy rocking my hand in the direction of these melodies.  When they move in parallel motion this means a slight rocking motion upwards or downwards for both.  I especially love the swinging feeling enabled in the fleeting contrary motion moments — you might see this at the end of the video.

I forgot to rotate this video before uploading and although I eventually figured out how to do some editing in YouTube, I became intrigued by its original positioning.  Learning to play the piano and how to read music is often mystifying until the inconsistencies get sorted out. The notated music moves left to right on the page while the note heads move up and down.  But the keys are level, moving right for up and left for down.  As the notes on the page move down both vertically and to the right, the eyes follow to the right while the hand moves down horizontally and to the left.  And then there are those opposable thumbs, wonderful for enabling the contrary swinging feeling mentioned above, but also maddening at times: the left hand thumb is at the “up” end of the hand while the right hand thumb leads the way down.

Now that I’ve highlighted all the up and down confusions in a possibly confusing way, here is the good news: With the sideways viewpoint of this video there is a vertical visual of the ups and downs. As simple as simple can be, but even more so.

Enough with the words!  Enjoy!  It’s Bach.  It’s beautiful. It moves up and down.