Amazing Day

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph
Hoffman
and today we're going to work on
learning a piece called "Amazing Day"
which I composed for my students in a
summer camp I taught years ago. I wanted
the song to capture the excitement and
happiness of a really great amazing day.
For me that might be a day when I get to
go for a long walk in the forest, or a
bike ride with my boys, or playing
frisbee on the beach. As you listen to
this piece, maybe you'll think of some
things that you love doing that make for
an amazing day for you. Let's go ahead
and listen to "Amazing Day".
All right, let's check out the sheet
music for "Amazing Day". Here's my score.
What I'd like you to do is download the
sheet music from the website, and press
pause and on your own
I'd like you to scan through the entire
piece and just see what you notice. Try
and find some patterns that are
happening, maybe look for some things
that you've never seen before,
maybe things you have questions about.
Just take a minute or two to get
familiar with the piece by scanning through it, and then press play and we'll talk about it together.
All right, what did you notice about this
score?
Hopefully you notice our tempo
indication says with excitement, which is
not a surprise, and you might have
noticed a new kind of symbol. You see
these lines going underneath with this
occasional little arrowhead
up and down. These are pedal marks which
we will learn how to read in a later
lesson, but for now just know that that's
going to be coming and we're going to
learn how to add pedal with this piece.
You might have noticed some new symbols,
like this coda symbol which again we'll
learn about in a later lesson. Today
we're just going to be focusing on this
page.
To coda is a kind of musical teleporter
that's going to teleport you to another
section when we get to that point a
second time, but again we'll learn more
about that in a lesson very soon.
Today let's focus on this page, and in these
first four, I'm sorry, first eight
measures, did you notice any patterns?
Hopefully you noticed a kind of two bar
pattern. And when I say 'bar' in music I'm
not talking about a chocolate bar. We're
talking about measures. 'Bar' is a kind of
a nickname for a measure. So here's a two
bar pattern that repeats. If you look at
the notes inside this yellow box I drew,
you'll see the exact same notes repeat
over here in measures three to four.
Now, let's come down here to measures five and six,
and tell me what you notice. Is it the
same pattern or different?
It's a very similar,
but slightly different pattern.
Let's try and figure out what's the same and
what's different. Going back up to our
yellow two bar pattern, can you figure out
the name of these two notes in the left
hand? We've got this two note chord. What
two notes are those?
If you said D and A you are correct. This
is low D just a step above low C, and
then we've got A just a step above our
ground G. So we've got this interval of a
fifth down here, and then what happens
right here?
We get the same fifth again an
octave higher. We also have a D and an A
chord, which again repeats in this two bar
pattern. So we have D and A down low, and then
D and A up high here. And then that happens again.
Now what's going on in the right
hand? See how we have this interval of a
fourth from E to A, E to A, and then it
resolves to a third, D to F-sharp.
Same pattern again. Now what happens here?
Can you tell me the names of
these two notes?
You've got a C on the
bottom. That's our low C, and then we've
got our ground G, also a fifth, but this time
this fifth is a step below this one. So
that's very important to notice, and then
look, the same thing here. Now this
symbol you may recall is a natural, and
the natural cancels a sharp or a flat.
And I just realized we forgot to talk about,
which we should always do at the start
when we're analyzing a piece, is our key
signature. Our key signature for this piece
has two sharps. Now, starting with a D and
A chord like this, and seeing the two
sharps, can you figure out what key this piece is in?
If you said D major you're
correct.
Check out our ladder of fifths to see
that as we go up the ladder to two
sharps, we land on the key of D major
which has both an F-sharp and a C-sharp,
however here we're cancelling the C-
sharp and playing a C-natural, and that
will give it kind of a unique sound that
we want there. Now here in measure seven ...