Elliott Carter Piano Concerto Concerto at Amazon
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Playing piano by ear is something most humans may learn to do. A little part of the population is tone deaf and will never be competent to recognize specific pitches, even though the rest of us may learn to get pretty good at it. All melodies are comprised of musical intervals and rhythms, the simplest of which are recognized by closely everyone. Take “Twinkle Bells” or even “Mary Had A Little Lamb”, for examples of exceedingly simple melodies, and they may without apparent effort be broken down into without apparent effort learned patterns of notes. In fact, just with regards to anything that one may hum or sing may be worked out on the piano keyboard without much trouble. All musical pieces, whether simple or complex, implicate chords in specific keys, which is something that playing the just the melody ignores, but this is something we will cover another time. For now, let’s just concentrate on getting the melody played. Using the white keys, representing the key of C Major, is universally the most immediate way to learn a tune even if it was in the first place written in some other key, so for now we will keep the piece in C. Now, the thing to realize is that no matter what the starting note in the melody is, the tune will practically always end on the note which is the tonic of the piece. This means that if you hum the song you will end up on the bass of the key that the piece was written in, and this is a huge help in working out the melody. As an example, in “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, the initial note singing the word “Mary” is the third note of the key, or “me”, as in “doe-ray-me-fa-so-la-tee-doe”, while the tune ends on the word “doe”(tonic or the bass note). Moving on to the piano, “doe” would be middle C, with is the white note in the middle of the keyboard to the left of the middle two black notes, and up to it is right would be “ray, me, fa, so, la, and tee, with doe ending up at the next “C” an octave up. So, singing and playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” would echo this progression starting on “three” which is two notes up from middle C: “me-ray-doe-ray-me-me-me…..ray-ray-ray….me-so-so……me-ray-doe-ray-me-me-me…me-ray-ray-me-ray-doe”. Numerically it would look like this: 3-2-1-2-3-3-3…2-2-2…3-5-5…3-2-1-2-3-3-3…3-2-2-3-2-1″, ending on middle C. If you may play that progress starting on “E” two white notes above middle C, you may play by ear. Try it! Most helpful customer reviews 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. |
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