A final sightreading list update for the foreseeable future.
I'm working on entering a Ph.D. program in statistics, so that will be dominating my life for a few years. I am, however, going to try to resume piano lessons after the pandemic is done. What that looks like at this point is unknown. Here was the last update I did on this list.
Current Status I'm not going to continue concentrating time on sightreading. Rather, I'm going to spend time learning pieces. I hope the list below serves as a decent reference point for beginning and getting you to a decent spot. While this might seem like an end to a project, I did achieve my overall goal for this project, which was to have sufficient familiarity with the piano so as to learn pieces without having to look at the keys. As a side commentary, I've not found great resources for sightreading at the level I'm at currently, so I'm refraining from getting more large collections of music. On top of working full-time and being a part-time PhD student, I don't have time to continue scavenging for sightreading materials. The way I've decided to approach learning pieces is as follows:
Make sure I can play the vast majority of the piece without looking at my fingers at a somewhat lower tempo (not much slower than performance tempo), keeping my eyes on the sheet music.
Once most of the technique is down, gradually transition to memorizing. I've purposefully made it a point only to look where necessary and to trust my fingers where I can. Focus more on musical nuances at this point.
I know most people (I learned this way in my first years playing piano as well) believe that you should allow yourself to look at the keys from the very beginning, but I feel that trying to worry about hand-eye coordination from the beginning for every key is too much stress on my mind, especially when it comes to performance or recording time. If I can't play it at least somewhat near tempo without looking, I don't feel it's secure in my mind. Maybe I'm just odd in this way. To get an idea of how much time I spend with the two steps above, for the Zdes' Khorosho I'm learning, I have most of it down minus three measures. Once I'm satisfied with it (which will be soon), I would guess I probably spent 90% of my time learning the piece keeping my eyes on the sheet music, and 10% memorizing. Now back to the list.
Here's what my path looked like, in roughly chronological order, but I've reordered things to how I would recommend someone pursue these texts. I did go through the entirety of everything I listed below, with eyes not on my fingers or keys and at a tempo where I had at least 98% accuracy.
You should not aim for speed when you are doing this. This is a slow process and it takes a lot of time, but it is SO worth it!
Suggested Prerequisites
Be familiar with basic major scale patterns. You should at least be acquainted with common crossing patterns (e.g., 12312345 on the right hand, etc.).
Be competent enough with theory and ear training so that you can identify your mistakes when you hear them. This is extremely important to have - if you are not going to look at your fingers, the only way you can identify when you have a mistake is if you have a ear that is trained well enough to associate what you see in sheet music with the correct pitches. You want your ear trained at a level where you are able to identify intervals, triads, chords, nonharmonic tones (suspensions, appoggiaturas, etc.), and common chord progressions (e.g., I-IV-V-I) by ear.
Simple Finger Patterns and Chords (or "Vertical Playing") The focus of this section is to be able to play simple melodic and harmonic patterns. The goal is to teach your fingers how to play common chord progressions without relying on looking at your keys. This level starts off with absolutely no leaps with a fixed five-finger position (see Smith) all the way to doing more complicated leaps (particularly in the left hand) in the works of Chopin and Joplin.
Smith: Progressive Sight Reading Exercises
John Kember's Piano Sight-Reading (I went through all three books)
Paul Harris' Improve Your Sightreading (stop right before the Advanced level)
Bartok: Mikrokosmos -- skip the last 2-3 books on your first read
Essential Keyboard Repertoire: volumes 2, 6, and 8 (I still take these out occasionally)
Schirmer's 20th Century Performance Editions: Intermediate
Patterson: 50 Hymn Tunes Without Words for Sightreading
Bach: 371 Harmonized Chorales for Keyboard
Chopin: all Mazurkas
Joplin: Complete Piano Works
Horizontal Playing Pianists, whenever possible, view horizontal playing as groups of vertical chords. (Sometimes this isn't possible, but it's nice when it is - one has to start somewhere.) Here's what I've done so far:
Sonatinas: Diabelli, Clementi, Haydn, Kuhlau
Sonatas: all Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, about 50 or so of the Clementi sonatas (don't know if I'll bother completing these).
Bach (or Contrapuntal Playing) I started going this route after finishing the Haydn while going through Clementi whenever I had time. I've done the:
Inventions
Sinfonias
Little Preludes and Fugues (the Henle edition)
Well-Tempered Clavier, Books 1 and 2
Toccatas (these felt relatively simple after the WTC)
Art of the Fugue
English Suites
Goldberg Variations (PLEASE get Paul Barton's version! I don't know why people stick with the Urtext edition of this piece when it was clearly meant for another instrument.)
An attempt at more complicated music
Scarlatti: 90 sonatas (this is a 3-volume edition - helped me get more comfortable with ridiculous leaps), see book 1, book 2, book 3
Chopin: all Preludes (the last few were nasty)
Mendelssohn: all Songs without Words
Chopin: choosing some Nocturnes at random (I didn't feel confident enough to run through all of them yet)
Scriabin: all Preludes (skipping about 1-2 of them where I could not figure out the polyrhythms, though) - mostly finished at this point
Debussy: all Preludes (books I, II)
Kabalevsky: all Sonatinas
Brahms: Complete Shorter Works for Solo Piano (Dover)
Scherzo, Op. 4
Ballades Op. 10
Waltzes Op. 39 (did not bother with the simplified edition)
Beethoven Piano Concertos: 1, 2, 3 (with Tutti parts as a piano reduction)
Repertoire (see my practice methods described above) Repertoire I'm (mostly) finished with:
Rachmaninoff, arr. Gryaznov: Zdes' Khorosho. A good piece to test your ability for clarity of line and melody, working with (at some times) as many as five implied parts at once and playing two against three in the same hand. If you'd like any tips on learning this piece, let me know in the comments and I'd be happy to provide insight.
Repertoire I'm working on:
Prokofiev, Sonata #1
Prokofiev, Etude Op. 2 #1 (d minor)
Repertoire I'm planning on starting soon:
Either one of Rachmaninoff, Moment Musicaux #4 or Etude-Tableaux Op. 39 #5 (e-flat minor)
Additional Note You should not interpret this list to mean "if I just complete this book once, I can move on to the next one with ease." That may be the case for some of these, but there were times when I was not quite as driven to move to the next book, and I would just re-play a book I had already gone through. Hope this is still helpful and let me know if any of you have questions!
The transcript of *the* lecture. You know which one. (the 2 final paragraphs are in the comments because of stupid reddit character limit)
How many of you here have personally witnessed a total eclipse of the sun? To stand one day in the shadow of the moon is one of my humble goals in life. The closest I ever came was over thirty years ago. On February 26, 1979, a solar eclipse passed directly over the city of Portland. I bought my bus tickets and found a place to stay. But in the end, I couldn’t get the time off work. Well, anyone who lives in Portland can tell you that the chances of catching the sun in February are pretty slim. And sure enough, the skies over the city that day were completely overcast. I wouldn’t have seen a thing. That work I couldn’t get out of was my first job out of college: A sales clerk at an old Radio Shack store in beautiful downtown Worcester, Massachusetts. On my very first day behind the counter, a delivery truck pulled up to the front of the store. They carried in a big carton, upon which was printed the legend TRS-80. It was our floor sample of the world’s first mass-market microcomputer. The TRS-80 Model I had a Z80 processor clocked at 1.7 megahertz, 4,096 bytes of memory, and a 64-character black-and-white text display. The only storage was a cassette recorder. All this could be yours for the low, low price of $599. This store I was working in had seen better days. At one time, it had been near the center of a thriving commercial district. But like so many other New England cities, the advent of shopping malls had, by the early ‘70s, turned it into a ghost town. Worcester’s solution to this problem was decisive, to say the least. The city’s elders apparently decided that if they couldn’t beat them, they would join them. And so several square blocks at the heart of the city were bulldozed into oblivion, destroying dozens of family businesses, including the site of a pharmacy once operated by my great-grandfather. In their place was erected a vast three-level shopping complex, with cinemas and a food court. When the dust settled, only a few forlorn blocks of the old Worcester remained standing. My Radio Shack store was in one of those blocks. Then, to add insult to injury, Radio Shack opened a brand-new location inside the shopping center, less than 500 feet from my store. So now patrons has a choice between a clean, well-lighted establishment with uniformed security and acres of convenient parking, or a shadowy hole in a seedy old office building next to an adult movie theater. Consequently, I had plenty of time to fool around with the new computer. I taught myself BASIC programming. Then I learned Z80 assembly. Both, of course, so that I could write games. I also created self-running animated demos which ran all night in the store window for the edification of the winos who peed in our doorway. Strangely enough, the few customers we had didn’t seem to be interested in our new computer, even after the 16K memory upgrade. In fact, most of the people who set off the buzzer on their way through the front door weren’t there to buy anything at all. They were there to exploit a free promotion which was the bane of Radio Shack employees for over forty years: The Battery of the Month Club. The idea of this promotion was simple. Customers got a little red card upon which was printed a square for each month. Twelve times a year, the lucky sales clerk got to punch out a square and give the customer one brand new triple-A, double-A, C, D or 9-volt battery. Of course, customers weren’t allowed to choose just any grade of battery. At the time of my employment, Radio Shack offered three different levels of battery excellence. First were the alkalines, powerful, long-lasting and expensive, hanging behind the counter like prescription medication in gold-embossed blister packs. These were most certainly not available through the Battery of the Month Club. Next were the high-end lead batteries, sturdy, dependable batteries, moderately priced, and prominently displayed near the front of the store. These were also not available through the Battery of the Month Club. Finally, at the bottom of the barrel, were the standard lead batteries. These were literally piled in barrels, cunningly located way at the back of the store, in a dark corner near the TV antennas. Remember TV antennas? Customers who came in looking for their free Battery of the Month had to walk the entire length of the premises, past the CB radios and stereo headphones and remote-controlled racing cars. Nothing would stop them. On the first day of every month, like clockwork, those customers come in waving their little red cards. I would look up from my programming and wave them to the back of the store. It didn’t matter that the batteries were only worth twenty-nine cents. It didn’t matter that most of them were already half dead. They came. They grabbed. And, as far as I can remember, not one of them ever paid for a damned thing. I was such a crappy salesman. I was young and foolish. I thought my education in game design was happening at the keyboard. I almost missed the lesson coming through the front door. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only person fooling around with games on micros. All over the country, people like me were experimenting. Scott Adams was coding what would soon become the world’s first commercial adventure game. Remember adventure games? My future employer, Infocom, was being founded, along with other legendary companies like On-Line Systems, Sirius, Personal Software and SSI. Those were exciting times. Teenagers were making fortunes. Games were cheap and easy to build. The slate was clean. But in 1979, the biggest news in gaming had nothing to do with computers. § On the morning of the autumn equinox, September 20th, a new children’s picture book appeared in the stores of Great Britain. This picture book was rather peculiar. It consisted of 15 meticulously detailed color paintings, illustrating a slight, whimsical tale about a rabbit delivering a jewel to the moon. On the back jacket of the book was a color photograph of a real jewel shaped like a running rabbit, five inches long, fashioned of 18-karat gold, suspended with ornaments and bells, together with a sun and moon of blue quartz. According to the blurb underneath, this very jewel had been buried somewhere in England. Clues pointing to its location were concealed in the text and in the pictures of the book. The treasure would belong to whoever found it first. The book was called Masquerade. It was created by an eccentric little man with divergent eyes and a talent for mischief named Kit Williams. Within days, the first printing was sold out. And the Empire That Never Sleeps found itself in the grip of Rabbit Fever. Excited readers attacked the paintings with rulers, compasses and protractors. Magazine articles and TV specials dissected the clues, floated theories, and followed with keen delight the reckless exploits of the fanatics. One obscure park, unfortunately known by the nickname Rabbit Hill, was so riddled with holes excavated by misguided treasure seekers that the authorities had to erect signs assuring the public that no gold rabbits were to be found there. Some hunters ended up seeking psychological counseling for their obsession. The craze lept over the Atlantic Ocean and invaded America, France, Italy and Germany. It sold over a million copies in a few months, a record unrivalled by any children’s title until the advent of Harry Potter. Over 150,000 copies were sold in foreign translations, including 80,000 copies in Japanese, despite the fact that the puzzle was only solvable in English. It didn’t matter that the Masquerade jewel was only worth a few thousand dollars. Many seekers spent far more than that in their months of exploration and travel. It was the thrill of the chase. The possibility of being The One. Treasure hunts, secret messages and hidden things seem to exert an irresistible appeal. They’re fun to look for, and to talk about. And this fact of human psychology has been exploited in computer games since the earliest days. It finds expression in the hidden surprises we call Easter eggs. Atari’s Steven Wright is credited with coining this term in the first issue of Electronic Games magazine. The first Easter egg in a commercial computer game appeared in an early Atari 2600 cartridge called, simply enough, Adventure. By a sequence of unlikely movements and obscure manipulations, players could discover a secret room where the words “Created by Warren Robinet” appeared in flashing letters. Over the decades, Easter eggs and their evil twin, cheat codes, have become an industry within an industry. Entire magazines and Web sites are now devoted to their carefully orchestrated discovery and dissemination. They’re part of our toolkit, our basic vocabulary, the language of computer game design. Computer gamers may have been the first to refer to hidden surprises as Easter eggs, but we certainly weren’t the first to use them. Painters, composers and artists of every discipline have been hiding stuff in their works for centuries. The recent advent of VCRs and laserdisc players with freeze-frame capability exposed decades of secret Disney erotica. Thomas Kinkade, the self-appointed “Painter of Light,” amuses himself by hiding the letter N in his works. A number beside his signature indicates how many Ns are hidden in each painting. Picasso, Dali, Raphael, Poussin and dozens of other painters concealed all kinds of stuff in their paintings. A favorite trick was hiding portraits of themselves, their families, friends and fellow artists in crowd scenes. El Greco loved dogs. But the Catholic Church forbid him from including any in his sacred paintings. So he hid them, usually within the outlines of celestial clouds. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich chafed under the political censorship imposed by the Soviet Ministry of Culture. His symphonies and chamber works are loaded with hidden signatures and subversive subtexts which, had they been recognized, would have sent him to Siberia. Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is filled with musical allusions to the rituals of the Freemasons, the ancient secret society of which he and his mentor Haydn were members. But the most famous purveyor of Easter eggs is that champion of the late Baroque, the ultimate musical nerd, Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was a student of gematria, the art of assigning numeric values to letters of the alphabet: A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. By comparing, sequencing or otherwise manipulating these numbers, secret messages can be concealed. Bach took particular delight in the gematriacal numbers 14 and 41. 14 is the sum of the initials of his last name: B=2, A=1, C=3 and H=8. 41 is the sum of his expanded initials, J S BACH. These two numbers show up over and over again in Bach’s compositions. One of the better-known examples is his setting of the chorale “Vor deinen Thron.” The first line of the melody contains exactly 14 notes, and the entire melody from start to finish contains 41. Another of Bach’s favorite games was the puzzle canon. A canon is a melody that sounds good when you play it on top of itself, a little bit out of sync. “Freres Jacques” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” are familiar examples of simple, two-voice canons. But a canon can employ any number of voices. And you don’t have to play each voice the same way, either. You can change the octave, transpose the key, invert the pitch, play it backwards, or any combination. Finding melodies that make good multi-voice canons is a fussy and difficult art, of which Bach was an undisputed master. Now, in a puzzle canon, the composer specifies the basic melody and the number of voices, but not the relationship of the voices. The student has to figure out the position and key of each voice, and whether to perform them inverted and/or backwards. Bach wrote quite a number of puzzle canons. The most famous, BWV 1076, is part of a fascinating story. One of Bach’s students was a fellow by the name of Lorenz Mizler, founder of The Society of Musical Science. This elite, invitation-only institution devoted itself to the study of Pythagorean philosophy, and the union of music and mathematics. Its distinguished membership reads like a Who’s Who of German composers, including Handel, Telemann and eventually Mozart. Applicants for membership in the Society were required to submit an oil portrait of themselves, along with a specimen of original music. With nerdly efficiency, society member number 14 decided to combine these admission requirements into a single work. He sat for a portrait with Elias Haussmann, official artist at the court of Dresden. This portrait, which now hangs in the gallery of the Town Hall in Leipzig, is the only indisputably authentic image of Bach in existence. The Haussman portrait shows Bach dressed in a formal coat with exactly 14 buttons. In his hand is a sheet of music paper upon which is written a puzzle canon for six simultaneous voices. In 1974, a manuscript was discovered which proved that this canon was the thirteenth in a series of exactly 14 canons based on the ground theme of the famous Goldberg Variations. As if these musical gymnastics weren’t enough, Bach liked to hide messages in his compositions by assigning notes to the letters. His initials B-A-C-H correspond to the pitch sequence B-flat, A, C and B-natural in German letter notation. This theme makes its most memorable appearance in the last bars of his final composition, The Art of Fugue, published soon after his death in 1750. The word “fugue” comes from the Latin fuga, which means flight (as in running away). So the art of fugue is the art of flight, the art of taking a theme and running with it. Bach wrote hundreds of fugues, but none as sublime as this sequence of 14. In the last and most complicated fugue in the series, the first and second sections develop normally. This is followed by the B-A-C-H signature, and then suddenly, without any warning or structural justification, the fugue stops dead in its tracks. One of the composer’s 20 children, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, claimed that Bach died moments after those last few notes were written. This story is probably apocryphal. The Easter eggs in Bach’s music are a pleasant obscurity, known chiefly to professors and students of Baroque music. But in March of 2002, when this lecture was first delivered, those Easter eggs were the talk of the entire classical music industry. Sitting near the top of the classical music charts that month was a compact disc on the ECM label called Morimur. It is performed by the Hilliard choral ensemble together with a talented but, until then, little-known violinist, Christoph Poppen. The music on Morimur is based on a gematriacal analysis of Bach’s Partita in D Minor for solo violin. This analysis, by German professor Helga Thoene, assigns numeric values to the duration of notes, the number of bars, and the German letter notation of the Partita. In doing so, she claims to have discovered the complete text of several liturgical ceremonies encoded in the notes. The CD presents these hidden texts, superimposed over the original music. The result was strangely melancholy, dark, haunting, and very, very popular. Quite a few music critics attacked this disc. They didn’t buy Professor Thoene’s analysis, dismissing it as a combination of numerology and canny marketing. Their caution was not without basis. Numerology is a slippery slope down which many a fine mind has slid to its doom. Allow me to offer an amusing anecdote from my own experience. Back in the early ‘90s, before the Internet took off, one of the more popular online bulletin board systems was a service called Prodigy. I bought an account on Prodigy so I could join a fraternal interest group, and gossip with fellow members around the country. One day, a stranger appeared on our bulletin board. Right away, I knew we were in trouble. This fellow, whose name was Gary, began spouting all kinds of apocalyptic nonsense about worldwide conspiracies, secret societies and devil worship. At first we tried to be polite. We questioned his sources, corrected his histories, logically refuted his claims, and tried to behave in a civilized manner. But instead of soothing him, our attention only made him worse. His conspiratorial warnings became urgent, approaching hysteria. He began to threaten people who disagreed with him. To coin a phrase, Gary went All Upper Case. But his most urgent warnings weren’t about the gays, the Jews, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati. According to Gary, the greatest enemy of mankind was Santa Claus. Gary claimed to possess a secret numerical formula that “proved” beyond a shadow of a doubt that Santa Claus was an avatar of the Antichrist. Intrigued, we pressed Gary to reveal his formula. In doing so, we walked right into his trap. We should have known he had a book to sell. I fell for it. I sent him the fifteen bucks. Less than a week later the book arrived. Above an ominous photograph of the Washington monument was emblazoned the title: 666: The Final Warning! Inside this privately printed 494-page monster, Gary reveals a simple gematriacal formula which he claims was developed by the ancient Sumerians. This formula assigns successive products of 6 to each letter of the alphabet: A=6, B=12, C=18, etc. Imagine my dismay when I applied this ancient formula to the name “Santa Claus,” and obtained the blasphemous sum of 666, the Biblical Number of the Beast! I went on Prodigy and reported to the stunned members of our interest group that Gary was right, after all. There could be no doubt that, according to the unimpeachable wisdom of ancient Sumeria, Santa Claus was the AntiChrist. I then went on to point out several other names which, when submitted to Gary’s formula, also produced the sum 666. Names like “Saint James,” “New York” and “New Mexico.” Soon the bulletin board was filled with discoveries like “computer,” “Boston tea” and, most sinister of all, “sing karaoke.” Gary left us alone after that. I got my $15 worth. But Gary is hardly the first person to connect secret codes to the Bible. People have been looking for Easter eggs in the Bible for hundreds of years. The Hebrew mystical tradition of kabbalah can be described as a gematriacal meditation on the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. The advent of computers has made the application of numerology to the Bible fast and efficient. The latest spate of Bible-searching was instigated by a book published in 1998 by Michael Drosnin, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. His book, The Bible Code, applied a skip-cypher, in which every nth character in a text is combined to form a message. By applying his skip-cypher to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, Drosnin claimed to have discovered predictions of World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and both Kennedys, the moon landing, Watergate, the Oklahoma City bombing, the election of Bill Clinton, the death of Princess Di and the comet that collided with Jupiter. He also found predictions of a giant earthquake in LA, a meteor hitting the earth, and nuclear armageddon, all scheduled to occur before the end of the last decade. The Bible Code spent many weeks on the bestseller lists, spawning several sequels and dozens of imitators. The Bible has certainly attracted its share of crackpots. But for the real hardcore egg hunters, nothing can rival the ingenuity, the tenacious scholarship, the stubborn zeal of those who seek the answer to the ultimate literary puzzle. A poisonous conundrum that has squandered fortunes, destroyed careers, and driven healthy, intelligent scholars to the brink of madness, and beyond. Who wrote Shakespeare?