Hi this is Tom Kenaston I'm a singer song writer pianist music director. I live in West
Palm Beach and also New York City. In this clip we're going to talk about how to read
piano music. For the purposes of this clip, we're going to assume that you know the notes.
You know how to look at a staff and know what notes you're looking at. If you don't you
might want to take a look at another clip in this series I believe it called "How to
read Music the Notes." So now lets take a look at the piano music that we're going to
talk about. Ok so now we're going to look at a piece of piano music. This is an Octern
by Chopin. The first thing you'll notice is there's a lot of stuff going on here and the
first time you're looking at it you might be a little intimidated by it. But the trick
is absolutely just to break it down. We talked in the clip about how to read read music.
There's a treble cleft and a base cleft. Generally when your playing piano and reading piano
music your looking at the right hand is written on the treble cleft and the left hand is written
on the base cleft. As if you're reading a book we look at music from left to right.
So when you sit down to play a piece of music on the piano the first thing you're going
to start with the first note on the left hand side at the top of the page. So here we have
the right hand starts with that note and the left hand comes in here. I'm not going to
take your time right now to talk about all the different notes that are going on but
I just want to talk about the elements are present on this music. Not only do we have
notes which you can see traveling left to right in the right hand. This is a very simple
line one note at a time. You'll see also there are numbers on top of some of the notes, these
are fingerings , so that too tells you to play that note with finger two. And there's
another clip in the series that talks about fingering so I'm just going to hold my right
hand up here and reiterate when your look at the hand the thumb is actually the one.
So in fingering the two would be here, your first finger. Just FYI. And then all the rest
of that you can take a look at. You might also notice the P in music we have what are
called dynamics . These are symbols based on words in the Italian language that tell
you how loud or soft to play. In this case the P stands for piano which means play it
very softly and as you travel down I'm looking to see, no there are no other dynamics written.
Then you have articulation markings in piano music. These little dots are called staccatos.
So those tell you not to play the note long but to play it quickly. Like that. Phrase
markings tell you how to connect the ideas within a phrase that's also another thing.
All of this of course you will learn as you study piano with a teacher. But I just wanted
to go through the basics of what you might see on the page when you are looking at a
piece of piano music. You'll also notice that the treble and the base cleft here are connected
by a bracket and that tell you that this piece exists simultaneously with itself. This right
hand goes with this left hand. Then there's a break and then you have another bracket
here. So here's the next section. So as your reading you just want to make sure you don't
try to connect this one with this one. These two don't go together. That's treble and base,treble
and base , and treble and base. So just to wrap up I would like to reiterate that when
your looking at piano music, you may be very intimated at first but as you learn all the
different elements of the language of written music, you'll be able to break it down easily
and be able to take one little piece at a time and learn to speak the language as fluently
as any other brilliant musician can. This is Tom Kenaston and this has been "How To
Read Piano Music".