Arabesque: Left Hand

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and in our lesson today we'll be adding the left-hand part
part to the A section of Burgmüller's "Arabesque".
Let's get started by checking out the score.
You'll notice if you scan through the left-hand part, that you're playing
all these chords with these staccato dots, and they're all quarter notes so your left hand you can think of
as kind of your metronome. It's keeping the beat for you.
Now, your job is to figure out what these chords are.
I'm going to draw a box around certain chords with my purple marker here,
and what I'd like you to do is pause the video,
and on your own music at home, I want you to write the name of these chords up above the music,
or you could put it right below the chord. Wherever you prefer.
If it's for example, a C major chord you can put a capital C, which stands for C major.
Remember if it's a minor chord, you do a capital letter like if it was C minor capital C lowercase M.
The little M stands for minor.
You'll through it and figure out what these chords are that I draw this box around.
Write the name of the chord up above or below.
Remember, some of these chords may be an inversion.
So watch out for that, and you have to find the root of the chord to be able to figure out the name of the chord.
Now, pause the video, figure out those chords, and then press play to go on.
All right, let's start with this first chord.
If you analyzed it from the bottom note first, you can see that's a bass A,
which is here on the piano, and then here's that middle C,
and then we have another third above that.
You can see these notes are all line, line, line.
When notes go line, line, line, or space, space, space, you know that's built like your regular triad,
which is a root position chord which tells you the root is this A.
That you should recognize as an A minor chord.
So we'd write it like that: capital A little m.
And that's the key that we're in. So we could also say that's the i chord.
So I'm going to write with a lowercase Roman numeral which is an i, little i, which says we are a minor i chord.
It's kind of our home base chord, okay and then we stay on that i chord A minor.
We play it four measures, and then the chord changes, okay if you look at this chord the bottom note is still A,
and then we have a D and an F. What chord is that?
Well, you know it's an inversion because we have this fourth here
with a third. Whenever you have a fourth and then a third
or a third than a fourth, you know it's an inversion. so what if we took this A and put it on top.
See how I just took this A from down here and moved it to the A up here, and that reveals it's a D minor chord, which is our iv chord.
Okay, so we could write capital D little m there, and maybe a little i little v
for the iv chord. Remember we use Roman numerals when writing chord symbols in music.
Okay, so we have A minor then this D minor chord, then what chord is this?
That also is an A minor chord, which is the i chord.
Okay, now what about this chord?
Let's name each note one at a time. The bottom note is G.
If you compare it to the A minor chord, sometimes it's helpful to just compare where you just were.
You can see the top two notes stayed the same. We still have a C and an E just like a second ago,
but now that bottom note step down to G.
So we have a G, a C, and an E. What chord is that?
Once again, we can tell it's an inversion by that fourth. So take the G, move it up to that G, and you can see it's a C major chord.
Well, you use a capital C, and in the key of A minor,
the C chord is the III chord.
So we can use a Roman numeral III to show that.
Now, I have to say this is like college music theory stuff.
So if you're not in college yet, you should be pretty proud. You're learning college-level music theory doing these lessons with me.
Pretty cool, huh?
Now, there's one more chord I'd like to look at with you. We didn't, I didn't assign you to figure this one out yourself, but let's take a look at it together.
It's an interesting chord.
The bottom note stayed the same as before. So that's our G. Now, can you tell me the name of the next note up in the chord?
If you said B, you're correct. So we have a G and a B,
then look we're on a space. We skip a space to the next space.
Whenever you go space, skip a space to a space, that's a fifth. It's kind of like a double skip, okay?
See how these are all spaced notes? G B, skip the D, up to F.
And then way up high in the right hand
we have this D way up there, which I'm going to take down an octave to here.
See how I did that? I just took the D from up high in the treble clef part and moved it down so we can see it's a G major chord with a seventh on top.
We call that a seventh because one, two, three, four, fi ...