⁴ The essays and books devoted to the Shakespeare authorship problem are sufficient to fill a large library. Several such libraries actually exist. Not even a day-long tutorial, much less an hour lecture, can begin to do justice to this complex, bizarre and dangerously tantalizing story. Nevertheless, for the unacquainted, I will attempt to summarize the issue in a few paragraphs. The undisputed facts of Shakespeare’s life and career could be scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin. We know for a fact that a man named William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in or around the village of Stratford-upon-Avon. We know that he had a wife and at least three children. We know he bought property in Stratford, was involved in several lawsuits with his neighbors, and died there in 1616, aged 52. We also know that during those same years, a man with a last name similar to Shakespeare worked as an actor on the London stage, eventually becoming co-owner of some of the theaters there. We also know that, about the same time, a number of most excellent poems and plays were published in London under the name Shakespeare. We do not know for a fact that the landowner in Stratford and the actor in London with a similar last name were one and the same man. We do not know for a fact that either man had anything to do with the poems and the plays. All we know is that those poems and plays have, in the four hundred years since their composition, come to be regarded as a pinnacle of Western culture. The works attributed to Shakespeare appear to have been written by a man or woman who knew something about just about everything. They’re filled with references to mythology and classic literature, games and sports, war and weapons of war, ships and sailing, the law and legal terminology, court etiquette, statesmanship, horticulture, music, astronomy, medicine, falconry and, of course, theater. Therein lies the problem. How could a farmer’s son of uncertain schooling from a mostly illiterate country village, a man of practically no account at all, wield such encyclopedic learning with so much eloquence and wit, so much wisdom and human understanding? For the first 150 years, nobody questioned the traditional history of the Bard. Then, in the late eighteenth century, Reverend James Wilmot, a distinguished scholar who lived just a few miles north of Stratford, decided to write a biography of the famous playwright. Dr. Wilmot believed that a man as well-educated as Shakespeare must have owned a fairly extensive library, despite the fact that not a single book or manuscript is mentioned in his will. Over the years, he speculated, some of those books must have found their way into local collections. And so the good Reverend Doctor scoured the British countryside, taking inventory of literally every bookshelf within 50 miles of Stratford. Not a single book from the library of William Shakespeare was discovered. Neither were there found any letters to, from or about Shakespeare. Furthermore, no references to the folklore, local sayings or distinctive dialect of the Stratford area could be found in any of Shakespeare’s writings. After four years of painstaking research, Dr. Wilmot concluded, to his own dismay, that only one person contemporary with Shakespeare of Stratford had ever demonstrated the wide-ranging education and expressive talent needed to compose those poems and plays. That man was the multilingual author, philosopher and statesman, inventor of the Scientific Method, Chancellor to the Courts of Queen Elizabeth and King James, Sir Francis Bacon. Dr. Wilmot never dared to publish his theory. But before he died he confided it to a friend, James Cowell, who, in 1805, repeated it to a meeting of the Ipswich Philosophical Society. The members of the society were suitably outraged, and the scandalous matter was quickly forgotten. Then in 1857, a lady from Stratford -- Stratford, Connecticut -- published a book called The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded. In this book, Miss Delia Bacon, no relation to Francis, claimed that the works of Shakespeare were written by a secret cabal of British nobility including Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney as well as Sir Francis Bacon. Delia Bacon’s book electrified the world of letters. Battle lines were drawn between the orthodox Stratfordians and the heretical Baconians. Literary societies and scholarly journals were formed to debate the evidence. Hundreds of pamphlets, newspaper articles and essays were published defending each side, and ridiculing the opposition with that self-aggrandizing viciousness peculiar to tenured academics. Armed with her explosive book, Delia Bacon journeyed to Stratford-upon-Avon and, unbelievably, obtained official permission to open Shakespeare’s grave. However, when the moment came to actually lift the stone, Delia’s self-doubt precipitated a catastrophic nervous breakdown. She later died penniless in a madhouse. Around 1888, things began to get a bit out of hand. U.S. Congressman Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota became interested in the Shakespeare controversy. One day, browsing through his facsimile copy of the First Folio of 1623, he noted that the word “bacon” appeared on page 53 of the Histories and also on page 53 of the Comedies. He also noted that Sir Francis Bacon had written extensively on the subject of cryptography. Donnelly began counting line and page numbers, adding and subtracting letters, drawing lines over sentences, circling words and crossing them out. The result was a complex and virtually incomprehensible algorithm which he claimed was invented by Bacon to hide secret messages inside the First Folio. The greatest Easter egg hunt in the history of Western civilization had begun. Here are just a couple of the sillier highlights. A doctor named Orville Owen of Detroit constructed a bizarre research tool he called the Wheel of Fortune. This wheel consisted of two giant wooden spools wrapped with a strip of canvas two feet wide and a thousand feet long. Onto this canvas he glued the separate pages of the complete works of Bacon, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Greene, Peele and Spenser, together with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. By cranking the spools back and forth, Dr. Owen could quickly zip across the pages in search of clues and cross-references. Employing a large team of secretaries and stenographers, Owen claimed to have uncovered a complete alternative history of Elizabethan England, as well as several entirely new Shakespeare plays and sonnets. Listen to this hidden verse, supposedly penned by the mighty Bard himself, which inspired Dr. Owen to build his Wheel of Fortune. Take your knife and cut all our books asunder And set the leaves on a great firm wheel Which rolls and rolls, and turning the fickle rolling wheel Throw your eyes upon Fortune That goddess blind, that stands upon a spherical stone that, turning and inconstant, rolls in restless variation. After publishing five thick volumes of this rubbish, Owen announced the discovery of an anagram indicating that Bacon’s original manuscripts were buried near Chepstow Castle on the river Wye. Owen spent the next fifteen years and thousands of dollars excavating the bed of the river with boat crews and high explosives. He died before anything was found. A fellow named Arensberg wrote an entire book based on the analysis of the significance of a suspicious crack in the tomb of Bacon’s mother. A ray of sanity finally appeared in 1957. To those familiar with the science of cryptology, the name William Friedman needs little introduction. During World War II , Colonel Friedman was the head of the US Army’s cryptoanalytic bureau. He is credited with cracking the Japanese Empire’s most sensitive cipher. After the war, the Colonel decided to apply his expertise to the study of the Shakespeare ciphers. He interviewed several of the experts in the field, and prepared a detailed scientific analysis, which he published under the title The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined. His conclusion? In a word, bunk. According to the standards of cryptologic science, not one of the hidden messages purportedly discovered in Shakespeare’s works was plausible. The rules used to extract these messages from the texts were non-rigorous, wildly subjective, and unrepeatable by anyone except the original decypherer. The people involved were not being dishonest. They were channeling their preconceptions. They were trapped in a labyrinth of delusion, mining order from chaos. “Angler[s] in a lake of darkness.” Lear III.6. You would think that Friedman’s cold and ruthless exposure would be enough to silence the heretics once and for all. Not a chance. The books and TV specials and Web sites and conferences and doctoral dissertations keep right on coming. I should point out that the Shakespeare authorship issue is not only the preoccupation of cranks and weirdos. A substantial number of respected authors and Shakespeareans have expressed serious doubts about the traditional origin of the plays. The list includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Sam Clemens, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles and Sir John Gielgud. Living skeptics include the artistic director of the New Globe Theater, Mark Rylance; Michael York, Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, and even that most revered and scholarly of contemporary Shakespearean actors, Keanu Reeves. The current leading candidate for the authorship is Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, a theory first proposed in 1920 by an English schoolmaster with the unfortunate name J. Thomas Looney. What is it about Bach, the Bible and the works of Shakespeare that inspires this intense scrutiny? Nobody’s looking for acrostics in Chaucer or Keats. There are no hit CDs of the secret chorales of Wagner or Beethoven. For the answer, we need to recognize the unique roles which the Bible and Shakespeare have played in the development of Western culture. No other single work of literature has influenced Modern English more than the translation of the Holy Bible published in 1611 under the auspices of King James I. The King James Bible exemplifies the meaning of the word classic. It has been called the noblest monument of English prose, the very greatest achievement of the English language. It has served as an inspiration for generations of poets, dramatists, musicians, politicians and orators. Countless people have learned to read by repeating the phrases in this, the only book their family possessed. Our constitutions and our laws have been profoundly shaped by its cadences and imagery. But even the glory of the King James Bible, compiled by a committee of 46 editors over the course of a decade, pales before the dazzling legacy of the Swan of Avon. The lowest estimate of Shakespeare’s working vocabulary is 15,000 words, more than three times that of the King James Bible, and twice the size of his nearest competitor, John Milton. His poems and plays were written without the aid of a dictionary or a thesaurus. They didn’t exist yet. It was all in his head. When Shakespeare had a thought for which Elizabethan English had no word, he invented one. The Oxford English Dictionary lists hundreds of everyday words and phrases which made their first appearance in the pages of the Bard. Addiction. Alligator. Assasination. Bedroom. Critic. Dawn. Design. Dialogue. Employer. Film. Glow. Gloomy. Gossip. Hint. Hurry. Investment. Lonely. Luggage. Manager. Switch. Torture. Transcendence. Wormhole. Zany. Hamlet alone contains nearly forty of these neologisms. Who today would have this audacity, this giddy exuberance of invention? Only one other English author even approaches