Für Elise: Beethoven’s Mysterious Inspiration

In the 21st century, the music and notes to Beethoven’s Für Elise are the object of millions of Internet searches and downloads every day. The fact that the music is so freely available for download, along with the piece’s continued popularity in the Internet age, is testament to the great emotional power and musical depth of Beethoven’s work. Für Elise is one of the most instantly recognized pieces of music from the Classical era, and it continues to work wonders in the ears and hearts of modern listeners and pianists. But what’s the story behind this composition? Before downloading the notes to Für Elise, let’s take a look at its history.

In fact, the true story behind Für Elise is shrouded in mystery, and there are many theories behind the events in Beethoven’s life that lead to the writing of the piece. What’s more, the manuscript of Für Elise was undiscovered and unpublished until 1865, nearly 40 years after the composer’s death. Because of this, obviously, Beethoven could not make any first-hand clarifications about the origins of his work, which became wildly popular almost immediately upon publication.

In reality, “Für Elise” is actually just Beethoven’s note of dedication included with the piece, whose real name is “Bagatelle in A minor.” A bagatelle is a musical form, literally translating to a “trifle,” which is usually short, light, and mellow. Meanwhile, the piece is also a Rondo, which is a form, frequently used in the Classical era, which usually follows an A B A C A structure, although there are variations. As its name suggests, the key signature of the piece is A minor, but one of the beauties of Beethoven’s composition is how he mixes in discordant notes and continuously shifts the tonal center of the music.

“Für Elise” translates from German to “For Elise,” yet Beethoven historians have never figured out who Elise was. One popular theory is that the piece was actually called “Für Therese,” and that because of Beethoven’s notoriously sloppy handwriting, the original transcriber of the piece simply copied the name wrong. When the piece was written — in 1810 — Beethoven had recently been involved in a courtship with Therese Malfatti, who eventually turned down Beethoven’s marriage proposal. This could account for some of the effusive and overwhelming emotion of the music.

Meanwhile, some historians have posited that Beethoven, his heart broken, deliberately changed the name of the piece to a non-existent woman’s name, in a subtle refutation of the woman or women who snubbed him.

Of course, Beethoven historians acknowledge that it is not possible to know about every single person with whom Beethoven had a relationship. Elise may be a short-time sweetheart who never made it into records of Beethoven. Or, the piece could have been commissioned, and Elise could be the name of someone related to the person who paid for the piece.

Ultimately, it’s not important who or what Beethoven’s Elise was, as each person who plays those famous notes can have in mind his or her own “Elise.” All that is required to play the piece is to have some deep well of emotion to put into the music. It doesn’t matter where this emotion comes from. Beethoven clearly had something that he felt strongly about, which makes this one of his most famous and evocative compositions. Most of us cannot even listen to the first, emotionally strained notes of the piece without feeling something in our own hearts.

This emotional intensity is what distinguishes Beethoven from many of his contemporaries, and it also accounts for the continued popularity of his music, both on paper and in formats that make the notes free to download. Many of us remember hearing Für Elise children and being profoundly moved even then — and maybe it even inspired us to take up the piano — just as our own children are moved by the piece. Because of its pure beauty, Für Elise should remain popular for as long as music exists.

Can Beginners Really Play Christmas Carols This Christmas?

If you are just starting out on your piano playing journey — learning to play the piano — you probably don’t think it is possible to abe able to play Christmas Carols this Christmas.

After all, more advanced pianists can add all kinds of arranging techniques to their Christmas Carols like bells and chimes and waterfalls and jazzy chords and runs and fills and re-harmonizations and all kinds of exciting things.

But if you’re just starting out, you might only know a few basic chords. So what can you do?

I have good news — no, make that GREAT news for you!

By using just 3 simple chords that anyone can learn in a few minutes you can actually play many of the great Christmas Carols including:

O Christmas Tree
Angels We Have Heard On High
Silent Night
Away In A Manger
Joy To The World
Deck The Halls
Go, Tell It On The Mountain
O Come, O Come Immanuel
Star Of The East
The First Noel
The Holly And The Ivy
While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day

So you can actually learn to play those Christmas Carols this Christmas if you know, or are willing to learn, three simple chords.

