Sonatina by Clementi, 2nd Movement: A Section: Left Hand

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman. In this lesson we'll continue to work on Clementi's "Sonatina", opus 36 number one, second movement. Mr. Hoffman, what's an opus? I thought opus was that funny penguin with a bow tie. You may be right Chef, but in music an opus is a collection of compositions by a composer published in a book. The word opus comes from Latin, and opus literally means work. I suppose it does take a lot of work to compose an entire collection of music. For sure. So opus is a pretty good name for one of these music books. Back in the classical era, composers were super boring with naming their compositions. They would write a beautiful piece, which you would think they would title something like 'Moonlight on the Mountains', but no, they'd call almost every single piece for piano the same thing: sonata. And the next one they composed, sonata, the next one sonata. Oh this one's a little shorter, let's call it sonatina. Clementi wrote dozens of sonatas and sonatinas, and since we don't have unique names for them, the only good way to keep track of them is by using opus numbers. Opus 36 means it was Clementi's 36th book of music that he published. The next book he published after that was his opus 37, and then each piece in the book gets its own number too. The first piece in opus 36 is called "Opus 36 Number One". The next piece in the same book is "Opus 36 Number Two", and so on. "Opus 36 Number Three" all the way to "Opus 36 Number Six", which is the last one because Clementi only composed six sonatinas for his opus 36. And remember, that inside each of the numbers there are also three individual movements too. So now, you can have one more thing you can impress your musical friends with. Your knowledge of opus numbers. Yes, I'm working on "Opus 36 Number One" by Clementi. Oh, you're studying his "Opus 25", how lovely. Do invite me to your performance. Cheerio. Now let's check out the score of Clementi's "Opus 36 Number One" second movement. Now, I'm bringing back our old analysis because I wanted to compare the left hand to the right hand and see how the chords are working together. So I'm going to give you some new boxes for the left hand today for you to analyze. I want you to compare it to what we had last time in the right hand. If I draw a line between notes I want you to figure out the interval. So figure out the interval here, here, here, and here. Pause the video and now figure out all of these boxes. Figure out the chord for the boxes in the left-hand bass clef part, and any line says to figure out the interval. Pause to work on that, and then press play and we'll look at it together. Okay, what did you get for this chord? That's our F major chord, the I chord, and let's also try playing this on your piano, and let me show you a time saving technique, and that is when you're learning something brand new if you see all of these are the same chord, don't bother playing this six times, because you know you can just do it once, and if you do it as a blocked chord, then that will save you time too because all you really need to do is figure out where your fingers go and then the rest will be easy when we get to playing it hands together. So we're going to play this as a blocked chord, and that takes us all the way to here, and I just realized there are two chords that I wanted you to analyze but I didn't box, so let's do these together. This one and this one. Okay, what do we have here? We have a C, an F and an A. Can you tell me what chord we have here? First of all you can see it's not root position. So we have a fourth and a third. Root position needs to be a third and a third. To get it to root, I can just take this C put it on top. Now third and third, I know I'm in root position with an F major chord. So I just have the same chord here as here. I just went down one inversion to second inversion. That chord repeats. Now what chord do you see here? We have a C, an E, and a G. What chord is that? Well, since we have a third and a third we know we're in root position. So that's a C major chord. Now notice we have this F major chord going all along while the right hand is also playing these notes in the F major chord. Oh, first let's practice this all as blocked chords now. Can you play this first chord? This will save us a lot of time when we go to playing the actual notes. We're going to play these all as a block chord. So this F major chord and then this inverted F major chord, and be sure to use the correct fingering: 5 2 1 And then the C major chord 5 3 1, then what did you get here? It's another F major chord back up here in root position, and then what did you get here? This is a B-flat major chord in second inversion. And hopefully you notice that there's a pattern going on with the right hand. The left hand had this F major chord. which carries on into the right hand and then the left hand has this B-flat major chord which carries on into the right hand. Kind of makes this B-flat major arpeggio. It's really beautiful, okay so we have that B-flat major chord. And then here you should recognize that. We've already had this: it's our F major chord, and we have some notes here which we'll learn in a little bit. What ch ...