Shakespeare’s facility for coining new words: Sir Francis Bacon. In the modern era, the record holder is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, who, interestingly, also happens to be the second most quoted author in English, after Shakespeare. Everyone has been profoundly molded by the influence of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. Like it or not, all of us peer at the world through the lenses of these great works. They are the primary source documents of modern English thought, the style guides of our minds. Contemplating these dazzling jewels of wisdom and eloquence gives rise to an extraordinary feeling. A potent, rare and precious emotion with the potential to completely upset your life. An emotion powerful enough to make a man abandon his wife and children, forfeit career and reputation, lay down his possessions and follow his heart without questioning. That sweet, sweet fusion of wonder and fear, irresistible attraction and soul-numbing dread known as awe. Awe is the Grail of artistic achievement. No other human emotion possesses such raw transformative power, and none is more difficult to evoke. Few and far between are the works of man that qualify as truly awesome. It is awe that convinces a rabbi to spend a lifetime decoding Yahweh from the Pentateuch. Awe that sends millions of visitors each year to the Pyramids of Giza, Guadalupe and Mecca. It was awe that drove poor Delia Bacon to her doom. Now, please don’t come away from this lecture thinking that the key to awesome game design is the installation of Easter eggs! Ordinary games, with their contrived Easter eggs and cheat codes, are like the Battery of the Month club. You have to trudge down to the back of the store to get what you really came for. If super power is what people really want, why not just give it to them? Is our imagination so impoverished that we have to resort to marketing gimmicks to keep players interested in our games? Awesome things don’t hold anything back. Awesome things are rich and generous. The treasure is right there. One afternoon, I was sitting alone behind the counter at that old Radio Shack store. My boss had stepped out for some reason. An elderly woman walked through the front door. Like most of our customers, she was shabbily dressed. Probably on a fixed income. I assumed she was there for her free battery. But instead, she placed a portable radio on the counter. This radio came from the days when they boasted about the number of transitors inside on the case. It was completely wrapped in dirty white medical tape. The woman looked at me, and asked, “Can you fix this?” Slowly I unwrapped the medical tape, peeling away the layers until the back cover of the radio fell off, accompanied by a cloud of red dust. The interior of the radio was half eaten away by battery leakage and corrosion. I looked at the radio. I looked at the old woman. I looked back at the radio. I reached behind me, where the expensive alkaline batteries were hanging like prescription medication, and removed a gleaming nine-volt cell from its gold blister pack. Then I pulled a brand-new transistor radio from a box, installed the alkaline and helped the lady find her favorite station. No money changed hands. She left the store without saying a word. Awesome things are kind of like that. Bach offered his students very specific insight into the source of awe. In addition to B-A-C-H, two other sets of initials are also associated with Bach’s music. These initials are not hidden in the notes. Instead, they’re scrawled right across the top of his manuscripts for the whole world to see. The initials are SDG and JJ. SDG stands for the Latin phrase Soli Deo Gloria, “To the glory of God alone.” JJ stands for Jesu Juva, “Help me, Jesus.” Bach wrote all of his great masterpieces sub specie aeternitatis, “under the aspect of eternity.” He did not compose only to please his sponsors, or to win the approval of an audience. His work was his worship. Bach once wrote, “Music should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul. Where this is not kept in mind there is no true music, but only an infernal clamour and ranting.” The name of the power that moves you is not important. What is important is that you are moved. Awe is the foundation of religion. No other motivation can free you from the limits of personal achievement. Nothing else can teach you the Art of Flight. Computer games are barely forty years old. Only a few words in our basic vocabulary have been established. A whole dictionary is waiting to be coined. The slate is clean. Someday soon, perhaps even in our lifetime, a game design will appear that will flash across our culture like lightning. It will be easy to recognize. It will be generous, giddy with exuberant inventiveness. Scholars will pick it apart for decades, perhaps centuries. It will be something wonderful. Something terrifying. Something awe-full. A few years ago I was invited to speak at a conference in London. My wife joined me, and we took a day off for some sightseeing. We decided to visit England’s second-biggest tourist attraction, Stratford-upon-Avon. It was cold and rainy when our train arrived. Luckily, most of the attractions are just a short walk from the station. We visited Shakespeare’s birthplace, a charming old house along the main street which attracts millions of pilgrims every year, despite the complete lack of any evidence of Shakespeare ever having lived there. We went past the school where Shakespeare learned to read and write, although no documents exist to prove his attendance. We visited Anne Hathaway’s cottage, the rustic country farm where his wife spent her childhood, although no record shows anyone by that name ever having living there. Finally we came to the one location undeniably associated with Shakespeare: Trinity Parish church, on the banks of the river Avon, where a man by that name is buried. This beautiful church is approached by a long walkway, between rows of ancient gravestones, shaded by tall trees. The entrance door is surprisingly tiny. No cameras are allowed inside. The interior is dark and quiet. Despite the presence of busloads of tourists, the atmosphere is hushed and respectful. A few people are seated in the pews, deep in prayer. An aisle leads up the center of the church. The left side of the altar is brightly illuminated. On the wall above is a famous bust of the Bard, quill in hand, gazing serenely at the crowd of pilgrims. On the floor beneath, surrounded by bouquets of flowers, at the very spot where Delia Bacon lost her mind, the gravestone of William Shakespeare bears this dire warning: Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here Blest be the man who spares these stones And curst be he that moves my bones. Every year, three million pilgrims arrive from every nation on Earth to approach this stone and consider the likeness of a man whose body of work can only be described as awesome. By contrast, the right side of the altar is dark and featureless. Nobody of any consequence is buried there. The only point of interest is a wooden case, of simple design, carved of dark oak. Inside the case, sealed beneath a thick sheet of glass, lies a large open book. A plaque on the case identifies this book as a first edition of the King James Bible, published in 1611, when Shakespeare was forty-six. Not many pilgrims visit this side of the altar. Most of those that do simply glance at the book, read the plaque and move along. A few, more observant, note that the Bible happens to be opened to a page in the Old Testament: the Book of Psalms, chapter 46. No explanation is given for this particular choice of pages. For the initiated, none is necessary. If you are of inquisitive bent, if you are intrigued by English history and literature, if you value your peace of mind, cover your ears, now. In the year 1900, a scholar noticed something about the King James translation of Psalm 46. Something terrifying. Something wonderful. The 46th word from the beginning of Psalm 46 is “shake.” The 46th word from the end is “spear.” There are only two possibilities here. Either this is the finest coincidence ever recorded in the history of world literature. Or, it is not.
Hello, Next piano jam will be posted around 1-2 October. Due to delay, feel free to submit pieces from this one till 4-7th October. Thank you for suggestions, they really help to put the list together. If there is any piece you would like to have on a list in next months do not hesitate to suggest here: suggestion form. Some of links to the music sheet might be broken, if so, please comment with fixed link and I will update the post. Thanks! The jazz and ragtime sections are run by u/abnormal_human.
Guidelines
If you're new to /piano, the Piano Jam is a monthly event where you get the chance to challenge yourself to work on a piece of music and share your playing with the community. Whether you're a beginner or expert, we'd love to hear you play! See the guidelines below and check out all the previous piano jams in the sidebar. You are encouraged to share a recording (of YOU playing) in a post to /piano anytime during the month. Please put "Piano Jam" post tag or "[Piano Jam]" somewhere in the submission title, so we know that's what the post is for. People have posted without this tag before and it's not the end of the world of course, but it does mean I might miss your submission! Please try to use YouTube / SoundCloud / Bandcamp for your links for accessibility & reliability, but any links are allowed.
You do not have to complete or perfect pieces to submit them, and don't be afraid to simplify/shorten pieces. Also, don't be afraid to improvise or write your own ending to a looped piece of video game music, etc.
This is not a contest! It's a chance for you to set a goal for yourself and to share your journey and accomplishments with the /piano community.
For classical pieces ABRSM grade estimate is in brackets - the source of estimation is piano grade aggregator
You do not have to limit yourself to just one piece, you can submit as many as you like as long as they belong to the list.
If you have pieces you would like to suggest for future Piano Jams, please use our suggestion form.
here is topic on piano forum about difficulty of each variation: forum.pianoworld.com/ubbathreads.php/topics/2550377/goldberg-variations-order-of-difficulty.html
Aria is the easiest - it will be challenging for early intermediate pianists, but provides great study of baroque ornaments, so I encourage you to give it a try
Hello, Next piano jam will be posted around 1-3 September. Currently we are low on grade 1-2, anime and game music pieces, so please suggest: suggestion form. The jazz and ragtime sections are run by u/abnormal_human.
Guidelines
If you're new to /piano, the Piano Jam is a monthly event where you get the chance to challenge yourself to work on a piece of music and share your playing with the community. Whether you're a beginner or expert, we'd love to hear you play! See the guidelines below and check out all the previous piano jams in the sidebar. You are encouraged to share a recording (of YOU playing) in a post to /piano anytime during the month. Please put "Piano Jam" post tag or "[Piano Jam]" somewhere in the submission title, so we know that's what the post is for. People have posted without this tag before and it's not the end of the world of course, but it does mean I might miss your submission! Please try to use YouTube / SoundCloud / Bandcamp for your links for accessibility & reliability, but any links are allowed.
You do not have to complete or perfect pieces to submit them, and don't be afraid to simplify/shorten pieces. Also, don't be afraid to improvise or write your own ending to a looped piece of video game music, etc.
This is not a contest! It's a chance for you to set a goal for yourself and to share your journey and accomplishments with the /piano community.
For classical pieces ABRSM grade estimate is in brackets - the source of estimation is piano grade aggregator
You do not have to limit yourself to just one piece, you can submit as many as you like as long as they belong to the list.
If you have pieces you would like to suggest for future Piano Jams, please use our suggestion form.
here is topic on piano forum about difficulty of each variation: forum.pianoworld.com/ubbathreads.php/topics/2550377/goldberg-variations-order-of-difficulty.html
Aria is the easiest - it will be challenging for early intermediate pianists, but provides great study of baroque ornaments, so I encourage you to give it a try
Hello, For many of you vacation has come. In case you want to take a little break from piano we have a bigger selection of 3 month pieces :). I'm a bit unsure if there is enough music for beginners - if not please let me know in comments. Next piano jam will be posted around 1-3 August. Currently we are low on grade 3-4 pieces, so please suggest: suggestion form. The jazz and ragtime sections are run by u/abnormal_human.
