Dance: Left Hand

Hello and welcome back I'm Joseph Hoffman. Today we're learning the left hand for "Dance" by Cornelius Gurlitt. So let's come and check out the score. Okay let's look at the left hand part for line one. Remember that in "Dance," both hands are playing treble clef. So if this is a treble clef, what note do you see here? That's right, this would be middle C. So we start on a C, and what note do you see next? Remember we're in treble clef. That's right, it's treble G. So we have C G G C G G What letter do you see here? Tell me it's letter name. If you said F you're correct. F G G What letter do you see here? If you said E, you're correct. E G G Do you notice any kind of pattern going on here? If you look at the second and third notes of each measure, it's a repeated G. Now, to make this song feel like a dance, back in Gurlitt's day a very common dance was the minuet or the waltz, which had a triple feel. 1 2 3 1 2 3 With a strong beat 1, and a very gentle or light beat 2 and 3. So I'm going to draw some arrows here to remind you how I'd like you to move your wrist. We're going to drop down on beat 1 and then lift up on beats 2 and 3 to make a more gentle light sound. So this note will be medium in loudness. Maybe think mezzo forte, and then I want you to think piano or even pianissimo on these two notes. I know the dynamic says forte, but usually the dynamics are mostly applying to the melody. The left hand is playing the accompaniment some notes to support the melody, and so we're going to play these repeated G's very gently with an up wrist. Let's take a look at what I mean. So with your left hand in the C pentascale the down, up, up, will look like this: We'll drop down on the C, and then as we play our thumb, our wrist is going to float up, and that will keep us from pounding the thumb overly loud. We want it to sound gentle on the thumb. 1 2 3 1 2 3 Down, up, up, down, up, up Can you place your left hand in the C pentascale with finger 5 on middle C. And let's practice this together. Think down, and then up, up, and just play that finger one thumb as gently as you can, pianissimo. Ready, try it with me, go: Down, up, up, down, up, up. Two more, up, up. Down, up up Good. Now, let's try to play line one of "Dance" with the left hand. With your left hand in the C major pentascale, we have C G G, C G G, then F G G, E G G. I'd like you to press pause and try that three times working on a good down, up, up on every measure. Press play when you're ready to go on. Alright, time to check out line two. Can you tell me what's different on line two compared to line one? Point to it. Now if you're pointing right here you're correct. This is the only spot that's different from line one for the left hand. We have a little chord here. This bottom note is middle C. And the top note of the chord is what? If you said E, you're correct. We have a little C and E chord. Let's try line two on the piano. So to play line two, all we need to remember is when we get to the end we're going to have this C and E chord that will play with fingers 5 and 3. So will you try to play line two along with me? Let's try it together. Ready, go C G G C G. Now F, F G G, now the chord. Great, now press pause and on your own practice line one and line two of the left hand, then press play when you're ready to go on. All right, time to check out line three. Here's our treble clef again. Can you tell me the letter names for these first three notes? Say them out loud for me. If you said F G G, you're correct. Now can you tell me these next three notes? If you said E G G, you're correct. Once again, we have these repeating G's on beats 2 and 3. So we had F G G, then E G G, then can you tell me these next three? If you said D G G, you're correct. What about these next three? If you said C G G you're correct. Now, let's write in those first notes. We had F G G, then E G G, then D G G, then C G G. Do you see a pattern here? Maybe you notice that the first note of each measure is stepping down one at a time. If you just look at the first note we had F, which steps down to E, which steps down to D, which steps down to C. Let's try to play that on the piano. So our left hand's still in the middle C major pentascale. We've got F G G E G G D G G C G G Remember the stepping down pattern of the first note of each measure. Now you try that on your own. Let's check out line four. Can you tell me what's the same and what's different from line three? You probably noticed that these first two measures are the same. So we're going along pretty good, and now whoa, a chord here for the left hand. Now you know that this ledger line right here is for middle C, but you probably notice that this note isn't on the middle C line. It's a step below the middle C ledger line. So what's the note a step right below middle C? That's right, it's a B, but we don't have a finger on B. So for here our fingers are going to need to shift down a little bit to land our finger 5 on B. And what note do we have here on top? It's an F. So with fingers 2 and 5 we'll need to play an F and B chord followed by those two repeated G's, and then we finish with a chord playing what two notes? Can you tell me the letter names? If you said C and E ...