Etude in D Minor by Cornelius Gurlitt

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman,
and in this lesson we're going to circle back to a familiar favorite composer: Cornelius Gurlitt.
To learn a piece from his Opus 82 Number 65, which is entitled "Etude in D Minor".
The word etude comes from the french verb etudier, which means to study.
So, a composer may call a piece etude if she or he thinks that a student may use or study that piece
to help them advance their piano skills,
because the piece presents some kind of unique technical challenge.
In "Etude in D Minor", the technical challenge is found
in combining the damper pedal with fast but soft repeating chords in the right hand
while the left hand plays a sweeping lyrical melody.
Let's have a listen to "Etude in D Minor".
Here's the score for "Etude in D Minor".
Let's go through our new piece checklist.
I always like to check the tempo indication. That will give us an idea for the mood of the piece.
Here we see allegro, which is a familiar term, Italian term, for fast.
Non troppo.
Troppo, as the Italians would say,
and that means not too much. So,
Gurlitt is saying he wants it fast but not too fast. We've got to find just the right amount of fast.
A composer may put a non troppo to make sure the performer doesn't get carried away and playing it out of control fast.
So that's good to know.
We've got our treble and bass clefs.
Let's figure out what key we're in.
Our clues are that we have one flat in the key signature.
So that should narrow it down to F major or D minor.
How do we tell?
Well, our best clue is going to look at the first note or chord and the last note or chord.
We start here with a D and F,
and we end with what? Can you tell me the letter name for both of these notes?
In the treble staff we have a D, and what do we end on here in the bass staff?
If you said low D, you're correct.
Now ending on a D, beginning with a D and F, which could be part of a D minor chord,
these clues are telling us that we're going to be in the key of D minor,
and what's our time signature?
We'll be in 4/4 meter.
Now, let's do some analysis.
One of my favorite things to do before we learn a new piece.
I'm going to draw a box around certain chords, and I'd like you in your own music to analyze
what chords you see inside those boxes.
If you see a line between two notes, that's an interval. I'd like you to figure out what is the interval.
This interval goes off the page
to here. So also find the interval from this low note to this note,
and a couple of more.
Pause the video in your own music.
Analyze the chords. You can just write in the chord symbol for each chord and write a number for the intervals,
and then press play, we'll look at the answers together.
Okay, right here we have an A D F A
Now we can see that the A is in there twice, so we can take away this bottom one, and that reveals that it's a D minor chord.
The symbol for which is capital D, little m for minor.
And then what did you get for this chord?
We have an A, an F, and a D.
That's also a D minor chord.
All right, now what interval did you get from here to here?
This is bass A going down to
low A. What's a quick way to figure that out? Well, remember the bottom line of bass clef
is ground G, and then every ledger line is one skip down.
We're three ledger lines down, so one, two, three, that puts us on low A. A to A is an octave or eighth.
Octave, just another word for an eighth, right?
and then from here to this D, is the interval of a fourth.
Now, what did you notice about these two chords?
You should have caught they're the exact same chord that we had before: D minor, D minor.
Now if we didn't already realize by now, which of course we already figured out we're in the key of D minor,
but look how much else is reinforcing that.
Gurlitt is really driving home the fact that we're in D minor on this page.
Now what did you get for this interval?
We have a C down to low C.
Once again you can use ground G that bottom line, and then ledger line down, ledger line down, every ledger line is a skip.
Down, that tells us C to C.
That's an eighth,
or an octave.
Okay, let's analyze page two now. I'll draw some more boxes for chord analysis and some lines for interval analysis.
Okay, pause the video, analyze these chords, then press play and we'll look at it together.
All right, what do we have here?
We've got C F A C.
Well, that C is duplicated up here, so we can just leave off this one,
and that reveals we have an F major chord.
And then what about here? C A F,
that's also F major,
and what chord did you get here?
That's D minor.
And then the same notes going back down.
D minor again.
And uh what did you g ...