So what are these chords?

In any given key, there are 3 “family members” that are residents of that key — the I chord, the IV chord, and the V chord. They are far and away the most likely chords to occur in any given key.

For example, if I am playing in the Key of C, and the first chord is the C chord and I have to guess what the next chord is, I would guess that it would be either the F chord or the G chord. Why? Because those are the other “family members.” So we have narrowed the odds a great deal just by knowing who the members of the family are.

So how could I tell whether it should be F or G?

If the melody is a “B”, then the chord is probably a G chord. Why? Because “B” is in the G chord, but is not in the F chord.

If the melody is a “A”, than I would guess that the chord is F. Why? Because “A” is in the F chord, but is not in the G chord.

You can also just match one of the three chords to the melody to see if it sounds right. If it doesn’t, try another of the 3 chords. It won’t take long before you get the knack of matching chords to the tune of a song.

Does that mean that there are always just 3 chords in a song? No, but there are literally hundreds of songs that are made of just these 3 chords.

Can you use other chords in these carols? Of course. And they will probably sound fuller if you do. But you can “get by” with just 3 chords — the family chords in whatever key you want to play them in.

Here are the primary chords (the family chords) of all the major keys (remember that the primary chords are the I chord, the IV chord, and the V chord based on the scale of that particular key):

Key of C: C, F, G
Key of G: G, C, D
Key of D: D, G, A
Key of A: A, D, E
Key of E: E, A, B
Key of B: B, E, F#
Key of F: F, Bb, C
Key of Bb: Bb, Eb, F
Key of Eb: Eb, Ab, Bb
Key of Ab: Ab, Db, Eb
Key of Db: Db, Gb, Ab
Key of Gb: Gb, Cb, Db

Do you have to know all these chords in all these keys?

No.

You can choose to play in just one key, or just a few keys.

But what you MUST know is the 3 chords in whatever key you want to play in! That means that the stark beginner can learn 3 chords in just a few minutes, and be able to play along with thousands of tunes, because most folk songs, hymns, country songs, and many rock songs just use the 3 basic chords. That’s why people who know zilch about music can pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano or keyboard, learn 3 chords, and chord along while singing everything from “Silent Night” to “Joy To The World” to……………………..well, you get the idea.

Go thou and do likewise. It’s not too late — Christmas comes every year right on schedule!

And the great thing about Carols is that once you learn them, you can play them year after year. And of course you’ll be getting better year after year, so each year you can play them fuller than the year before!

Merry Christmas!

For a great course for beginners, please go to “How to Play 12 Christmas Carols On The Piano — This Christmas!”

For more advanced courses, please go to “The Secret of Arranging Spectacularly Beautiful Christmas Carols!”

Scales Video

Full length course on scales on DVD & CD & Scale Sheets.

I don’t often plug the work of a competitor, but in this case I’ll make an exception. Jermaine (a young guy from Southern California and one heck of a pianist) has come out with a course on playing Christmas carols titled something like “The Secret of Playing Christmas Songs By Ear On The Piano”.
Even if you have no interest in taking the course, at least go over to the site and watch the free sample videos.

Pretty good stuff, if I do say so!

Not a single professional musician plays the music exactly as it appears on a piece of sheet music. Instead, they use the written music as a map, or an outline, and then proceed to do their own thing with it. They twist it, bend it, add to it, subtract from it, put fills in it, change the key, change the words, change some of the melody notes, and on and on.

So when you hear your favorite artist perform a piece of music, if you look at the written sheet music while they are performing it, you will see it is MUCH different and MUCH better than the plain old sheet music.

So how can the average piano player make her or his piano playing more exciting? There are many ways, but here are seven of my favorites:

1. Change the chords slightly by adding color tones. What are color tones? Color tones are notes added to the basic chord, usually expressed as 6ths, 7ths, 9ths, etc. For example, instead of playing just a straight C chord as it is written C, E, G try adding a color tone to it, such as a 6th (A) or a 7th (Bb) or a major 7th (B) or a 9th (D). In fact, try adding a couple together, like a 6th and a 9th. So instead of being a plain vanilla chord made up of C, E, and G, you’ve made it a tasty variation adding A and D to the equation.

