Piano Guidance
Piano Guidance
Photo: Karolina Grabowska
The C major scale has no sharps or flats, this scale was created before the piano. When they created the piano (or whatever similar instrument before) they wanted all the sharps and flats to be on the black keys. Since there are no sharps or flats in CM it became the one with no black keys.
When it comes to taking music lessons, it's most common for students to take one lesson per week. While weekly lessons work perfectly fine for...
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Pianote is definitely worth it for beginners looking for a comprehensive method to get playing quickly. It would also be very useful for...
Read More »Like most things in music, the development was gradual and is still ongoing, and went in lurches as other events happened in history. Western music starts out from the early Christian church which borrowed both from the Greeks, who had figured out some harmony things, and the Jews, from whom they got the idea of chants. The Greek intervals, speaking generally, led toward these "modes". The chants were sacred and were not supposed to be changed, and went along the modes too. It was all oral, and it took forever for the boys to memorize one chant after the other by copying the master singers. Those chants were along those "modes". This went on for hundreds of years. After the collapse of the Roman Empire the different towns were like islands. Then came the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire, which tried to unit all Christendom, and to do so the rituals and so forth had to be unified. How do you communicate things if you have poor roads, no radio, telephone or Internet, and everything is oral? Writing is the answer, so the way of writing was improved, and ways of written music were also being sought by the existing powers. Charlemagne was given a mandate by the pope, if I remember correctly. Meanwhile monks and scholars were already trying ways to make teaching students (to memorize) these chants easier. You could make a little squiggle around a main note to show how the notes dance around it over here going higher and lower - so the neumes dancing around a single line got invented. It was like a quick memo for things that were memorized. D'Arezzi's revolution was to look at the structure (that was already in use) underneath that music - and he isolated the notes with their related intervals of a "scale". He gave them the names Do Re Mi etc. from that chant we all know about. There were spots on his hand which represented the Do Re Mi etc. so he could point to the "note" and the singers could sing it. The writing system came from this too. He did not invent the modes or the intervals - they already existed in the music. Up to then people had to memorize entire portions of chants. The idea that you could sing a note, another note, and another note, and create a chant out of this succession of notes, was mind boggling - that you didn't have to hear someone sing it first. The idea of looking at a sheet of paper, sing note after note, and end up singing a chant you had never heard before totally blew their minds. We take it for granted. Since the political agenda was to unify the European Christian world, partly via the religious rituals, there was a lot of support for spreading this system. Therefore it could take off. The time was ripe for it. Once there was a way of writing music, ideas could also get a lot more complex and it developed from there. And is still developing.
867-5309 Jenny is written in the key of A Major. According to the Theorytab database, it is the 4th most popular key among Major keys and the 4th...
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It's not uncommon for people to cry when they sing and it's not a sign of weakness either. It could be that you're feeling vulnerable at the time,...
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Pianoforall is one of the most popular online piano courses online and has helped over 450,000 students around the world achieve their dream of playing beautiful piano for over a decade.
Learn More »Clair de lune, (French: Moonlight) the third segment in Suite bergamasque, a four-movement composition for piano by French composer Claude Debussy, begun in 1890 and revised and published in 1905.
Clair de lune, (French: Moonlight) the third segment in Suite bergamasque, a four-movement composition for piano by French composer Claude Debussy, begun in 1890 and revised and published in 1905. The gentle “Clair de lune” provides an elegant contrast to the suite’s sprightly second and fourth movements. One of Debussy’s early compositions, it is the most readily recognizable segment of his works. The title of the movement refers to a folk song that was the conventional accompaniment of scenes of the love-sick Pierrot in the French pantomime. Set in the larger composition’s reference to Bergamo, Italy—a city traditionally considered the home of Harlequin, a standard figure of the commedia dell’arte—the piece shows Debussy’s connections with the circus spirit prevalent in early 20th-century compositions.
Singers with a 6-octave range are a rarity. And some of the famous names you may assume have loads of notes may have fewer than you'd realised....
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1) It Depends On How Many Keys The Piano Has Your piano will start on either A or C depending on the number of keys. Like I said in my article on...
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The duo began as an independent act, recording music in basements and self-producing their records, before they eventually emerged as one of the...
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Playing 12-Bar Blues The blues scale sounds great paired with a variety of chords, but it's especially at home being played over 12-bar blues. The...
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