Why was the piano player arrested?
Because he got into treble
I hope everyone is having an amazing break, and is eating lots of good food! Over the break I have had lots of time to learn some holiday songs on piano, catch up on homework, and learn stuff for a voice competition I am doing in January.
Today to try and stay in the holiday spirit, I decided to learn how to play Silent Night. To perfect this song, I also needed to read more on time signatures and rhythm in general since this song is not in the basic 4/4 time.
If you think about it rhythm plays a big part in our everyday life. Each step, each intake of breath, and even the cycle of sleeping and waking is rhythmic. Our life can depend on the rhythm of our heart, and music depends on rhythm in a similar way. Different notes like half notes and quarter notes have different amounts of beats tied to them. Time signatures are then used to structure beats into uniform measures. The book Easy Adult Piano: Beginners Course explains how to read these signatures, "the upper number (in this case, 3) always tells how many beats occur in each measure. The lower number,4, tells you the quarter note receives one beat" (Leonard 11). The bottom and top numbers aren't always 3 or 4 they can be 5/8 3/16 or practically anything you can think of and they all feel different when they are played in a song.
I tried to upload a video of me singing and playing the song, but for whatever reason, blogger doesn't want me to do that. So here is a screen clip from the video.
When I started learning the song I was confused on what the key was because I didn't see anything indicating what key it was in. So I flipped through the book to try and figure that out, and it told me that if it is not indicated otherwise then the key is always C. While learning the song I had trouble with the fingerings once again, but the book again helped me.
Do you agree with the statement "Our life can depend on the rhythm of our heart, and music depends on rhythm in a similar way." Why or why not?
Easy Adult Piano. N.p.: Hal Leonard, n.d. Print.
I agree with your analogy of our heartbeat and the music time signature and I really love how you tied those two together. This really helped me understand time signatures since most of my sheet music is played in a 4/4 signature. Is a 3/4 time signature the same as a 6/8 time signature? Also, blogger wouldn't let me upload videos either, I had to post them on YouTube and then put in a link to the video. If you decide to do that, I would love to hear you play and sing!
ReplyDeleteThank you Kara! Usually when playing in 6/8 you will be playing two groups of triplets (in x/4 equivalent) thus making it closer to 2/4 than 3/4. Other than that, you would also notice the difference in terms of strong beats. In 6/8 you would have a strong beat on 1 and a lesser strong beat on 2 (4th eight note) while in 3/4 you would have one strong beat on 1 and two lesser beats on 2 and 3. You would thus notice a distinct difference in how the music sounds!
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