2. During the pause between phrases, add a counter melody. How? Take the given melody notes and turn them upside down or inside out, or change the rhythm slightly so the tune is still recognizable, but different.

3. Add chord substitutions. Instead of always using the chords that are written, ask yourself this question: “Into what other chord will this melody note fit?” For example, if the melody is G and the chord is C, what other chords contain the note G in them? There are several answers to that question. G is not only in the C chord, but it is also in the Em chord, the Eb major chord, the G chord, the Gm chord, etc. Try one of those alternate chords until you like the sound combination, then use it instead of the C chord. It will add an originality and freshness to your playing almost immediately.

4. Add fills and runs between phrases. How do you do that? Simply break up the chord that is in force at the moment, and run it up the keyboard as a broken chord one note at a time. Or start at the top of the keyboard and come down. Or play with the chord a bit by playing 2 of the 3 notes instead of the entire 3 note chord.

5. Use melodic echos. After you have played the melody, echo it by playing it an octave higher, or two octaves higher, or an octave lower.

6. Use half-step slides. If the chord progression is from D7 to G7, instead of going to G7 directly, “slide into it” by playing the chord that is one-half step above namely, Ab7, then quickly sliding off Ab7 to G7.

7. Use “blue notes.” Blue notes are created by sliding off a black key onto a white key quickly. For example, if the melody is E, slide off Eb to E quickly using the same finger.

This is just a tiny sampling of what you can do to make songs more exciting. There are literally hundreds of other techniques, from cascading waterfall runs to inside blues moves to deceptive cadences to tremolos to twangs to crunches to straddles to 3-1 breakups to walk-downs and walk-ups to jazz voicing chords and on and on.

By simply adding a few of these techniques to your playing you can easily double and triple the excitement created by your piano playing. People will notice it, and you will find it exciting and exhilerating to create your own arrangments right on the spot as you play.

If you need help in this regard, please go to www.pianoplaying.com

As a piano teacher for many years now, I have had countless students ask me some variation of this question: “What fingers should I use on such and such a note, or such and such a chord?”

And my answer never fails to surprise them. I tell them “Fingering is not written in stone. Moses did not hand down a commandment on fingering, and neither did Bach or Mozart or Billy Joel or Dave Brubeck”

That comes as a shock to many adults because they think back to their piano lesson days as children and recall their teacher telling them things like “Don’t use your thumb on that key!” and “Cross your 3rd finger over…” and so forth.

So while there are no absolutes when it comes to fingering, there are certainly general principles that pianists have discovered down through the years. So whenever possible, don’t re-invent the wheel. We all learn from experience, but it doesn’t have to be our experience we learn from: we can stand on the shoulders of the giants of the piano that have gone before us, and take advantage of what they have discovered.

So here are some general principles — the intrinsic logic of fingering:

1. If you see a passage in your sheet music move higher on the staff, use a low finger (fingers are numbered from the thumb outward, so your thumb is #1, your index finger is #2, your middle finger is #3, your ring finger is #4, and your little finger is #5) so you’ll have fingers available for higher notes.

And of course, exactly the opposite if you see a passage move lower on the staff.

2. Hold your hand up in front of you. The longest fingers are in the middle — right? Your thumb is far and away the shortest because it starts at a lower point on your hand. Now look at a piano keyboard. The black keys are the furthest away from you — correct? So which fingers can reach the black keys best? You got it — your middle fingers. Therefore, whenever possible play the black keys with your long fingers instead of your thumb. It’s just common sense.

3. The corollary to that is obvious: use your thumb and little finger on white keys whenever possible. (And it’s NOT always possible.)

4. A scale contains 8 keys. You have 5 fingers. So it’s logical to assume you will have to use some fingers more than once. On right hand scale passages ascending beginning on white keys, start on your thumb and then cross your thumb under your 3rd finger except when the 4th note of the scale is a black key. In that case, to avoid playing the black key with your thumb, cross your thumb under your 4th finger. (And just the reverse with your left hand, of course)

On scale passages beginning on black keys, start on a long finger — preferably your index finger (also called your “pointer finger”) and then cross your thumb under whenever the next white key occurs.

