Sonatina in C: First Movement: A Section: Right Hand

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and today we are hitting a pretty important milestone. You're going to be learning your first sonatina. Wow, wait what's a sonatina? Oh, a sonatina is a special kind of musical piece which is longer than any kind of piece we've learned so far. Wow! Most often, a sonatina has three major sections called movements. Each movement is like it's very own piece, but the three movements all put together make the full sonatina. That's kind of like a trilogy. A trilogy? A trilogy is a series of three books or movies all part of the same story. Oh, right. Like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I love Gandalf. You shall not pass! Oh, and Star Wars! Do you mean the original trilogy? That's the only one I choose to acknowledge. So, a sonatina is a kind of musical trilogy made up of three movements. Traditionally, these movements follow a pattern: fast, slow, fast. The first movement is most often a lively allegro tempo, then for contrast the second movement is slow. Maybe an adagio or andante. Then to end with a lot of excitement, the third movement is fast again, sometimes allegro or vivace, or to go really fast a composer may choose presto or prestissimo. I love prestissimo! Want to watch me run prestissimo? Prestissimo power activate! Today we'll be learning the A section of the first movement of "Sonatina in C" by Muzio Clementi. Let's get started by checking out the score. Here's the score for the A section of the first movement of "Clementi Sonatina in C." What do we always check when we come to a new piece? Well, on my checklist I always want to see how fast I should be playing this. Here with our tempo indication we know it's going to be allegro, which is exactly what we would expect for the first movement of a sonatina. But I'm going to check my clefs treble and bass, no surprise. Then I want to look and see if there's a key signature which would usually come right after the clefs, before the time signature. Well, I don't see any sharps or flats, so what key would that put us in? We know that would be C major or possibly A minor, but since the title of the piece is "Sonatina in C," that's a pretty big clue we're going to be in C major. No sharps or flats in the key signature. Next up we come to our time signature, and whoa here's something new. This is a new kind of time signature called cut time. So let's take a second to explore what cut time means. So to back up a little bit, there are a lot of symbols that have evolved over the years in music. One symbol that used to be used commonly but isn't used much anymore is actually called common time and they would just mark it as a C. So when you C a C, sometimes in older pieces of music composed a couple hundred years ago, you might see a big capital C like this. It might look a little fancy with a little dot there. Just know that that means common time, which stands for 4/4. Now, another symbol that was used a lot back in the day of like Mozart and his friends was called cut time, and cut time is really a symbol for 2/2. Remember another way to think about time signature is the top number tells you how many beats in each measure. The bottom number tells you what kind of note you're counting as a beat. So you could think of 4/4, or common time, as 4 quarter note beats per measure. So what does 2/2 mean? You could think of that as 2 half note beats per measure. Let's look at an actual example of this. In 4/4, how would we count this? We'd say 1 2 3 4. Each quarter note equals 1 beat. 4 quarter note beats. How many beats does a half note get? 1 2 3 4. Each half note gets 2 beats, and how many beats does a whole note get? 1 2 3 4. Now what if we're in cut time, which remember we could have written as 2/2. Notice that with 2/2 we can have the exact same rhythm because when we have 2 half note beats per measure, we essentially can fit this same, exact same notes in every measure as before we're just counting it differently now. Now it's the half note that gets 1 beat. One half note gets one beat all to itself, and so quarter notes are now kind of like eighth notes. This would have to be 1-& 2-&. And this whole note would get only 2 beats. 1 2. Well why on earth would a composer do that? Why couldn't they just call that 4/4? Well, the reason is sometimes a composer wants the song to feel faster. Remember if you're counting 1 2 3 4, that's going to feel slower than if you go 1-& 2-& 1 2 1 2 So generally a composer will pick cut time even though it literally can look exactly the same as 4/4. Why is it cut time you might ask? It's basically because all the values get cut in half. Whatever was 2 beats before is now just 1 beat. If you were 4 beats before, now you're 2 beats. Everything is cut in half. So, cut time. If you ever see cut time in a piece you can pretty much expect that is going to be a fast movement or piece. But when you're learning it, you can pretend that you're in 4/4 as you're learning it at a slower speed, and then switch to cut time when you to play it at the full speed. So when we're first learning sonatina in c even though we're in cut time, we're going to pretend we're in 4/4 time and just think 1 2-& 3 4 1 2-& 3 4 But eventually we' ...