Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Ever played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# minor? 4 well separated simultaneous note groups in a couple of places. That makes it theoretically impossible to play...

View on HN

Igudesman & Joo have their own way of playing stuff like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w

I love these guys. Saw them live once. :)

This had me in tears of laughter. What a genius.

Pure genius, and funny too! I couldn't resist posting that link on facebook.

I'm assuming that since you bring up Rachmaninoff, you know that he reportedly had freakishly large hands, and was in the habit of writing things he could play, but others considered "impossible". To me, that's significantly different than black MIDI, which just seems silly, albeit vaguely amusing.

I'm actually only referring to a couple of places in Prelude in C# minor. Most of the song is "almost impossible" for one reason or another, but there are a couple of places near the end where the lower octaves and the upper freakish chords are played simultaneously. The 9th and 11th measure from the end, to be precise. Even Rachmaninoff with his freak hands had to roll that.

It's not a song, it's a prelude. And actually not very technically difficult, one reason for its immediate and enduring popularity. The simultaneous chords are just played very quickly one after the other and not "rolled".

"not very technically difficult" is a matter of perspective. It's about as difficult a piece as any student or amateur is ever going to play or be exposed to and few students or amateurs are skilled enough to play it.

But it is accessible to amateurs, and sounds very impressive. Which is, as you noted, a good reason why it's so popular. It's a good piece to pull out when you want to show off.

> large hands

Can't they make the piano keys a little smaller (narrower)?

Sure, but it could take considerable time to adapt one's muscle memory to the different key spacing.

The keyspacing is identical on all pianos?

For the most part, with the exception of toys and some compact synthesizers and MIDI input devices.

Edit: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_keyboard#Size_and_hist...

Yup, there's a company that does this, can't google it tho

http://books.google.com/books?id=IbZOJIpgnNwC&printsec=front...

Thing is, players with broad fingers have trouble negotiating between black keys as it is now.

You could make the gap between those note groups wider and it would become impossible. Even then, it is impossible to play for some—my piano teacher had rather small hands and had to "cheat" by dropping out notes if she was going to try Rachmaninoff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com