Guidelines
If you're new to /piano, the Piano Jam is a monthly event where you get the chance to challenge yourself to work on a piece of music and share your playing with the community. Whether you're a beginner or expert, we'd love to hear you play! See the guidelines below and check out all the previous piano jams in the sidebar. You are encouraged to share a recording (of YOU playing) in a post to /piano anytime during the month. Please put "Piano Jam" post tag or "[Piano Jam]" somewhere in the submission title, so we know that's what the post is for. People have posted without this tag before and it's not the end of the world of course, but it does mean I might miss your submission! Please try to use YouTube / SoundCloud / Bandcamp for your links for accessibility & reliability, but any links are allowed.
You do not have to complete or perfect pieces to submit them, and don't be afraid to simplify/shorten pieces. Also, don't be afraid to improvise or write your own ending to a looped piece of video game music, etc.
This is not a contest! It's a chance for you to set a goal for yourself and to share your journey and accomplishments with the /piano community.
For classical pieces ABRSM grade estimate is in brackets - the source of estimation is piano grade aggregator
You do not have to limit yourself to just one piece, you can submit as many as you like as long as they belong to the list.
If you have pieces you would like to suggest for future Piano Jams, please use our suggestion form.
here is topic on piano forum about difficulty of each variation: pianoworld
Aria is the easiest - it will be challenging for early intermediate pianists, but provides great study of baroque ornaments, so I encourage you to give it a try
hi. i'm new with the piano and i would like to play goldberg's variations but i don't know how to read the music sheet. could you recomend to me some web with music theory? thanks
Today marks the 335th birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, without a doubt one of the tallest standing giants on whose shoulders stands a significant portion of our musical canon. What better time than his birthday is there to take a look at his life and his works? I will leave a short biography below, share some resources, and share some of my favorite pieces of his. I welcome everyone reading to join me below. Biographical Outline Bach had a fairly mobile life, and spent short periods in many places. For the sake of brevity, I will gloss over the shorter periods, and focus more on the more significant ones. 1685-1703
Born in Eisnach, Saxe-Eisenach on March 31, 1685.*
The Bach family was very musical: his father, many uncles, many cousins, and his siblings were all professional musicians in some sense.
His mother died in 1694, and his father died shortly thereafter; Sebastian Bach moved in with his older brother, Johann Christoph Bach, who lived in Ohrdruf (1695).
Enrolled in the St. Michael's School in Lüneburg in 1700. *The calendar at the time would have read March 21, 1750; this is due to difference in the Julian and the Gregorian calendar systems
1703-1723
After graduating (1703), Bach obtained a position as a musician of Duke Johann Ernst II's court in Weimar; became the organist at the "New Church" (now the "Bach Church") in Arnstadt later that same year. (this post is the setting of two famous stories of Bach: the incident with the "nanny-goat bassoonist", as well as his two week leave to travel in which he walked 280 miles [450 kilometers] both ways on foot to visit Buxtehude [he was absent for 4 months during his "2 week" leave].)
Spent 2 years in Mühlhausen as organist at the Basius Church (1706-1708); he met and married Maria Barbara Bach four months after his arrival
Returned to Weimar to become the organist at the Ducal Court (1708-1717): became Director of Music (1714), which entailed a monthly composition of a cantata; spent a considerable amount of time transcribing Italian works during this period; wrote the English Suites during this period; wrote the preliminary works that would become the Well Tempered Clavier during this period.
Dismissed from his Weimar post in 1717, and even jailed for a day over his stubbornness over the dismissal.
Hired as Kapellmeister for Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen in Köthen (1717-1723): Leopold did not require much music for services, so much of Bach's time was spent on secular compositions during this period; Bach's attempted visit of Handel (a 22 mile [35km] walk away) happend during this time (1717)-Handel wasn't in town; his first wife died (1720); he met and married Anna Magdalena Wilcke in 1721; completed the Brandenburg Concertos by 1721; completed the first book of the Well Tempered Clavier in 1722.
1723-1750; The Leipzig Years
Appointed Thomaskantor of the Thomasschule at the St. thomas Church in Leipzig (1723): wrote the majority of his known cantatas within his first 3 years here; completed the French suites within the first 3 years as well.
Became director of the Collegium Musicum (1729-1737): many of his secular compositions during this period were intended for this organization, to be performed at the famous Café Zimmermann in Leipzig.
Published his four Clavier-Übung during his time in Leipzig (discussed in the "Compositional Output" section).
Composed the bulk of his Mass in B Minor in the mid-1740s
Completed the second book of the Well Tempered Clavier in 1742
His famous visit to Frederick II of Prussia in Potsdam occurred in 1747
Began a large part of his "The Art of Fugue" in 1742, which he would prepare for publication and work on until his death.
Bach, becoming blind, had eye surgery performed by the fraud John Taylor in early 1750; JS Bach would die several months later from infection on July 28, 1750.
Compositional Output How can I even begin talking about Bach's compositional output... This is a rare instance where I feel like simply dropping a link to a Wikipedia page is the best thing to do. This is a page about Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis [BWV] "Bach Works Catalogue". This catalogue is the standard way of organizing Bach's many works, and this page contains information on all 13 categories within the catalogue, and endless rabbit holes to fall into. His four Clavier-Übung I mentioned earlier are as follows:
His output is stunning not only due to its volume and variety, but also because each piece that we have is so packed full of music. There are few works by JS Bach that we have that are simply trivial, throw-away pieces; they are all so well-composed, so full of craftsmanship, that nearly each piece invites one to devote themselves to the study of it. Resources
gerubach is a YouTube channel that, as far as I can tell, is incredibly run by a single person. The ultimate goal of the channel is to have a video with scrolling sheet music for every single composition by Bach. This channel is truly a great resource.
Netherlands Bach Society is another channel with a similar goal. However, this group focuses on creating new, extremely high quality (both in audio/video and in performance) recordings of every Bach piece. Their performances are all historically informed. They have some of the absolute best performances of Bach's cantatas and Passions I have ever heard. Along with nearly every performance, they upload a sister-video that is an interview with some of the performers; these videos are always very informative and interesting.
Voices of Music does not focus soley on Bach, but rather all of the baroque repertoire. They are another historically informed ensemble. They have a great deal of Bach recordings, and their videos are of very high quality.
Ashish Xiangyi Kumar has only a small amount of content relating to Bach, but it is of such high quality that it deserves a mention. The videos feature scores, high-quality audio, informed analyses, and great discussion in the descriptions.
For those few unaware, IMSLP is an incredible source for sheet music. The site has nearly anything you could want that is in the public domain.
Personal Favorites It will take a lot of discipline to keep this section short. I will also skew away from the more well-known pieces; I personally adore much of the WTC, but so do most others, and they are already aware of the pieces. The same goes for many other works. (I do have future plans for a post solely dedicated to the WTC, that goes into more depth, incidentally).
BWV 532 - This Prelude and Fugue for organ has some of the most incredible dissonances I've felt. I really urge you to listen to this with good studio headphones or loud speakers; feel the power of the instrument-the adagio section of the prelude will hit you like a ton of bricks.
BWV 572 - Another great organ piece, this time a Fantasia. The Grave segment is great. If you don't want spoilers, stop reading: the final cadence of the Grave section is quite the surprise, a deceptive C#dim7 chord.
BWV 578 - This organ fugue has a very catchy subject, and deserves its fame. This piece (and this video) is great for teaching; it's a great way to introduce beginner students to the concept of counterpoint, as they can "see" the voices, and the subject is so memorable and distinctive.
BWV 1023 - This violin sonata is great. The Adagio is so beautiful.
BWV 1016 - Another stunning violin sonata. The second Adagio is really something else. If you listen to the harpsichord parts, you'll realize this is actually a disguised trio sonata.
BWV 1018 - This is a sonata for violin and keyboard. I hate to sound like a broken record, but the Adagio is 100% worth checking out. Bach really had great skill with getting these kinds of feelings out of a violin.
BWV 1043 - This is the Largo movement from his D Minor double violin concerto. The way the violins speak to each other is incredible. It's very easy to be absorbed by this music. Here is a full performance; I simply like the previous performance of the second movement better.
BWV 245 - Bach's St. John's Passion really must be experienced by everyone, and this is an incredible performance of it. Few things in music grab one as much as the opening, "Herr unser Herrscher", of this masterpiece.
BWV 227 - This is one of my favorite motets by the composer. The first verse is very memorable, of course, but Bach also goes on to showcase some incredible 5-part polyphonic writing later on.
BWV 8 - This cantata is one of my favorites. I don't know what it is, but something about this one really sticks with me. The description of this video has some good information.
BWV 997 - This is an incredible suite played on, and composed for the lute-harpsichord. Unknown to many, this was one of Bach's favorite instruments (read the description of this video: the information is accurate). Bach loved the sound of the lute, but wasn't fond of its limitations in what it could play compared to keyboard instruments: the lute-harpsichord was the best of both worlds to him.
BWV 831 Mvt.I, Mvt.II, Mvt.III, Mvt.IV, Mvt.V, Mvt.VI, Mvt.VII, Mvt.VIII, Mvt.IX, Mvt.X, Mvt. XI - This is his French Overture in B Minor. Glenn Gould's performance of this work is a strong contender for my favorite keyboard work of all time. The counterpoint is amazing; it's truly some of the most perfect polyphony I have ever heard. The voices really feel... "real". This is a true discussion between these disembodied voices. If you have any kind of an inclination towards counterpoint yourself, give this a listen with some focus: with headphones, or driving around a quiet neighborhood, or lying in bed with a speaker playing, or anything like that.
"The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul." -J.S. Bach
"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself." -J.S. Bach
"Music owes as much to Bach as religion to its founder." -Robert Schumann
"Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars." -Frédéric Chopin
"Now there is music from which a man can learn something!" (after hearing Bach's motets performed in Leipzig) -W.A. Mozart
"Study Bach. There you will find everything." -Johannes Brahms
"Nicht Bach, sondern Meer sollte er heißen." -Ludwig van Beethoven
"In Bach, the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God." -Gustav Mahler
"The music of my father has higher intentions; it's not supposed to fill the ear, but to move!" -C.P.E. Bach
Afterthoughts There is nothing I can say about this composer here that hasn't already been said a thousand times, in a thousand ways, by a thousand musicians more talented than I. There is also no need to convince anyone reading this post of J.S. Bach's compositional prowess. My simple hope is that I can spark some more exploration into this great man, as well as hopefully spark some discussion in the comment section. Happy Birthday, Sebastian, and happy listening for everyone else~
Here's what my path looked like, in roughly chronological order, but I've reordered things to how I would recommend someone pursue these texts. I did go through the entirety of everything I listed below, with eyes not on my fingers or keys and at a tempo where I had at least 98% accuracy.
