Prelude in C Minor: Part 1

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman,

and in this lesson we're going to start learning a new piece by Johann Sebastian Bach that I think you'll love.

"Prelude in C Minor BWV 999." Let's have a listen.

Let's check out the score for "Prelude in C Minor."

First of all, what is a prelude?

Well, technically prelude means something that comes before.

In music, a prelude is usually a short piece often with a consistent or repetitive rhythm or theme.

And often in music a prelude would come before some other work like another movement. Like Bach wrote many preludes and fugues

where it would start with the prelude and then go into a fugue which is another kind of musical piece that we'll learn about later.

You might have noticed at the start I said that this was BWV 999.

BWV stands for Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis or Bach-Works-Catalogue.

You see, in 1950 a musicologist named Wolfgang Schmieder

organized and collected all of Bach's works giving each one a special BWV number

in his catalog so we could keep track of all of Bach's music.

Bach lived in a day before composers were publishing things in opuses,

and so we don't have opus numbers for Bach instead, thanks to Mr. Schmieder, we have a catalog which is the BWV.

So let's dive in what's our tempo indication?

Allegro, which means what?

If you said fast, you're correct.

Our clefs are treble and bass as expected, and what key are we in?

Well, the title kind of gave it away. I already told you it's "Prelude in C Minor."

But also seeing these three flats and noticing we start with the C in the left hand, and what triad does the right hand play right off

the bat?

Because we start with a C, and a C minor triad, and the three flats, we know we're in the key of C minor. Can you play a one octave

C natural minor scale with your right hand? Just kind of get that key in your mind.

And what's our time signature?

If you said 3/4, you're correct.

Now, scanning the piece what do you notice?

You've got lots of 16th notes, and this symbol here

a sixteenth rest.

We might not have seen one of these before. A sixteenth rest looks just like an eighth rest, but with an extra flag.

Remember, an eighth rest looks like this and usually gets half of a beat if there's a four on the bottom. a sixteenth rest just gets 1/4

of the beat. So if we're counting subdivided sixteenth notes, we could have 1-e-&-

a. Notice all these are sixteenth notes so all together that creates beat 1.

And then here we have 2-e-&-a sixteenth rest gets 3-e

on that sixteenth note, &-a.

You'll recall that you can write 16th notes with flags.

You would need two flags. Eighth notes can get one flag,

or if they're beamed together of course,

sixteenth notes get a double beam as opposed to eighth notes with just a single beam.

So all these are sixteenths. 16th rest, 16th note, 16th notes, 8th rest, 8th note, and another way to draw eighth notes with beams or flags, both mean the same thing. So notice here on beat 3 something interesting is going to happen.

On beat 3, the left hand plays this eighth note while the right hand rests.

3, left hand plays e, right hand plays &, left hand plays, a right hand plays so it's going to go back and forth very quickly. 3-e-&-a

3-e-&-a, 3-e-&-a. So listen to this whole measure and count out loud with me.

1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a, 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a.

And of course that's going to go much faster because it's allegro. 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a, 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a.

Now, before we learn to play this you might benefit from pausing and circling all

the notes that are flat on page one. We're going to just work on page one today. So you might go through.

Here's an E, so we might circle that. Another E, another E. There's an E here.

Go through and hunt for all the B's, E's, and A's, and circle them unless like here's a B but it has a natural symbol.

Remember, a natural or sharp or flat lives the whole measure long until the bar line so that means this B,

this B, this B, this B, and this B are all natural, so I'm not going to circle those because the flat gets cancelled.

So if you'd like time to circle all the flats there's an A here, and I'll let you find all the rest.

Right hand and left hand. Hunt for flats, circle them, uh if you'd like time to do that go for it otherwise let's try to play it.

So let's start with the left hand today.< ...