5. On chromatic passages, the best way I have found is to use just fingers #1 and #3 except where two white keys in a row occur — then use fingers #1 and #2.

6. Fingering on chords is largely dictated by the size of the chord; obviously if you are playing a 5-note chord, you will use all 5 fingers. Otherwise just follow the intrinsic logic in the general principles listed above.

If you still find it hard to believe that fingering is not written in stone, then watch any video of Art Tatum (available on YouTube.com), one of the great jazz pianists, who stunned classical musicians with his blazing speed while using extremely unorthodox fingering.

www.playpianocatalog.com

Yesterday I posted about the pentatonic scale, and mentioned that the 5 black keys on a piano form a pentatonic scale (penta=5).

A student of mine sent me a YouTube video which illustrates this perfectly. Here it is:

As you know, there are many kinds of scales, the most familiar of

which is the major scale, on which the largest percentage of songs are

built.

There are also 3 types of minor scale — the natural minor, the

harmonic minor, and the melodic minor. Then there is the

Mediteranean scale, the blues scale, and all the “church modes” —

Dorian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aolian, Phrygian, Locrian, and Ionian.

But surprisingly, the most-used scale in the world throughout history

and even now in many Aisian countries is the pentatonic scale.

The Pentatonic scale is formed of notes 1 2 3 5 and 6 of the major

scale. It is a five note scale, hence the name “penta-tonic”.

To find any pentatonic scale, just leave out the 4th and 7th degrees of

any major scale, and presto — you have the pentatonic scale.

The most obvious way to play the scale on piano, is to play all the

black keys and none of the white keys. Many of our spirituals such as

“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and even the great classic “Amazing

Grace” can be played with just the pentatonic scale — nothing else.

Even the great composer Chopin got into the “black key act” by

composing Étude Op. 10, No. 5 in G-flat major, also known as the

Black Key Étude. He did use one white key — F — in one measure of

the melody, otherwise it’s all black keys.

Try improvising on the pentatonic scale — you can’t make a mistake,

as all the notes of the scale are harmonious with every other note.

The tango is an incredibly sensual genre of music and dance that originated in Argentina. It is always played by a tango orchestra consisting of strings, bandoneon, bass and sometimes piano, though various other Latin-based instruments are found outside of this core group. Each of these instruments can be represented in any number within the band; the specific instrumentation is part of the tango orchestra’s uniqueness.

Most tango orchestras are full of extremely portable instruments, instruments that can be quickly packed up and easily traveled with. This bent towards portability is a strong reflection on the tango’s underground origin. The tango originally started in the early 1900s as a sort of low-brow music in Buenos Aires. Those playing the tango were usually tied in some way those listening to the tango, so they were constantly on the move. Portable instrumentation, for these early tango orchestras, was absolutely essential.

However, the constant playing of tango music in the Argentine streets eventually bore holes into the mainstream, and the upper class (despite their initial misgivings) eventually gave in to the intimate form that we know today; it was altered and toned down into various commercial forms. By World War II, the tango was a craze in Argentina and elsewhere, bringing with it the dance of the same name.

The tango dance, unlike some forms of the music, managed to stay true to its peasant roots. The Argentine tango, a form sometimes found in modern times, is the original peasant tango, danced as early as just after the music’s inception. A variation on the original tango dance eventually found its way to the United States, sweeping the country with its sensuous, sometimes complicated steps. A simplified version of this form eventually became the ballroom tango dance that is still danced today.

The rhythm of the tango is not as complex as one would think, but because of the interplay between various instruments, one would get that impression.

There are two basic types of tangos — the Spanish Tango and the Argentine Tango. The basic structure of the Spanish Tango is in 4/4 with a quarter notes on the first beat followed by an eighth rest on the first half of the 2nd beat followed by two quarter notes in each measure, whereas the Argentine Tango is in 4/4 with three quarter notes followed by 2 eighth notes per measure.

To complicate things a bit, the Spanish Tango sometimes has a two measure rhythm, with the 2nd measure consisting of eighth, quarter, eighth, quarter, quarter.

All this plus many other rhythms are covered in detail in Rhythm Piano.