You should not aim for speed when you are doing this. This is a slow process and it takes a lot of time, but it is SO worth it!
Suggested Prerequisites
Be familiar with basic major scale patterns. You should at least be acquainted with common crossing patterns (e.g., 12312345 on the right hand, etc.).
Be competent enough with theory and ear training so that you can identify your mistakes when you hear them. This is extremely important to have - if you are not going to look at your fingers, the only way you can identify when you have a mistake is if you have a ear that is trained well enough to associate what you see in sheet music with the correct pitches. You want your ear trained at a level where you are able to identify intervals, triads, chords, nonharmonic tones (suspensions, appoggiaturas, etc.), and common chord progressions (e.g., I-IV-V-I) by ear.
Simple Finger Patterns and Chords (or "Vertical Playing") The focus of this section is to be able to play simple melodic and harmonic patterns. The goal is to teach your fingers how to play common chord progressions without relying on looking at your keys. This level starts off with absolutely no leaps with a fixed five-finger position (see Smith) all the way to doing more complicated leaps (particularly in the left hand) in the works of Chopin and Joplin.
Smith: Progressive Sight Reading Exercises
John Kember's Piano Sight-Reading (I went through all three books)
Paul Harris' Improve Your Sightreading (stop right before the Advanced level)
Bartok: Mikrokosmos -- skip the last 2-3 books on your first read
Essential Keyboard Repertoire: volumes 2, 6, and 8 (I still take these out occasionally)
Schirmer's 20th Century Performance Editions: Intermediate
Patterson: 50 Hymn Tunes Without Words for Sightreading
Bach: 371 Harmonized Chorales for Keyboard
Chopin: all Mazurkas
Joplin: Complete Piano Works
Horizontal Playing Pianists, whenever possible, view horizontal playing as groups of vertical chords. (Sometimes this isn't possible, but it's nice when it is - one has to start somewhere.) Here's what I've done so far:
Sonatinas: Diabelli, Clementi, Haydn, Kuhlau
Sonatas: all Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, about 50 or so of the Clementi sonatas (don't know if I'll bother completing these).
Bach (or Contrapuntal Playing) I started going this route after finishing the Haydn while going through Clementi whenever I had time. I've done the:
Inventions
Sinfonias
Little Preludes and Fugues (the Henle edition)
Well-Tempered Clavier, Books 1 and 2
Toccatas (these felt relatively simple after the WTC)
Art of the Fugue
English Suites
Goldberg Variations (PLEASE get Paul Barton's version! I don't know why people stick with the Urtext edition of this piece when it was clearly meant for another instrument.)
An attempt at more complicated music
Scarlatti: 90 sonatas (this is a 3-volume edition - helped me get more comfortable with ridiculous leaps), see book 1, book 2, book 3
Chopin: all Preludes (the last few were nasty)
Mendelssohn: all Songs without Words
Chopin: choosing some Nocturnes at random (I didn't feel confident enough to run through all of them yet)
Scriabin: all Preludes (skipping about 1-2 of them where I could not figure out the polyrhythms, though) - mostly finished at this point
Debussy: all Preludes (books I, II)
Kabalevsky: all Sonatinas
Brahms: Complete Shorter Works for Solo Piano (Dover)
Scherzo, Op. 4
Ballades Op. 10
Waltzes Op. 39 (did not bother with the simplified edition)
Beethoven Piano Concertos: 1, 2, 3 (with Tutti parts as a piano reduction)
Some next steps For those of you who dare to sightread through Scriabin's music... it is laborious. Ugly key signatures, ridiculous leaps, strange polyrhythms (Scriabin seems to like 5 against 3 for some reason), awkward hand crossings at times, etc. However, it seems to have paid off. Last night, I took out the French piano collection I have which I had never been able to read through because it was too difficult. Well, I read through Debussy pieces I've never been able to play before and it was tough (i.e., the entire Suite Bergamesque), but doable to read through! I'm really impressed. It appears that sightreading Scriabin was the leap that I needed to make to get to a point where I could start sightreading through some of the more difficult French impressionism pieces. So I might try running through all of the Book I and Book II Preludes by Debussy as a next step once I'm done with Scriabin and see where I can go from there.
Additional Note You should not interpret this list to mean "if I just complete this book once, I can move on to the next one with ease." That may be the case for some of these, but there were times when I was not quite as driven to move to the next book, and I would just re-play a book I had already gone through. Hope this is still helpful and let me know if any of you have questions!
Hello everyone, I’m new to this community and I’d like to ask for some sheet music practice suggestions. I’ve recently started to pick up piano again after a decade of losing touch with it. The only pieces I’ve managed to have learned so far on my own (on YouTube) is Bach’s Goldberg Variations: Aria, and The Well Tempered Clavier Prélude. I’m a big fan of Bach’s Fugue, but despite my efforts in trying to learn bits of BWV846/2, I just find it a bit too overwhelming. I think I’m lacking in fundamentals and practice, so I would like to ask from the experienced amongst you for some sheet music suggestions that’ll help me to eventually be able to play fugué. Cheers!
EDIT: Here is currently the most updated version of the list as of June 2020. I'm trying to finish my master's project right now, so just getting this out of the way...
Here's what my path looked like, in roughly chronological order, but I've reordered things to how I would recommend someone pursue these texts. I did go through the entirety of everything I listed below, with eyes not on my fingers or keys and at a tempo where I had at least 98% accuracy.
You should not aim for speed when you are doing this. This is a slow process and it takes a lot of time, but it is SO worth it!
Suggested Prerequisites
Be familiar with basic major scale patterns. You should at least be acquainted with common crossing patterns (e.g., 12312345 on the right hand, etc.).
Be competent enough with theory and ear training so that you can identify your mistakes when you hear them. This is extremely important to have - if you are not going to look at your fingers, the only way you can identify when you have a mistake is if you have a ear that is trained well enough to associate what you see in sheet music with the correct pitches. You want your ear trained at a level where you are able to identify intervals, triads, chords, nonharmonic tones (suspensions, appoggiaturas, etc.), and common chord progressions (e.g., I-IV-V-I) by ear.
Simple Finger Patterns and Chords (or "Vertical Playing") The focus of this section is to be able to play simple melodic and harmonic patterns. The goal is to teach your fingers how to play common chord progressions without relying on looking at your keys. This level starts off with absolutely no leaps with a fixed five-finger position (see Smith) all the way to doing more complicated leaps (particularly in the left hand) in the works of Chopin and Joplin.
Smith: Progressive Sight Reading Exercises
John Kember's Piano Sight-Reading (I went through all three books)
Paul Harris' Improve Your Sightreading (stop right before the Advanced level)
Bartok: Mikrokosmos -- skip the last 2-3 books on your first read
Essential Keyboard Repertoire: volumes 2, 6, and 8 (I still take these out occasionally)
Schirmer's 20th Century Performance Editions: Intermediate
Patterson: 50 Hymn Tunes Without Words for Sightreading
Bach: 371 Harmonized Chorales for Keyboard
Chopin: all Mazurkas
Joplin: Complete Piano Works
Horizontal Playing Pianists, whenever possible, view horizontal playing as groups of vertical chords. (Sometimes this isn't possible, but it's nice when it is - one has to start somewhere.) Here's what I've done so far:
Sonatinas: Diabelli, Clementi, Haydn, Kuhlau
Sonatas: all Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, about 50 or so of the Clementi sonatas (don't know if I'll bother completing these).
Bach (or Contrapuntal Playing) I started going this route after finishing the Haydn while going through Clementi whenever I had time. I've done the:
Inventions
Sinfonias
Little Preludes and Fugues (the Henle edition)
Well-Tempered Clavier, Books 1 and 2
Toccatas (these felt relatively simple after the WTC)
Art of the Fugue
English Suites
Goldberg Variations (PLEASE get Paul Barton's version! I don't know why people stick with the Urtext edition of this piece when it was clearly meant for another instrument.)
An attempt at more complicated music
Scarlatti: 90 sonatas (this is a 3-volume edition - helped me get more comfortable with ridiculous leaps)
Chopin: all Preludes (the last few were nasty)
Mendelssohn: all Songs without Words
Some next steps Recently, I attempted to see if I could feel comfortable sightreading pieces by Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Prokofiev, Ravel straight through. Judging by the few I've tried, I'm definitely not ready for that yet. Occasionally, I have revisited a Beethoven or Mozart sonata movement. I think I've hit the point where I can't improve unless I work seriously at my technique. Thus, as a start, I am attempting to learn Czerny's School of Velocity at tempo without looking at my fingers, transposing exercises to other keys by sight as I have time available. I attempted this a few years ago, but it feels much more doable now, since my fingers have at least become more acquainted with the patterns that I've seen in all of this music.
Additional Note You should not interpret this list to mean "if I just complete this book once, I can move on to the next one with ease." That may be the case for some of these, but there were times when I was not quite as driven to move to the next book, and I would just re-play a book I had already gone through. Hope this is still helpful and let me know if any of you have questions!
Did Glenn Gould hit a wrong note in Var.5 of his 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations?
So, this is a rather specific question. When listening to Glenn Gould’s 1955 take on the Goldberg Variations, I always wondered why I heard an F natural near the end of Var.5. Needless to say, that note is supposed to be sharp, and Gould himself does play F sharp in the 1981 recording. Now, when he was little Gould was taught piano by his mother with a verg strict rule: if he played a wrong note, the lesson would end. So, is that F natural a mistake (which would be strange indeed, especially in a recording) or is there another explanation, perhaps a different version of the sheet music?
