Today’s Listening Assignment is Country Gardens by Percy Grainger.
“Country Gardens” is an English folk tune collected by Cecil Sharp from the playing of William Kimber and arranged for piano in 1918 by Percy Grainger.
The tune and the Grainger arrangement for piano and orchestra is a favorite with school orchestras, and other performances of the work include morris dancing.
A piano version:
Piano duet (four-hands)
Clarinet solo
Orchestra
From the Muppets
And, how a Morris Dance is done:
Find Country Gardens on IMSLP, Piano Maestro (under the method book section) and Piano Pronto: Movement 2
Johann Sebastian Bach’s towering monument of organ music, with its deep sense of foreboding, will forever be associated with Halloween.
Get a free copy of the sheet music at IMSLP or borrow a copy from the O’Connor Music Studio. I have this arranged for organ, piano, duet, 2-piano, simplified…
It’s also available in Piano Maestro, Piano Pronto Encore and Coda
Humoresques Op. 101 (B. 187), is a piano cycle by the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, written during the summer of 1894. One writer says “the seventh Humoresque is probably the most famous small piano work ever written after Beethoven’s Für Elise.
Yo Yo Ma (cello) and Itzhak Perlman (violin
Orchestra:
Ragtime:
Jazz with Wynton Marsalis on trumpet
Zez Confrey gave this a makeover and included Way Down Upon the Swanee River:
Find the original Humoresque on IMSLP.. The O’Connor Music Studio Lending Library has versions of Humoresque available at several levels and Confey’s Humorestless played in the video above.
Korobeiniki is a nineteenth-century Russian folk song that tells the story of a meeting between a peddler and a girl, describing their haggling over goods in a veiled metaphor for courtship.
Outside Russia, “Korobeiniki” is widely known as the Tetris theme.
Orchestral version:
For Boomwhackers:
Vocal:
Ragtime:
Balalaika:
The Red Army Choir:
Korobeiniki/Tetris is available in Piano Maestro on the iPad and I have the sheet music for anyone who is interested.
Pictures at an Exhibition is a suite of ten pieces (plus a recurring, varied Promenade) composed for the piano by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky in 1874.
The suite is Mussorgsky’s most famous piano composition and has become a showpiece for virtuoso pianists. It has become further known through various orchestrations and arrangements produced by other musicians and composers, with Maurice Ravel’s arrangement being by far the most recorded and performed.
You can download the sheet music at IMSP or I have a copy of the book, as well as simplified sheet music.
The work opens with a brilliant touch – a “promenade” theme (above) that reemerges throughout as a transition amid the changing moods of the various pictures.
The ten pictures Mussorgsky depicts are:
a gnome-shaped nutcracker;
a troubadour plaintively singing outside an ancient castle;
children vigorously playing and quarreling in a park;
a lumbering wooden Polish ox-cart;
a ballet of peeping chicks as they hatch from their shells;
an argument between two Warsaw Jews, one haughty and vain, the other poor and garrulous;
shrill women and vendors in a crowded marketplace;
the eerie, echoing gloom of catacombs beneath Paris;
the hut of a grotesque bone-chomping witch of Russian folklore named Baba Yaga;
and a design for an entrance gate to Kiev.
The whole piece for piano. See if you can tell which pictures are which.
Today’s is a cheat post, partly because I ran out of time.
I’ve watched this video several times in the past few days. It’s a great overview of the Beatles music. And, yes, I have books of their music arranged for piano, if you want to play anything.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major), K. 525, is a 1787 composition for a chamber ensemble by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The German title means “a little serenade”, though it is often rendered more literally but less accurately as “a little night music.” The work is written for an ensemble of two violins, viola, and cello with optional double bass but is often performed by string orchestras and there are many arrangements for other instruments as we will see below.
Part of a full orchestral score:
Follow the score…
Easy piano sheet music might look like this:
The first movement of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, with a graphical score.
One of my favorites, Barbershop-Style. Eine Kleine Not Musik by the Gas Houe Gang tells the story of The Magic Flute (from June 19) to the music of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
A piano transcription
For four recorders, all played by the same person
From the Muppets: The Great Gonzo performing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on bagpipe while sitting on a ten-foot pole!
When my son and I played Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart arranged for 2 pianos November 30, 2014 we were the last people to play in the old Steinway Hall. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a good video camera 😦
Find this arranged for piano in Piano Pronto: Movement 2, Movement 3, Encore, Coda and Mozart: Exploring His Life and Music,
Today’s piece is one of those that piano students often try to learn on their own – or a friend will teach them the first 9 notes. It’s usually played too fast and, often in the wrong octave, or the first couple notes are repeated too many times.
This is one of two pieces that are so often played incorrectly that they have the distinction of being banned from competition in Northern Virginia Piano Teacher competitions.
Stay tuned for the other one!
Fur Elise was not published during Beethoven’s lifetime, having been discovered by Ludwig Nohl 40 years after the composer’s death. The identity of “Elise” is unknown.
The very basic melody:
The actual beginning is a little more involved.
And, there’s more!
If you’d like to learn to play this piece correctly, find the sheet music at IMSLP, Beethoven: Exploring His Life and Music, and countless compilations of classical music available at the O’Connor Music Studio.
Follow along:
By Valentina Lisitsa:
Ragtime!
A variety of instruments (Piano, Guitar, Cat Piano, Cello, Launchpad, Ukulele)
The Big Piano at FAO Schwartz in NYC:
Glass harp:
Youtube has many, many more versions. Beethoven would probably go nuts!
Today’s assignment is Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp minor. It is the second in a set of 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies by composer Franz Liszt, and is by far the most famous of the set.
In both the original piano solo form and in the orchestrated version this composition has enjoyed widespread use in animated cartoons. Its themes have also served as the basis of several popular songs.
Above, Danish comedian and pianist Victor Borge gives every impression of having been asked to play a duet with someone whom he not only doesn’t know but doesn’t particularly like. Forced to come up with a mutually agreeable way of sharing the musical workload, he settles on the most difficult route possible.
It’s not clear why two pianists were needed for this performance of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.2, S.244/2. I think that they did it just for the fun of it. The result is hilarious.
They’re not the only ones to tackle Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.2 as a piano duo.
We also have these guys:
The “history” of this piece in several cartoons:
This is very interesting:
As he often did, Horowitz arranged it more for his liking:
It’s wedding season! Today and tomorrow, we’ll be looking at, and listening to, the music most associated with weddings.
The “Bridal Chorus” from the 1850 opera Lohengrin by German composer Richard Wagner is a march played for the bride’s entrance at many formal weddings throughout the Western world.
The piece was made popular when it was used as the processional at the wedding of Victoria the Princess Royal to Prince Frederick William of Prussia in 1858.
This piece is available in Keyboard Kickoff, Movement 2 and Piano Maestro.
The original from the opera
A piano version (this book is available for loan, if interested)
MaryO'Studio 