Hello and welcome back.
I'm Joseph Hoffman and today we're going back to one of my favorite collections of music.
The notebook for Ana Magdalena Bach.
You may recall that this notebook is a collection of musical pieces
hand written by various members of the Bach family for Ana Magdalena,
who was the second wife of the famous composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
The Bach family had exceptional musical taste,
and so the pieces that were chosen to be included in Anna Magdalena's notebook are beautiful and delightful pieces
like "The Prelude in C Major" that we're listening to now.
We used to think that most of the pieces in the Ana Magdalena notebook were composed by J.S. Bach himself,
but thanks to research done by music historians or musicologists,
we now realize that many of the pieces were actually by other composers.
Pieces that the Bach family discovered and simply copied into Ana Magdalena's notebook.
Copying music by hand like that was a common practice in Bach's day
since actual printed music was somewhat rare and expensive to buy.
The piece we're going to begin learning today is "Minuet in G Major" from the Ana Magdalena Bach notebook,
a piece which musicologists have now confirmed as being composed by Christian Petzold.
Here's the sheet music, or score, for "Minuet in G Major".
Let's do our usual checklist. What's our tempo indication?
If you said allegretto, you're correct. A medium fast tempo.
Always check our clefs, treble and bass.
You might think, why do we need to check those? There's always treble and bass.
Well, not true. Every once in a while the composer may put both hands in the treble staff,
or both hands in the bass staff like we had for "The Bear". It's always important to check that,
and what's our time signature?
3/4 is correct telling us we have 3 beats, 3 quarter note beats per measure,
and what key are we in? Well,
the title of the piece kind of gives it away "Minuet in G Major".
And we can confirm that by seeing we have one sharp in the key signature.
We start with this G major chord, and we end with a G major first inversion chord, and G D
G in the left hand. So pretty obviously
all signs are pointing to G major for our key.
Those are the things I always want to check before learning a piece. The tempo,
the clefs, key signature, time signature.
Now that we've checked in with those things, tell me what you notice about the first line of music.
You probably are noticing a new symbol.
This kind of zigzaggy line with a slash right through the middle is called a mordant.
A mordant is a kind of embellishment.
Embellishments are fancy little things that composers a long time ago love to put in their music.
Especially composers who lived around the time of Bach in what's called the baroque era.
Embellishments make music sound interesting and fancy.
What a mordant does is if you place it over a note like right here, this mordant is placed over the note C.
Treble C.
When you see a mordant, you're going to play the note you see and then quickly play the note below it and then go right back to it.
And that's called a mordant.
See how I play the C, I play a B just a step below,
and then I step back to the C and that's all done quickly.
Makes kind of a fancy sound.
I'll play that whole measure.
See how fancy that mordant can sound?
Playing a mordant is going to look like this.
Notice the fingering. Let's do that in slow motion. 3,
2, and then finger 1 is going to play the C at the end. C B C with fingers 3 2 1, and the reason we end on a 1 is if we keep going in that measure
we're going to need all five fingers to get up to that high B at the start, sorry, high G in the start of measure four.
Okay, so let's try that mordant in slow motion.
Try finger 3 on C, step down to B, then finger 1 on C.
And then to do it quickly, here's a few tips. You need to stay relaxed,
use a gentle touch.
If you try to play it really loud, your fingers are going to move slower not quicker.
Sometimes when you want to do something fast it makes you want to do it louder,
but that's not how it works with piano.
To play quick sometimes it helps to try and play more gently,
and just think of key staying really relaxed and loose,
and keep your fingers close to the keys.
It almost feels just like you're wiggling your fingers. Try doing this for a second just take all your fingers and just kind of gently wiggle them.
Okay, and the mordant will sound best if it's just a gentle wiggle. Keep your fingers close to the keys,
and just try this a few times with fingers 3 2 1.
Pause the video and work on that for a little bit,
and be patient with yourself.
Doing ornaments like this sometimes can take weeks and weeks, even months of practice to get the sound just the way you ...