Sightreading List Update - before life gets chaotic
EDIT: Here is currently the most updated version of the list as of June 2020. I know it's only been 4 months since the last update, but 1) I've done enough at this point that an update is warranted and 2) lots of changes in my personal life (new job, finishing up a grad-level degree, etc.) that may inevitably cause me to forget what I've done with piano. Here's what my path looked like, in roughly chronological order, but I've reordered things to how I would recommend someone pursue these texts. I did go through the entirety of everything I listed below, with eyes not on my fingers or keys and at a tempo where I had at least 98% accuracy. YOU SHOULD NOT AIM FOR SPEED WHEN YOU ARE DOING THIS. This is a slow process and it takes a lot of time, but it is SO worth it! Suggested Prerequisites - Be familiar with basic major scale patterns. You should at least be acquainted with common crossing patterns (e.g., 12312345 on the right hand, etc.). - Be competent enough with theory and ear training so that you can identify your mistakes when you hear them. This is extremely important to have - if you are not going to look at your fingers, the only way you can identify when you have a mistake is if you have a ear that is trained well enough to associate what you see in sheet music with the correct pitches. You want your ear trained at a level where you are able to identify intervals, triads, chords, nonharmonic tones (suspensions, appoggiaturas, etc.), and common chord progressions (e.g., I-IV-V-I) by ear. Simple Finger Patterns and Chords (or "Vertical Playing") The focus of this section is to be able to play simple melodic and harmonic patterns. The goal is to teach your fingers how to play common chord progressions without relying on looking at your keys. This level starts off with absolutely no leaps with a fixed five-finger position (see Smith) all the way to doing more complicated leaps (particularly in the left hand) in the works of Chopin and Joplin. - Smith: Progressive Sight Reading Exercises - John Kember's Piano Sight-Reading (I went through all three books) - Paul Harris' Improve Your Sightreading (stop right before the Advanced level) - Bartok: Mikrokosmos -- skip the last 2-3 books on your first read - Essential Keyboard Repertoire: volumes 2, 6, and 8 (I still take these out occasionally) - Schirmer's 20th Century Performance Editions: Intermediate - Patterson: 50 Hymn Tunes Without Words for Sightreading - Bach: 371 Harmonized Chorales for Keyboard - Chopin: all Mazurkas - Joplin: Complete Piano Works Horizontal Playing Pianists, whenever possible, view horizontal playing as groups of vertical chords. (Sometimes this isn't possible, but it's nice when it is - one has to start somewhere.) I myself am still going through this phase but will post a future update. Here's what I've done so far: - Sonatinas: Diabelli, Clementi, Haydn, Kuhlau - Sonatas: all Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn. Still working on the complete Clementi (about halfway through... there's a ton of them) Bach (or Contrapuntal Playing) I started going this route after finishing the Haydn while going through Clementi whenever I had time. I've done the: - Inventions - Sinfonias - Little Preludes and Fugues (the Henle edition) - Well-Tempered Clavier, Books 1 and 2 - Toccatas (these felt relatively simple after the WTC) - In progress: Art of the Fugue, English Suites - Sometime after: Goldberg Variations Once Bach is done? My teacher has strongly suggested that I start getting into pop music and transposing music on sight, perhaps start off with a Schubert song. I'm considering trying some Brahms/Liszt. My teacher has also suggested atonal music, but one of the disadvantages there is that mistakes will be harder to hear (I've been relying on my ears to catch mistakes). Additional Note You should not interpret this list to mean "if I just complete this book once, I can move on to the next one with ease." That may be the case for some of these, but there were times when I was not quite as driven to move to the next book, and I would just re-play a book I had already gone through. This is especially the case for the Patterson and the Bach chorales - I revisit these quite frequently. Hope this is still helpful and let me know if any of you have questions!
My name is Kimiko Ishizaka, and I'm a composer, pianist, and olympic weightlifter. I just crossed over from classical piano (Bach) to jazz, and am releasing new songs on Kickstarter. AMA!
I'm most well known for recording and releasing the Open Goldberg Variations, the Open Well-Tempered Clavier, and the Libre Art of the Fugue, which are all iconic works by J.S. Bach. They're "Open" or "Libre" because the recordings and new editions of the sheet music, made in collaboration with Musescore.com, were licensed and released as Public Domain works, instead of copyrighted works as is normal. Recently, I began studying jazz piano. I play in a jazz band in Köln, Germany, and I've applied the things that I've learned to composing new pieces. My first album as a composer will be released this year with ten new pieces that I wrote and performed. For the past two weeks I've been running a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money needed to finish the album, and fortunately, with just 14 hours to go, it looks like it will succeed! Thanks to everyone who is a backer, I look forward to sharing this new music with you. As an athlete, I've actually been successful both as an olympic weightlifter, and as a powerlifter. In both sports, I competed at the national level in Germany, and in both sports, I placed 2nd place nationally. The strength and discipline of weight training has positively contributed to my piano playing. Here's my proof that it's me... https://twitter.com/KimikoIshizaka/status/1125838108698738688 Don't forget to upvote this post! =)
Hello, Violy cellists and violists! Bach’s Cello Suites will run through your ‘violy’ February and make the month more fascinating. During the whole month, the Violy sheet music album of The Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites for Cello and for Viola are FREE to all Violy users. In this article, we will go through these Baroque masterpieces from Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the greatest composers of all time. https://preview.redd.it/qk5o4832nsh41.png?width=2136&format=png&auto=webp&s=f6a09ad509d023401550afa820f5c4327a791439
Cello Album Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. The Bach family had already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Brandenburg Concertos and the Goldberg Variations. He enriched German styles through his mastery of counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organization, and his adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France. https://preview.redd.it/dcrcv2z2nsh41.jpg?width=880&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=945bf28347309677893b680887922238bda0d93a Bach’s compositions include hundreds of cantatas, Latin church music, passions, oratorios, and motets. He often adopted Lutheran hymns, not only in his larger vocal works, but also in his four-part chorales and sacred songs. He wrote extensively for organ and other keyboard instruments. He also composed concertos for violin and harpsichord, and suites for orchestra. Many of his works employ the genres of canon and fugue. Throughout the 18th century, Bach was primarily valued as organist, while his keyboard music, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier, was appreciated for its didactic qualities. The 19th century saw the publication of some major Bach biographies, and by the end of that century, all of his known music had been printed. https://preview.redd.it/0pirzja4nsh41.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5eb4923b48b03ff8e6374c7f6f660937a650645e
Bach’s Cello Composition
Bach’s six unaccompanied cello suites are some of the most frequently performed and recognizable solo compositions ever written for cello. Bach most likely composed them during the period 1717–23, when he served as Kapellmeister in Köthen. The title given on the cover of Anna Magdalena Bach’s manuscript was Suites à Violoncello Solo senza Basso (Suites for cello solo without bass). As usual in a Baroque musical suite, after the prelude which begins each suite, all the other movements are based around Baroque dance types. The suites are structured in six movements each: prelude, allemande, courante, sarabande, two menuets or two bourrées or two gavottes, and a final gigue. The Bach cello suites are considered to be among the most profound of all classical music works. Wilfrid Mellers described them in 1980 as “Monophonic music wherein a man has created a dance of God.” Due to the works’ technical demands, étude-like nature, and difficulty in interpretation, the cello suites were little known and rarely publicly performed until they were revived and recorded by Pablo Casals in the early 20th century. Since then, they have been performed and recorded by many renowned cellists and have been transcribed for numerous other instruments. The six cello suites are considered to be some of Bach’s greatest musical achievements.
Violy FREE Album Contents:
There are totally 42 pieces of music in the FREE album of The Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites — Bach (and the same pieces for Viola) on Violy, including:
Suite I-Prelude | BPM = 80
https://reddit.com/link/f6420w/video/xuzu71qwnsh41/player The Prelude of Suite №1 in G major, mainly consisting of arpeggiated chords, is probably the most well-known movement from the entire set of suites and is regularly heard on television and in films.
Suite I-Allemande | BPM = 80
Suite I-Courante | BPM = 80
Suite I-Sarabande | BPM = 80
Suite I-Menuet I | BPM = 80
Suite I-Menuet II | BPM = 80
Suite I-Gigue | BPM = 80
Suite II-Prelude | BPM = 80
Suite II-Allemande | BPM = 80
Suite II-Courante | BPM = 80
Suite II-Sarabande | BPM = 80
Suite II-Menuet I | BPM = 80
Suite II-Menuet II | BPM = 80
14.Suite II-Gigue | BPM = 80 The Prelude of Suite №2 in D minor consists of two parts. The first part has a strong recurring theme that is immediately introduced in the beginning. The second part is a scale-based cadenza movement that leads to the final powerful chords. The subsequent allemande contains short cadenzas that stray away from this very strict dance form. The first menuet contains demanding chord shiftings and string crossings.
Suite III-Prelude | BPM = 80
Suite III-Allemande | BPM = 80
Suite III-Courante | BPM = 80
Suite III-Sarabande | BPM = 80
Suite III-Bourrée I | BPM = 80
Suite III-Bourrée II | BPM = 80
Suite III-Gigue | BPM = 80
The Prelude of Suite №3 in C major consists of an A–B–A–C form, with A being a scale-based movement that eventually dissolves into an energetic arpeggio part; and B, a section of demanding chords. It then returns to the scale theme and ends with a powerful and surprising chord movement. The allemande is the only movement in the six suites that has an up-beat consisting of three semiquavers instead of just one, which is the standard form. The second bourrée, though in C minor, has a two-flat (or G minor) key signature. This notation, common in Pre-Classical music, is sometimes known as a partial key signature. The first and second bourrée of the third suite are sometimes used as solo materials for other bass instruments, such as tuba, euphonium, trombone and bassoon.
Suite IV-Prelude | BPM = 80
Suite IV-Allemande | BPM = 80
Suite IV-Courante | BPM = 80
Suite IV-Sarabande | BPM = 80
Suite IV-Bourrée I | BPM = 80
Suite IV-Bourrée II | BPM = 80
Suite IV-Gigue | BPM = 80
Suite №4 in E♭ major is one of the most technically demanding of the six suites, as E♭ is an uncomfortable key on the cello and requires many extended left hand positions. The key is also difficult on cello due to the lack of resonant open strings. The prelude primarily consists of a difficult flowing quaver movement that leaves room for a cadenza before returning to its original theme. The very peaceful sarabande is quite obscure about the stressed second beat, which is the basic characteristic of the 3/4 dance. In this particular sarabande, almost every first beat contains a chord, whereas the second beat most often does not.
Suite V-Prelude | BPM = 80
Suite V-Allemande | BPM = 80
Suite V-Courante | BPM = 80
Suite V-Sarabande | BPM = 80
Suite V-Gavotte I | BPM = 80
Suite V-Gavotte II | BPM = 80
Suite V-Gigue | BPM = 80
Suite №5 in C minor was originally written in scordatura with the A string tuned down to G, but nowadays a version for standard tuning is included in almost every edition of the suites along with the original version. Some chords must be simplified when playing with standard tuning, but some melodic lines become easier as well. The prelude is written in an A–B form. It is a French overture. It begins with a slow, emotional movement that explores the deep range of the cello. After that comes a fast and very demanding single-line fugue that leads to the powerful end. This suite is most famous for its intimate sarabande, which is the second of only four movements in all six suites that do not contain any chords. Mstislav Rostropovich describes it as the essence of Bach’s genius. The fifth suite is also exceptional as its courante and gigue are in the French style, rather than the Italian form of the other five suites.
