Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Can anyone here name this piece?

Just wondering what this piece is called and if anyone is familiar with it. I'm quite intrigued by it! It's really beautiful and sounds easy enough that I could learn it, but I have no idea what it's called or who composed it.

Here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAn_cVPexrA

I'm not holding my breath on this one, but thanks in advance!

Sounds improvised - and doesn't really match the video - but pretty anyway.

JF

Hmmm.... I just read through every single one of the 280 comments on that video, and about 140 of them are people asking "what was the piano piece playing in the background?" But nobody had an answer... so my guess is that John Frank is right and it's an improvised piece. I also agree that the music didn't really match the video.

Fair enough, it was a shot in the dark to begin with, and like I said I wasn't holding my breath on it, but it was worth a shot.

Thanks you two!

Sounds easy enough that you could use it as your first "learn to play by ear" project!

1. To get started, go to your piano and try to identify the first note. (Answers at the bottom, don't peek yet!) That note is important because it is repeated many times in the accompaniment and helps establish the tonality of the piece. Play that note with your left hand pinky.

2. Notice that the accompaniment has this oom...pah...pah, oom...pah...pah feel to it. That's a 1-2-3 feel that establishes your time signature, 3 beats to the bar, 3/4 time. So the accompaniment is simple: on the first beat you will play the root of a chord; on the next two beats you will play the rest of the chord, twice, also with the left hand. Can you identify this first chord? It will be your "home" chord. Does it sound "happy" or "sad", major or minor? OK, if you've identified the other two notes in the chord just play root, rest-of chord; root, rest-of-chord...for four measures.

3. Notice that after four measures something changes in the accompaniment. The bottom note stays the same. Can you identify the rest of the notes? It helps if you know a bit about harmony and the circle of fifths. If you don't, just try to figure out by ear if the notes of this chord are mostly higher or lower than in the first chord.

4. After two measures, a slight change in the accompaniment, for two measures.

5. Back to the "home" chord for two measures.

6. Now time to pick out the melody. What is the first melody note? After the first note does the melody jump up in pitch? How high? Just keep stopping and replaying the video while you try to match the pitches on your keyboard.

7. Continue....





..............
1. First note is the E above middle C
2. The first chord is E-minor: E-G-B for four measures
3. Second chord: E-F#-A-C two measures
4. Third chord: E-F#-A two measures
5. Back to the "home" chord (E-minor) for two measures
6. Melody notes: E B A#, B C B B F#......

LOL! I did the same thing and was surprised to find that.

Great post, jazzy -- you're a great teacher!

Thanks for the reply jazzy! I am a bit ashamed to admit that I've been playing for 4 years and have never played anything by ear in all that time. I have to go to a relative's for lunch in a few but I'll read your post (without peeking at answers) and give it a try after I get back.

It'll be a learning experience I'm sure, thanks for giving me a good excuse to try!

AS: You're welcome! Let us know how it goes. To make it easier, you can download the video using, for example, keepvid. Then you can play it back at half speed using the speed control in QuickTime or whatever player you use.

MC: Thanks! I teach for a "living"...not music though.

jazzyprof,
Thanks for the post. I had fun with this today using your information. I need to write down the melody line as I figure it out though.

Too bad you have to put "living" in quotes!
(I bet it's not as bad as all that.....)

Alrighty, I didn't get home until about 6:30 but I got started on this a good little bit ago. I haven't even touched on the melody yet (just ignoring it and listening to the accompaniment). Finally got to where I think I'm close on it. I've marked all of the accompaniment from the video down (so I don't forget it as I go), hopefully it's close to correct. Sounds pretty close to my ears anyways.

I used a free program that I found called MuseScore to write up the sheet. Here's what I've come up with so far without melody:


I'm going to go work on the melody now. Thanks again Jazzy, this is more fun than I thought. Difficult, and slow, but interesting! Slow is fine though, I have plenty of spare time to kill. It probably also helps that I have a piano that's actually in tune now (digital rather than my old beater spinet), hehe.

EDIT:
Okay, just realized after I posted this (now actually paying attention to the melody a bit) that the melody ALSO repeats during the video, so I guess I could have saved a lot of space and just added repeat lines at the end of the sheet rather than write the entire accompaniment out twice. I will correct this mistake in the final sheet though, assuming I can figure out the melody. It's a learning process, lol.

What a cool project! And the software makes it look nice

Cathy

I sincerely agree on both counts!

I was also surprised to find free software like that. Very pleased too! I originally started out trying to quickly freehand my own staff and notes on a piece of paper... Let's just say "And I thought my normal handwriting was bad", it wasn't pretty. So I Googled to see if I could find something to use in the computer and make it look nice and neat.

AS
I played around with this a bit today and in the 5 & 6 measures JP had this- Second chord: E-F#-A-C two measures.
It sounded right to me. He then went to the E-F#-A for measures 7 & 8.
Carl

AnotherSchmoe--Did you watch any of that guy's other tornado videos? They all have nice piano music in the background. You would think he would answer all those requests for the name of the piece.

Jazzyprof--I am a very left-brained, orderly learner, so your step-by-step instructions on playing by ear was right up my alley. Maybe I'll give it a try on another piece sometime. I feel like I have no talent in that area, but maybe it's just that I haven't had the right teacher!

Nancy

AnotherSchmoe: That's fantastic! Your first attempt at transcription looks really good. There are a couple of places where I hear things a little differently. In measures 5, 6 I hear an F# at the bottom of the A and C. In measure 15 I hear a C minor chord. I would flatten that E. In measure 16 I think the root is a B and the F there should be an Eb. Try those changes and see if you agree. Good job!

Later on you can tweak the notation a little bit. It sounds from the video that all the "bass" notes are sustained. I would notate those first notes as dotted half notes and place a quarter note rest above each such note.

I feel exactly the same way! I wasn't totally honest earlier, I actually did try and learn something by ear a couple of years ago (albeit sans transcription) but it just didn't work out at all and I've never tried since, always stuck exactly to sheet music. Then again I didn't have anyone guiding me along either.

Thanks for the additional tips strings and jazzy, I just checked it again your way and believe you are absolutely correct, I'll make the necessary adjustments to the accompaniment.

Nancy, it's really not a talent but a learnt skill and I'm sure you'll pick it up in no time! One thing that helps the process of learning by ear is to actually sing (accurately) the pitches you hear.

AS: By the way, when you change those first notes to dotted half notes you want the stems to point downward so that the quarter note rests will fit above.

I'm loving this! (Great job by Jazzy and you.)
But besides that......Thanks for mentioning the program that you're using. I had tried to get a couple of programs for doing scores and couldn't get them to work -- one of them I couldn't even successfully download. Granted, I didn't try that hard but this one looks better.
Thanks!