A harmony is a series of notes in combination, played simultaneously. Listen to your favorite songs, and pay close attention to the back-up vocals when they’re being sung along with the lead.

Can you hear how the two vocal melodies differ in pitch? That’s harmony, and it’s highly possible that those back-up vocalists were chosen because of their strong ability to harmonize. Singing a harmony, or rather picking one out on your own without written sheet music, is an almost inherent musical skill that many singers would die to possess.

But harmony isn’t just the province of singers; it’s found in every single area of music. Any time a sound is layered on top of another sound and those sounds match each other in rhythm and melody (but not pitch), a harmony is created.

Harmony is made of intervals, and as such, it can be considered dissonant (scratchy, uncomfortable, like playing an E and an F at the same time) or consonant (pleasing or smooth). What makes a harmony pleasing or unpleasing, however, is somewhat relative. In medieval times, only octaves and perfect fifths were considered harmonious, and any harmony that deviated from that was generally frowned upon. In modern western music, though, nearly everything is considered to be harmonious by someone. Fifths are still very popular in modern harmony but are now used in the most unlikely of places; heavy metal music, for example, frequently uses perfect fifths in the vocal harmony to create an eerie effect when layered on top of the more dissonant instrumentation.

Harmony, in addition to being consonant or dissonant, can also be subordinate or coordinate. Subordinate harmony, the tonal harmony used most frequently today, is a series of harmonies that are based on each other. The harmony moves in such a way that a resolution is somewhat predictable; you can hear this type of harmony in modern pop music, musical parts that flow very easily into each other and don’t leave the listener baffled as to the turn the song has taken. On the other hand, coordinate harmony is a series of harmonies that operate independently of each other. They do have some common relation, of course, but don’t typically move toward a goal, or predictable resolution. Renaissance musicians often used this type of harmony, and it’s capable of producing rich and moving textures within a piece of music.

So what is a piano player to do to harmonize a tune with chords that sound good? In other words, how do we match a left hand chord to the melody at any given point in a song?

It sounds compliated, but it’s really not. You just need to know the “family chords” of the key you are playing in, and then ask yourself “into what other chord will this melody note fit?” You’ll come up with a few matching chords that will give a new flavor to an old song.

For a great downloadable course in harmonizing, check out “How To Harmonize Any Tune
With Beautiful Piano Chords!”

A musical tritone is an interval of three whole tones (whole steps) or six half tones (half steps). Simply put, a tritone is an augmented fourth or diminished fifth, depending on the key. A tritone is typically created by adding an accidental, but it’s found naturally on the fourth and seventh degrees of any scale. In a C major scale, for instance, the tritone would be found by playing the F and B simultaneously.

Tritones are significant because of their ability to create a heavy, uncomfortable dissonance. It’s so uncomfortable, in fact, that it has been referred to as the devil’s interval and was strongly discouraged during the Baroque period — a time when the pleasing sound of perfect fifths ruled the day. But despite its rather nasty stigma, the tritone has the power to be pleasing and even somewhat consonant when used correctly. Because it’s one of the most moody and easily personified intervals, the tritone is frequently used to foreshadow a heavy resolution.

Additionally, the tritone is helpful to jazz musicians who employ a technique called “tritone substitution.” This substitution is possible by playing a dominant seventh chord that uses a root a tritone away from the original dominant seventh. Because the interval pitches are the same, the chords become interchangeable, thus giving the musician a bit more freedom to explore possibly melodies and harmonies during an improvisation.

Jazz isn’t the only type of modern music to use the tritone, however. Though it was frowned upon in the early ages of western music, dissonance is far more acceptable today; in some cases, it’s even what draws an audience to a certain piece of music. The tritone can be found in nearly every area of modern rock and pop, but it’s exploited most often in heavy metal music that prides itself on sounding eerie or evil. Metallica and Black Sabbath have used the tritone to wondrous effect, and one of Jimi Hendrix’s most famous songs, “Purple Haze,” is based almost entirely around the dissonant chord. The well-known 17-minute song “Inna Gadda Di Vida,” by psychedelic rockers Iron Butterfly, also used the tritone during an extended keyboard solo as a way to break the glory of a series of perfect fifths.

