Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is: how can you have a slur over a rest? A slur tells you to connect notes smoothly. A slur on a wind instrument means you don’t use the tongue to articulate the notes. It’s all done with the breath. On the piano, we kind of fake slurs. There’s no way to get the notes between the notes the way a singer can. A true slur is slurring those notes between the notes. On the piano, we overlap notes slightly to give the illusion of a slur. Rests tell you you have silence between notes. So how can you possibly have a slur over rests?
The answer is that it’s an effect.
It’s an idea of phrasing and a musical concept that, even though the rest is slurred, you have this difference in the way the music is executed. I’m going to demonstrate this for you because there’s no way to really explain it without hearing it. (You can listen to the accompanying video.) I’m going to play the last movement of Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood, Kinderszenen, and it is the movement The Poet Speaks. I’m going to play the end of the movement for you, and you’ll see that there are slurs over rests. I’m going to play it how I believe that these rests with slurs should be executed. Then I’ll explain why, and I’ll play it a couple of other different ways so you can hear the difference.
See the video to hear the demonstration!
It’s truly ethereal music, isn’t it? It’s the last movement of a glorious collection of small musical statements, Scenes from Childhood of Schumann. So why would he put rests with slurs? How would this be played if it didn’t have the slurs? It’s a subtle difference. There’s a little bit of energy lost during the rests, but there’s continuity because of the slurs. This is a very abstract concept. There are many different ways to execute this. I encourage you to listen to different performances of this piece. You’ll be astounded at the range of different expressive possibilities this music offers. This is in no small part because of the ambiguity of the contradiction of a slur over rests. I hope this has been interesting for you! Let me know your thoughts on this subject in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
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