Suite VI-Prelude | BPM = 80
Suite VI-Allemande | BPM = 80
Suite VI-Courante | BPM = 80
Suite VI-Sarabande | BPM = 80
Suite VI-Gavotte I | BPM = 80
Suite VI-Gavotte II | BPM = 80
Suite VI-Gigue | BPM = 80
It is widely believed that Suite №6 in D major was composed specifically for a five-stringed violoncello piccolo, a smaller cello, roughly 7⁄8 normal cello size with a fifth upper string tuned to E. However, some people say there is no substantial evidence to support this claim. Cellists playing this suite on a modern four-string cello encounter difficulties as they are forced to use very high positions to reach many of the notes. This suite is written in much more free form than the others, containing more cadenza-like movements and virtuosic passages. It is also the only one of the six suites that is partly notated in the alto and soprano clefs (modern editions use tenor and treble clefs), which are not needed for the others since they never go above the note G4 (G above middle C). Stay tuned, Violy musicians, let’s enjoy more Violy FREE Sheet Music albums later~ More Articles for violin teachers and violin beginners here~
My [25M] roommate [26M] constantly talks shit about my favorite composer Mozart
So my roommate is a baroque elitist, he claims that Bach and Händel are the greatest composers to have ever lived, and calls everything that came later (classical, romantic, etc.) trash. A composer he especially hates is Mozart who happens to be my favorite, so whenever I'm playing one of his sonatas on my piano he will later complain to me how I played Mozart again and why I can't play real music like Bach's Goldberg Variations, or if they are too difficult for me (they are not, I'm just not particularly fond of polyphonic music). I've tried to explain Mozart's music to him countless times, how he was an extraordinary composer who understood how no other how to craft perfect melody lines and also the beauty of the classical Alberti bass. But he won't listen, calls Alberti bass boring and uninspired and usually makes some joke how Mozart died too late rather than too early (and I know perfectly well that he stole that line from his idol Glenn Gould). Sometimes he even does passive aggressive stuff like hiding my Mozart sonatas sheet music and replacing it with sheet music for the Well-Tempered Clavier. I've tried adressing it before but he usually tries to shut me down quickly and says something like that I'd thank him later in life once I've realized how mistaken I was about Mozart and classical music in general. So what can I do about this? His hostile attitude towards my favorite composer slowly starts to negatively influence our relationship as roommates. tl;dr: Roommate constantly talks shit about my favorite composer Mozart. What can I do to make him shut up about it?
Submissions from last month's Piano Jam Just to be clear, the username links are links to the posts. Dr. John Blow's Minuet by SlurpeeGoood George Shearing's Lullaby of Birdland by GoldmanT Philip Glass's Metamorphosis I by Shaaaan123 Philip Glass's Metamorphosis I by Swipesy_Cakewalk Philip Glass's Metamorphosis I by SleepyConscience Roberto Cacciapaglia's Luminous Night by hundredvisions Roberto Cacciapaglia's Luminous Night by maniacalsounds Bach's Goldberg Variations (Aria) by tlipcon Gurlitt's Turkish March by Keselo If you still have a submission but you feel it's too late then please do post it anyway and I'll happily edit it in! Guidelines: If you're new to /piano, the Piano Jam is a monthly event where you get the chance to challenge yourself to work on a piece of music and share your playing with the community. Whether you're a beginner or expert, we'd love to hear you play! See the guidelines below and check out all the previous piano jams in the sidebar. You are encouraged to share a recording (of YOU playing) in a post to /piano anytime during the month. Please put "[Piano Jam]" somewhere in the submission title, so we know that's what the post is for. People have posted without this tag before and it's not the end of the world of course, but it does mean I might miss your submission! Please try to use YouTube / SoundCloud / Bandcamp for your links for accessibility & reliability.
You do not have to complete or perfect pieces to submit them, and don't be afraid to simplify/shorten pieces. Also, don't be afraid to improvise or write your own ending to a looped piece of video game music, etc.
Where there are multiple pieces within a category, I have ordered them from easiest to hardest and assigned a rough difficulty rating. Jazz is split into full arrangements (i.e. left and right hands notated) and lead sheets (melody and chords only).
This is not a contest! It's a chance for you to set a goal for yourself and to share your journey and accomplishments with the /piano community.
You do not have to limit yourself to just one piece, you can submit as many as you like.
If you have pieces you would like to suggest for future Piano Jams, please use our suggestion form
3 month challenge The 3 month challenge gives you extra time to learn a longer / more difficult piece. This piece will run from March till the end of May:
Note: This is my last month. I've decided I'm happier without WiFi. If someone else steps up and is computer-savvy, I've got a Python script that can make things easy for you. Let me know, and I can get it to you. Submissions from last month's Piano Jam Just to be clear, the username links are links to the posts. Graupner's Intrada in C Major by SlurpeeGoood Philip Braham's Limehouse Blues by GoldmanT Howard Shore's In Dreams by jonathanfox5 Howard Shore's In Dreams by dredly999 If you still have a submission but you feel it's too late then please do post it anyway and I'll happily edit it in! Guidelines: If you're new to /piano, the Piano Jam is a monthly event where you get the chance to challenge yourself to work on a piece of music and share your playing with the community. Whether you're a beginner or expert, we'd love to hear you play! See the guidelines below and check out all the previous piano jams in the sidebar. You are encouraged to share a recording (of YOU playing) in a post to /piano anytime during the month. Please put "[Piano Jam]" somewhere in the submission title, so we know that's what the post is for. People have posted without this tag before and it's not the end of the world of course, but it does mean I might miss your submission! Please try to use YouTube / SoundCloud / Bandcamp for your links for accessibility & reliability.
You do not have to complete or perfect pieces to submit them, and don't be afraid to simplify/shorten pieces. Also, don't be afraid to improvise or write your own ending to a looped piece of video game music, etc.
We do not assign difficulty levels to individual pieces, but within each category they are generally ordered from easiest to hardest.
This is not a contest! It's a chance for you to set a goal for yourself and to share your journey and accomplishments with the /piano community.
You do not have to limit yourself to just one piece, you can submit as many as you like.
If you have pieces you would like to suggest for future Piano Jams, please use our suggestion form
Download and print in PDF or MIDI free sheet music for Goldberg-Variationen, Bwv 988 by Johann Sebastian Bach arranged by OpenGoldberg for Piano (Solo) Goldberg Variations Sheet music for Piano (Solo) | Musescore.com "Music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven." 13 10 7 4 VARIATIO 5 a 1 ovvero 2 Clav. May you be inspired by the sweet harmonies of the Goldberg Variations. 9 5 VARIATIO 7 a 1 ovvero 2 Clav. 32 28 Bach: Goldberg Variations. DG: 4855384. Buy download online. Lang Lang (piano), Anna Saradjian (work arranger), Gina Alice (piano) Goldberg Variations Complete (scanned) by Johann Sebastian Bach. . Download free sheet music. Edited by: Carl Czerny (1791–1857), Friedrich Conrad Griepenkerl (1782–1849), Friedrich August Roitzsch (1805–1889). Publisher: Leipzig: Editio... Sheet Music. Johann Sebastian Bach. Piano. Goldberg Variations, BWV 988; The Goldberg Variations, BWV. 988, are a set of 30 variations for harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach. First published in 1741 as the fourth in a series Bach called Clavier-Übung, "keyboard practice", the work is considered to be one of the most important examples of Download and Print top quality Goldberg Variations (COMPLETE) sheet music for piano solo (or harpsichord) by Johann Sebastian Bach with Mp3 and MIDI files. High-Quality and Interactive, Transpose it in any key, change the tempo, easy play & practice. Print and Download Goldberg Variations sheet music. Music notes for score and parts sheet music by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Les Productions d'OZ - Digital at Sheet Music Plus. (ZZ.DZ-3620). Browse official sheet music in our Goldberg Variations playlist for piano - PDF download, instant print & online streaming - ♪ Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Variatio 16. Ouverture. a 1 Clav. ♫ Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Variatio 2. a 1 Clav. ♬ Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Variatio 18. Canone alla Sexta. a 1 Clav. ♪ Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Variatio 25. a 2 Clav. ♫ Goldberg Browse: Bach, J S - Goldberg Variations, BWV988 This page lists all sheet music of Goldberg Variations, BWV988 by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Showing 1 - 10 of 42 results Misc. Notes Open Goldberg Variations. Recorded in Teldex Studio, Berlin, 2012. Bösendorfer 290 Imperial. Anne-Marie Sylvestre, Producer Purchase
Bach Goldberg Variations “Variation 30” with Score - P ...
Goldberg Variations Aria - Bach [Piano Sheet Music]Sheet music available on: https://www.jellynote.com/sheet-music-tabs/bach/goldberg-variations-aria/507bce9... Download the Goldberg Variations (mp3, wav): https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/album/j-s-bach-open-goldberg-variations-bwv-988-pianoSilence of the Lambs, H... In this recording I used the 4th harmonic pedal in resonance position only. The harmonic pedal was invented by In this recording I used the 4th harmonic peda... Download Kimiko's music (mp3, aif, wav, flac): https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/album/j-s-bach-open-goldberg-variations-bwv-988-pianoJoin Kimiko's Mailing... Bach - Goldberg Variations, Variations 1 to 8 (with sheet music)The audio is an arrangement for strings and basso continuo.0:00 Variation 11:54 Variation 23:... Bach, BWV 988 Goldberg Variations (complete) バッハ, ゴルトベルク変奏曲Aria - 0:10 Var. 1 - 2:53Var. 2 - 3:59 Var. 3 - 4:45Var. 4 - 6:19 Var. 5 - 7:10Var ... Bach - Goldberg Variations, Aria (with sheet music)The audio is an arrangement for strings and basso continuo. Recently I learned some incredible insights about the science behind the canons in J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations with help from my mentor and teacher, Davi... This video features the Aria from Bach's Goldberg Variations in 2 versions in overheard keyboard view with links to free scores featured in this video. How B... I redistribute some of the notes between the hands in the 2 manual variations and this new approach will soon be available from a music publisher publisher i...
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