Recording Fanchen’s Scherzo for Piano Duet
By Clare
We were invited to play at the Taiwan National Concert Hall again back in Nov. 2020. When we learned this news, we excitedly invited our dear Taiwanese student/friend to write a piece for us to premiere at the concert. It was unfortunate that we had to postpone the concert overseas due to COVID, but we thought we’d record it first and hopefully to present it live at another time!
It was late spring of 2020 when we received this piece from Fanchen. We both found it humorous and instantly fell in love with it! It’s a short, cute, fun, playful, bouncy, lively…..etc. piece that we thought it was really well-done! We actually learned the piece and we were ready to record it back in the summer of 2020. Our of our surprise, the whole Rush E drama (explanation of the drama below) came along and Fanchen invited us to do something with Rush E. So we put this aside and worked ASAP on recording Rush E. Then there were always new things we raced to finish every week, so we kept postponing the recording of this piece! Finally, we can share with you this piece!
I guess because we had learned this piece once before, the whole re-learning process was much faster. Things went quite smoothly and we did it a few times and that was it! The recording session actually took only 25 minutes!!! Definitely one of the quickest recording sessions we have ever done! We were so excited when we realized how quickly we were able to do it after the recording session!
Rush E drama explanation: So here is the explanation of the Rush E drama that happened on YouTube if you haven’t heard. A few years ago, there was a black midi composed by Sheet Music Boss called Rush E (original video here). It uses synthesia to give a visual representation of the keys blinking as the notes are played. The joke is that it’s humanly impossible to play, with this crazy visuals that you just have to watch it to get a sense of the “craziness”. Then there was this amateur pianist teenager who tried to play his arrangement of this piece and he recorded himself and put it on YouTube. While his video received many likes, there were also dislikes. So some other guy commented and said “How can you dislike this? I don’t see anyone else doing this.” Then one guy replied to that comment and said “Probably because it was mediocre, no offense”, and it turned into a big debate. This “one guy” was known as Fanchen on YouTube. Others challenged Fanchen to prove that he can do it better, while some defended Fanchen that he was only stating his honest opinion. So a week after, Fanchen actually recorded himself playing his own arrangement of Rush E at a much faster tempo than the teenager whose video started this argument. Everyone was in awe of how Fanchen was able to keep his words and prove himself on the internet, so this drama became viral and Fanchen became a meme. Fanchen is actually a student and a friend of ours on the other side of Canada, so his mom told us about this incident and encouraged us to do something with Rush E. That’s how we came in the picture of the Rush E drama, and thanks to Fanchen, we were able to finally pass the 1000 subscriber mark!
We hope that you enjoy this little piece by Fanchen that he wrote for us!
