Jurassic Park Main Theme (Intermediate)

Hello and welcome back to Hoffman Academy. I'm Alex.
Today we're going to learn an intermediate arrangement of the theme from Jurassic Park by John Williams arranged by Mona Rejino.
This arrangement comes from sheetmusicdirect.com, and you can get it at the link below this video.
Sheet music direct is a great place to go for arrangements of many of your favorite songs. So when you have the sheet music and you're ready to go, I'll meet you over at the piano.
All right, so because this piece is a little more advanced than we're used to doing,
I'm going to go a lot quicker and just get a lot of the major issues looked at, and so
I probably won't be asking you to pause the video as much. So feel free please to pause the video and practice anything that we cover
cover as much as you need to.
As always, we're going to start with looking at the key signature, the time signature, and the tempo.
The tempo is really slow. Quarter note equals 54,
and that's going to make our quarter notes feel almost like half notes and our eighth notes feel almost like quarter notes,
and so all these sixteenth notes they're going to almost feel like our usual eighth notes.
And we have two flats in the key signature. So B-flats and E-flats. So we're in the key of B-flat major.
And we're in 4/4. So if I count this, it's going to be again really slow like 1-& 2-& 3, like that
That's kind of how fast the regular tempo goes.
Okay, so this first chord, also this arrangement has a great finger numbers, so we're going to watch all these pretty carefully.
So 1 and 3 on each hand works really good for this first chord.
That way I can get down here to this lower E-flat here. Switching to finger 2
because I have this higher E-flat coming up,
and then finger 2 down here
because I have this low F down here.
So great fingers. Let's do that one more time. Here's from the beginning, & 2 3-& 4
& 4
& 4 Now here,
5 and 2
works great going into this chord. This is a 6/4 measure by the way.
& 2-& 3-& 4-& 5-& 6, now this rhythm looks weird here you have to watch out. There's starting on this beat 3, there's a quarter note F down here, and then another quarter note,
and then when this comes in it's an eighth note.
So counting that again that's & 2-& 3-& 4-& 5-& 6
And there's a big crescendo there, and then we have a rest
1-& 2
E-flat major chord here.
Goes up to the G in the left hand. Watch out for that.
I'm going to use my 2nd finger here and the 5 and the 1.
I'll pause there for a second. You'll see in this arrangement there's also a lot of these big groups of dotted eighth note, sixteenth note, dotted eighth note, sixteenth note like in this measure eight we're doing.
It's kind of like two TIM-KI's but they're all beamed in one group, so you have to think of those as still just 2 beats.
TIM-KI TIM-KI TA
Let's go on. Measure nine, or pick up to measure nine starting with my 2nd finger on this F because I have this low B-flat coming up.
Keep those eighth notes going down here.
& 4
Good. I'm going to pause on that real quick. This is a little tricky, this 5th finger to 4th finger, to this chord here. So if that's a little tricky you'll definitely want to pause that
because what's going to be tricky is going
smoothly.
I imagine some of you are going to be tempted to make it a separate thing, but if you can
you'll want to make that a really smooth transition.
If it's still tricky, try curling your fingers a little bit.
So flat fingers are going to make that really difficult.
See that?
So those curved fingers are going to help there.
Okay, now we made it to measure twelve. Now here in measure twelve
I'm going to show you a really cool strategy for practicing that I like to use a lot.
And so I'm actually going to get into the sheet music and starting at measure nineteen we're going to work
backwards from measure nineteen back to this spot at measure twelve.
All right, we're going to work backwards from measure nineteen right here,
and this is a lot like if you notice measure eight back on the first page, and what I'm going to use are these sticky notes.
And I do this as a way to stop myself. I notice sometimes I and my students get tempted to keep on going
and when we're getting excited about learning, but we're going to stop right there,
and I'm going to use another sticky note to decide where I'm going to start and I can start on as little a piece of music as I want.
Or even bigger, and I'm going to start here just to remind myself how this section goes, and this reminds me that's all that I'm working on.
So this again sounds like this:
So I worked on that back in measure eight. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put my starting sticky note
back here. Now I can do th ...