Hello and welcome back! I'm Joseph Hoffman,
and in this lesson we're going to learn how to play the
A section of a piece that I composed called "Harvest Dance".
When I composed "Harvest Dance", I was imagining people from times past.
Maybe gathering together in the village square to celebrate harvest time with good food,
good company, and dancing.
Let's have a listen to "Harvest Dance".
Here's the score for "Harvest Dance".
Will you take just a few seconds and just tell me what you notice in the score.
And as you're talking,
try to use real music vocabulary. Like don't just say, oh I see a bunch of those little thingy symbols.
Say, oh I see a lot of sharp symbols.
Use your real music words.
Tell me what you notice.
With a new piece I'm always
checking out my clefts first: treble and bass,
and my time signature looks like
we'll have 4 beats per measure.
As I already clued you in to, there are a lot of sharps.
So we know we'll have some key with a lot of sharps in it.
And you may have noticed lots of dynamic symbols. We've got
forte, we've got mezzo
piano,
mezzo forte.
We've also got slur markings everywhere and lots of staccati.
You may have noticed that there are no lyrics in this piece,
and that's why I'm calling it a piece. Remember a song is something you sing
that has words or lyrics.
When there's something you play on an instrument without words, that's generally called a piece.
Now let's see if we can figure out which
pentascale we're in.
Let's just look at these first few notes.
Can you pause the
video and say the letter names for these
first six notes?
And then on your piano
see if you can figure out what pentascale that is.
Okay the notes are C-sharp
A-sharp F-sharp G-sharp, then another A-sharp, which we've already had, and a B,
and if you put all those together,
what pentascale do we have?
That's our F-sharp major pentascale.
Now let's break these notes down into little groups.
Taking these first three notes,
we start on that C-sharp. How are these notes moving?
You'll see we have a skip down, skip down. Can you turn that into solfège? It starts on SO then what?
That's a SO MI DO
Then what are the next three notes doing?
They're stepping up, so we have
RE MI FA
SO MI DO RE MI FA
Now can
you tell me what's happening on these next four notes?
Tell me the steps, skips,
repeats. We'll say start here.
If you said start, step down, step down, step up, skip
up. That's a skip up of a third you're correct.
What would that be in solfège if
we have FA then MI RE MI SO
Now when you have a long slur mark like this,
we often call that a phrase mark.
Phrase marks are a special kind of slur that
show
a musical sentence.
You'll notice all of these notes kind of fit together
in a musical idea. Listen:
That's a musical idea or sentence with a
beginning middle and end.
And now listen to the next musical idea.
Did you notice how this first phrase
kind of asks a question? Listen.
Because it goes up at the end like that, it almost sounds like the music is asking a question,
and here's the answer.
See, it started out the same way,
measure three is the same as
measure one, but then when you get to measure four,
the notes all step down,
which sounds like it's giving the answer.
That's called a question-and-answer phrase.
This phrase mark goes off the edge of the line they just couldn't fit all four measures on one line,
so the phrase carries over into measure four here.
Now let's come to the piano and to play it.
All right, on the piano here
I've got the F-sharp major pentascale.
Can you tell me each note's letter name?
We'll call the first one F-sharp. Now you tell me the rest.
The correct answer is F-sharp, G-sharp, A-sharp, B, C-sharp.
Now with your right hand let's find that
pentascale. F-sharp major,
and can we play and name each note? Again say the
letter names, go:
F-sharp G-sharp A-sharp B C-sharp
Now I'd like you to figure out
measures one through four on your own.
A couple of clues for you: watch carefully
the changes of directions
in the steps and the skips. We start off with these
three notes skipping down. SO MI DO
Then a few notes stepping up. RE MI FA
There's a couple of changes of direction, but if you just use your eyes and follow along
in the score it will guide your fingers.
Can you pause the video now and
practice measures one through four,
and then press play and we'll look at it together.
Okay,
now you're welcome to try playing
along with me or if you'd rather just listen that's fine too.
I'll count 4
...