I use it a lot in my playing because it provides a perfect “half-step slide” into the next chord if it is a 4th above or a 5th below the chord I’m playing.

Most of us will never come close to creating the sounds we hear the great jazz pianists such as Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck and many others make, but it sure is fun trying. I’ve played jazz piano all my adult life — not very well compared to those guys, but good enough to amuse myself and entertain friends and make a few bucks.

If you’ve always wanted to learn to play jazz on the piano but never had the time or the money…or worst of all spent endless amounts money that you really didn’t have on lessons that were supposed to teach you but left you even further back than where you started,
I’ve definitely found that someone who is going to help you do it.

Check him out at “How To Play Jazz Piano”

When sight reading a piece of sheet music it is easy to lose your place in the score if you need to look down at your hands. Try to not look down, but if you must, don’t move your head — just do an eye-flip down at the keys and back up. That way your eye sockets stay pointed in the same direction, making it a lot easier to find your place in the score again.

But piano sight reading is more than a matter of the eyes; it’s a matter of understanding what you are seeing. If all you see is a mess of black notes on white paper, you’re in big trouble. But if you can see intervals, chords, scales, patterns and so forth, you’ll be much further down the road in piano sight reading.

Which is a good reason to get well grounded in music theory!

Do you remember the great jazz tune titled “Four” by Jon Henricks? It told a story about what Jon considered as the 4 important aspects of life: truth, honor, happiness and love.

Music has 4 basic components too. We’ve already considered the first three: melody, rhythm, and harmony. The 4th is tone color. (Some might say that lyrics are a 5th element, but not all musical compositions have words, so I vote no on that notion.)

Tone color is the distinctive sound that each instrument or voice makes. A bass, alto, tenor, piano, sax, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, french horn, etc. can all play the same note, but does the same sound come out? No. They can all be on the same pitch, but each instrument has a distinctive sound of it’s own. And it is the blending of all these sounds that makes what we call a “band” or “orchestra” or “choir” or “combo” or whatever.

Obvious? Yep. But it’s kind of nice to know the stuff of which music is made.

In previous posts we have discussed two of the elements that comprise what music is all about; namely melody and rhythm.

The 3rd element of music is harmony. Without these 3 elements working together, music is “bare-bones” and incomplete. Oh sure — you could sing just a melody without any harmony, but that melody follows some sort of rhythmic pattern, whether steady or syncopated or a combination of both.

But when you stir harmony into the music bowl, you have a complete musical meal.

Harmony is the tonal environment in which a melody lives — the underlying sounds that give it context and relevance.

That harmony can be expressed in intevals or chords, from simple to extremely complex. An interval is the distance between any two notes — such as a 3rd, or a 6th. Vocal duets often are harmonized by singing a 3rd or 6ths below the melody, with a sprinkling of other intervals from time to time.

Chords can range from 3-note triads to complex structures composed of all kinds of intervals (and therefore, overtones).

Next post we’ll look at the 4th element of music — tone color.

Jermaine is releasing a new course on jazz piano on Oct. 2nd, which some of you might be interested in. But even if you aren’t, go to “Jazz piano video clips” and watch a few of the short videos. Pretty cool stuff!

Musicians are inherently concerned with rhythm.

In fact, the mark of a natural talent is often their ability to understand, distinguish, and play a complicated rhythm – often intuitively. It makes sense, really. Rhythm is, after all, the part of music dealing with how sounds vary over time and their duration throughout it. Having natural rhythm is what some refer to as being able to keep the beat, and without some sort of beat a song is little to nothing (with the exception of some incredible experimental music that aims to get rid of rhythm altogether).

Some of us musicians, however, were not gifted with a great sense of rhythm — me included. I had to really work at learning various rhythms, while melody and harmony were no problem. Eventually I even created a course based on what I had learned called “Rhythm Piano” that reveals a “baseline” which makes knowing which note is played when much easier. It also covers many piano rhythms including:

Waltz, March, Swing, Ballad, Fiddle Jig, Rubato, Disco, Foxtrot, Stride, Triplet Patterns, The Shuffle, Gospel Waltz, Royal March, Polish Dance, Polka, Scotch Snap, Hungarian Skip, Rhythm & Blues, Western, Boogaloo, Hornpipe, Gigue, Jazz Waltz, Rock, The Skip, The Morris Dance, The Schottische, Habanera, Paso Doble, The Sweet Pea, Samba, C & W, Tango, Fatback , Rumba, Bolero, Bossa Nova, Cha Cha, and Beguine.

