Playing Scores on the Piano

As a conductor you often have to play scores with more than two staffs. This might be an a cappella piece, in which the parts are notated on a seperate staffs. It might be a work for choir plus accompaniment. Such a piece of sheet music is not easy to play. At first you may be disencouraged by all the notes. What might be a good way to learn such a score?

If you are playing complicated scores, at first you might try to play all notes. However, this will cause you to play very slow, and after a while you will lose overview and you will probably get tired. Let go of your urge to play all notes!

Knowing Key Signatures

gorillaFor musicians it is important to know how many sharps or flats belong to the different key signatures. A lot of musicians use mnemonics to determine the number of sharps or flats. For the sharps there is ‘Gorillas Don’t All Eat Bananas From Choice’ and for the flats there is ‘Foreign Bananas Eat All Dat Gorillas Can’t’. The drawback of the use mnemonics is that it doesn’t provide real knowledge. It’s just a trick; you don’t get deeper understanding of the material.

A much better way is to derive keys from other keys. C-major has zero sharps. Each time you go up a whole tone, two sharps are added. D-major has two sharps, E-major has four, F#-major has six, and so on. Going down works the other way around. Each time you go down a whole tone, two flats are added. B@-major has two flats, A@-major has four flats, G@-major has six flats, and so on. You can see the relationship of the keys in the following scheme:

Ear Training

einstein2In a previous post we talked about solfège. Solfège is translating notes on paper to sound without help of an instrument. Going in the opposite direction is interesting as well: analysing melodies and harmonies, in other words, notating music by ear.

Ear training is practicing to analyse melodies and harmonies. Ear training may consist of the following:

  • Analysing the intervals. Whenever the notes are sounding successively, we are talking about melodic intervals and when they are sounding at the same moment, they are called harmonic intervals.

Deriving Keys from the Tuning Fork

A good director is capable of deriving keys from the tuning fork. But doing so isn’t always easy. From the a of the tuning fork you would like to jump to the new root at once. However, not every interval is that easy to find. An ascending second or fourth is doable. But a sixth or a tritone, can be really hard to find.

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