The Song of Twilight: A Section: Right Hand

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and in this lesson we're going to start learning a piece by Japanese composer Yoshinao Nakada, "The Song of Twilight." Yoshinao Nakada was born in 1923 in Tokyo Japan. His father was a composer and organist, and so Yoshinao had a musical childhood, and he learned to play piano and compose from a young age. As an adult, Nakada composed music for piano and choir, and he also wrote music for TV and radio shows. One of his greatest gifts was his ability to create beautiful, lyrical melodies, which you'll hear for yourself in "The Song of Twilight." Let's have a listen. Here's the score for "The Song of Twilight." By now you know that I like to check four things before I learn a new piece. Number one: tempo indication. Number two: the clefs. Number three: the key. And number four: our time signature. So let's go through that checklist now. What's our tempo indication? Mr. Nakada tells us this piece will be played quietly, and he even gives us an exact metronome speed. Some composers like to be very specific, and say hey if you want to set your metronome to somewhere between 54 or 60 beats per minute, that's the speed of your quarter note. That can be very useful. Number two, we'll check out our clefs. What's interesting this time, you probably noticed we have two treble staffs, so both the right hand and the left hand are going to be up in the higher part of the piano. Now let's figure out what key we're in. How many sharps do you see in the key signature? There are three sharps here. Now from our ladder of fifths we know that will put us in the key of A major or F-sharp minor. So how do we tell? Well, it's usually best to look at the first chord or note of the song and the last chord. So what do we have here at the beginning? In the left hand we have, remember we're in treble staff, so we have an A and a C-sharp, and in the right hand we have this E. An A major triad. That's a big clue that we're probably in the key of A major, but just to be sure, let's also look at the last chord of the song. Now we're in bass staff, and notice we have this A, C-sharp, E triad with a C-sharp in the right hand. Another A major triad at the beginning and end. That tells us we're definitely going to be in the key of A major. Finally, the last thing to check is our time signature. Have we seen this before? If you see a C in the place where we would normally see a time signature, that is a symbol that stands for common time. It's an abbreviation that some composers like to do because 4/4 time is the most common, sometimes we'll just use a C as a shorthand, quick way to write 4/4. Stands for common time. It just means that we'll be in 4/4 time signature. Now that we've gone through our checklist, we're ready to start learning it. Now, I've noticed that we've got a lot of 16th note rhythms. So let's actually come to the heartbeat mat because I'd like to teach you a new more advanced way of counting sixteenth notes today. For a while now we've known two different ways of counting rhythms. Way back when we learned like "Hot Cross Buns" we learned TI-TI TI-TI TI-TI TI-TI, and then later we learned that we can count the beat using subdivided counts. 1-& 2-& 3-& 4-& With sixteenth notes, we can subdivide the beat equally into four parts, and count it like this: 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a 4-e-&-a Notice that the & is still in the same place that we had before with the eighth notes. 1-& The & still marks the halfway point in the beat, we've squeezed this e, 1-e. & is still in the same place, and then 'a' is this last sixteenth note. So now we have four equal parts of the beat. 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a 4-e-&-a Can you clap and count that with me? We're just going to say 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a 4-e-&-a while we clap each sixteenth note. Try to say it and clap with me ready, go. 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a 4-e-&-a Now, why is this helpful? Well, sometimes it can be helpful when you see some rhythm especially in a song like we're learning today, "Song of Twilight", where the rhythms are slow and you want to make sure the timing is correct. Our old way of counting rhythms would be TI-KI-TI-KI TI-TI TI-KI-TI-KI TA, but one problem with that method is how long do you hold that TA? If you count the subdivided beats, it tells you exactly how long to hold it. Listen. 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a 4-e-&-a A quarter note has to take 4-e-&-a. You're counting all little parts of that beat so you know exactly how long to hold it. Try it with me. Let's clap this rhythm while we count the subdivided beat, and now our subdivisions are 16th notes. Ready, go. 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a 4-e-&-a. Let's practice that one more time. Remember, on this one it's going to be 2-e-&-a. The eighth note still comes on the & just like before. 2-e. This first eighth note gets 2-e. The second half of the eighth note gets &-a. Let's try it again, go. 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a 4-e-&-a What about a rhythm like this? Well, this eighth note gets 1-e, and then these two sixteenth notes get &-a. 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a 4-e-& ...