Rhythm is constructed out of a time signature, a notation device that tells the musician how many beats are in one bar of music and what type of note constitutes a beat. The underlying rhythm or beat of a song is also called the pulse, and the speed of this pulse is what determines the tempo. These three aspects — the pulse, the time signature, and the tempo — are what create the initial and underlying rhythm for an entire song.

Western music typically uses a form of rhythm known as divisive: a rhythm in which a section of time is divided into tiny rhythmic units, usually one pulse. These rhythmic units vary depending on time signature and type. A metric rhythm is a steady pulse. An intrametric rhythm is slightly off the steady pulse, like some country-western or swing music. A contrametric rhythm is syncopated, and an extrametric rhythm is irregular, like triplets.

Percussionists generally get all the credit for a song’s rhythm, but rhythm is the province of every instrument and every musician. Understanding how notes relate to each other in a period of time is the concept of rhythm, and every musician must be familiar with it. Though the drums in a rock band or the piano in a jazz ensemble may be driving the underlying beat, all the musicians are playing a rhythm, and all rhythm is able to push a song forward.

During the next 3 sessions we are going to consider the essential parts of music — the elements of music that are “must haves” — you don’t really have music unless you have these 3 elements at some time or another. They don’t have to all happen at the same time, or all the time, but they are always intermittently present — like the weather.

The first part of music is melody. A melody is a tune, a horizontal flow of notes that generally serves as the basic identifier of a piece of music. On the keyboard we have 12 different notes to work with, and these 12 different notes are repeated in seven different octaves:

Melodies are constructed from these 12 notes, and are almost always derived from a scale of some kind. A scale is simply a row of notes in some consistent pattern. The word “scale” comes from a Latin word meaning “ladder” – notes ascend or descend the ladder rung by rung. There are many types of scales – major, minor (3 varieties of minor), chromatic, whole tone, etc. We will take a look at some of these other types of scales, but the most-used scale is the major scale, which is a row of notes in alphabetical rotation in the following pattern:

Whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step.

A half step is the 2 closest possible keys, such as C and B, and F and E, and B and Bb and C and C#.

A whole step always skips a key — either black or white; such as C and D, D and E, E and F#, and so on.

Tomorrow we’ll look briefly at the 2nd element.

Once upon a time about the only way people learned to play the piano was through structured lessons in a piano teacher’s home or a studio in a music store. Of course lots of people picked up the piano by ear or by asking a friend to show them certain chords, but for the most part piano playing was learned by going to a piano teacher and progressing through a series of music books such as Schaum, Thompson, D’Auberge, Bastien, and many others.

But with the advent of the internet people are no longer totally dependent on a music store or the lady down the street to teach them to play the piano. There are many online courses sponsored by respected institutions such as the Berklee School of Music in Boston — the alma mater of countless jazz musicians and fusion artists. And for the person who just wants to play for their own enjoyment, there are courses galore in reading music, chords, music theory, as well as traditional piano playing.

The nice thing about it is that it is not an either-or situation; people can take formal lessons from a local teacher or music school and supplement those lessons through independent study of specific areas, such as rhythm problems, technique, chord formation, improvisation, and many other areas.

The days of do-it-yourself piano playing is upon us.

Did you take piano lessons when you were a kid?

I’m looking for several people who took piano lessons as children to share anecdotes about their experiences in an article I’m putting together.

If you have had a funny experience at piano lessons — such as making up an excuse for why you didn’t practice like “the dog ate my piano book”, or a negative experience — such as the teacher slapping your wrists, or making you play scales endlessly, drop me an email telling me about it and giving me your permission to use it in an article.

If I choose to use your story, I’ll send you a small thank-you gift, so please include your mailing address. Send your email to: kidslessons@playpiano.com and put “kidslessons” in the subject line so I don’t miss it.

I will look forward to hearing from you!