All Of The Things To Keep Track Of When Learning A Piece Of Music
- Eric Ching
- 5 minutes ago
- 2 min read
All Of The Things To Keep Track Of When Learning A Piece Of Music - Allegretto #9 (Alexander Reinagle)
By learning one song while keeping track of multiple things, you can build several connections and develop a deeper understanding of the piece.
Starting with the notes and their letter names, you can associate how the note looks on the grand staff with what the letters are and how it looks on the keyboard.
Then, you can observe when the line moves by steps or skips (and later larger intervals). These simple patterns will be used throughout almost every song and will continually be useful.
After that, you can figure out the best finger numbers to use because that will give the easiest way to get around the keyboard with the least amount of shifting (moving the hand horizontally). By looking at the lowest and highest notes of a region, you can work backwards and figure out what the most convenient fingering is.
To add rhythm, students can count out loud and add in the counting numbers to the page. That way, you know exactly which notes will line up with which beat. It's also important to count with rhythm in your voice so you're not just saying the numbers and syllables, but also saying them in time.
Next, you can figure out the chords by stacking notes in 3rds as closely as possible vertically. That will usually reveal what the chord is, but you may have to use some context and inference. This information will tell you whether you're on the tonic (at home, relaxed sound), extending the tonic with more chords, building tension, or resolving a phrase back to the tonic. This organizes the notes into groups of sound that go in a specific direction.
You can also assign scale degrees to every note and it will be useful later on when you're playing a song in another key. The scale degrees from a song in C major will be the same as any other major scale so a pattern like 6-1-7-2-1 will have the same sound. That way, you can recognize patterns for an easier time learning a song without having to muscle out the letter names every time.
Once you've got down the notes and rhythms, you can move on to phrasing. That means adding tiny crescendos and decrescendos and articulations so that the lines have a shape to them. This gives the song character and movement.
You can also adjust the balance between the hands whether they play an equal role, if the melody is louder than the bass line, or if the hands intersect (later on)
Lastly, you can do research on the composer and try to figure out how the piece should be played based on the era. The notes and rhythms are only one portion of the puzzle and the cultural context will indicate whether the song should be played more evenly (if it was written for harpsichord), with wildly varying rubato, or some other quality.
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