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Spot on, Valencia.

Aesthetic benefits
When music appeals to us it's interesting to find out why. When good music doesn't appeal an educated study can change your appreciation. Analysis helps understand why a piece works, why it might not appeal, and why or how the composer wrote it. It can change what we like and don't like.

Intellectual benefits
Theory and analysis go hand in hand. Music theory is not a set of rules we apply arbitrarily. It is a distillation of what has worked over the years and what hasn't. It is, in effect, good practise, codified. When you learn theory from studying a piece of music you learn not just the 'rule' in a glass case that we forget next week, but why it's there and how it works and that makes it not just easy to remember but understood and applied as part of our musical make-up.

Practical benefits
Analysis looks at music the way an artist looks at the figure. We examine the form and the structure, break it down into a skeleton, musculature and flesh, study the proportions, and in the realisation bring out the spirit, the personality, the expression and the emotion.

When learning a new piece of music it makes it easier understand as a piece, easier to interpret and make it our own. We get to know it intimately, like a close friend, and it helps us to see inside the mind of the composer.

It can speed up and simplify the learning process. It can suggest easier ways to go about learning a piece and makes it easier to memorise and become part of us. And memorised pieces are the best way to develop and maintain technical facility. With memorised pieces our technique can be maintained without practising at the piano and restored in very short order even after many years away from the piano.

This sounds very interesting and I will most certainly follow this thread.
I don't know if it's the right place to post this, but I have found a nice resource on youtube teaching the basis of counterpoint and harmony and I guess this is relevant to this thread since it might help people to get started on understanding what happens in a piece: http://www.youtube.com/user/artofcounterpoint

Great post! I'll simply add that with understanding comes appreciation - as touched on - which is why music theorists and more experienced musicians will appreciate and tend to enjoy Bach while those less knowledgeable will often find him hard to listen to or perhaps "overrated."

Welcome, JohnSprung, zrtf90 (Richard), Bobpickle. Et bienvenu Jean-Luc.

sinophilia, congratualtions on your progress in Alfred 2.

JohnSprung, thank you for the non-classical suggestions.

I have MuseScore, and also the free version of Finale. Haven't quite decided which I like better, and am considering buying notation software, perhaps even as extravagant as full Finale. I might be able to get an educational discount, since I work at a college.

Jean-Luc, thank you for the counterpoint link. I hope people will watch it and share what they think or what they learn from it. (Or what is challenging about it, and why.)

I'll post up the first piece later today. For starters: I'm thinking we'll start with some arrangements of Happy Birthday, just to cover a few introductory points about analysis, and then move to Burgmüller Opus 100 for at least a few pieces, and look at the popular pieces suggested by JohnSprung.

Cool. Very good idea

Forstergirl

Sounds good to me!

Welcome, Forstergirl.

Here is the first arrangement of Happy Birthday: Happy Birthday 1

It is not a very good arrangement, but serviceable for the initial questions I want us to look at. Please feel free to ask if you're not sure about any of these, or if you're not even sure what the words mean! We're all starting at different levels, and we can all learn from each other.

For those just starting out, the leger lines (short horizontal lines supporting notes above or below the staff) may be new, or you may not have learned all the notes on the staff yet. Or other things may be new that I'm not even realizing! Ask about these, or other aspects of the score, and we can go over them.

Questions:

1. Overview: Are there any things in this score that you don't know what they are? Ask here!

2. Time signature: What is the time signature? What does that mean?

3. Key: What key is this in? How do you know?

4. Melody: What phrases (smaller groups) does the melody divide into? Where would you put slight pauses in playing it? Where is the climax? Would you play any parts of it louder or softer?

5. Harmony: What are the names of the chords in each measure? For this initial piece, just consider the notes in the bass clef. (Later on we'll ask about the notes in the treble clef too.) What is the first chord? What is the last chord?

6. Playing: Can you play or pick out parts or all of this, even if very slowly? If it seems daunting: try just the melody alone, with just one finger if you want. Try just the lowest notes in the bass clef. Try finding all the notes of each chord.

These are the kinds of questions we'll be asking for every piece. As we proceed, we will find more details to investigate in each area, and maybe add some areas.

I will tend to take the approach of asking questions first, and then using people's answers and questions to decide what to fill in and say more about.

I'd like us to have a recording of this. I can probably post a recording this evening, but if someone else wants to and can post one, please do.

Lets also talk about stems up vs down please.

I'd like to start by pointing out some issues:
- There is no tempo indication. Of course, everyone knows how this song should sound.
- The time signature is 3/4, or three quarter notes per measure. The first measure has only one beat. What is this called in English? Anyway, this means the last measure should have only two beats, so the two rests at the end are unnecessary.
- Chord progression is awkward when arranged for a beginner. It requires a lot of left hand movement. The high C major chord in measure 5 touches the same key (g) the right hand just played, which is physically possible but just feels awkward.
- Not an issue per se, but the score could use some fingering marks. This should be an early point to touch on when analysing a score you plan to play. In this case, you should probably start with 1 on g, so that the first right hand movement will be at the octave stretch in measure 5 (with 5 on the high g). I would then play the e with 4, c with 3, b with 2 and a with 1.

Good points all, Allard!


Yes, I was so completely mesmerized by "of course everyone knows how this goes" that a tempo indication never occurred to me.

Of course maybe everyone does not know this. Do they sing this "Happy Birthday" song in the Netherlands? Are there Dutch words for it?

OK, analysts: what tempo indication would you suggest?


Pickup notes, and pickup measure.


Yes, I would much rather have left those rests out, but I couldn't figure out how to do that in MuseScore. Anyone know how to do that?

This is one of the reasons I'm considering buying Finale.


Yes, that's one of the crap things about this as an arrangement. For ease of analysis, I wanted almost all the chords to be in root position, so that trumped ease of playing.


Ack! (Now I have to confess: I actually haven't played this, and arranged it entirely by eye and by theory.)


I had a fleeting thought about fingering somewhere along the way, and then I dismissed it for I don't know what reason. I'll put up a new version showing the fingering I use.

You're right, working out the fingering is one of the first things I do when learning a piece. Then I start doing the actual learning work in small sections, using the worked-out fingering.

Thank you for your comments! As an inexperienced arranger and notator, I find this very helpful.

You're welcome

In the Netherlands we just sing "happy birthday" in English, though I remember a Dutch version from elementary school that basically just repeated the Dutch word for congratulations.

Good idea. For anyone reading, think for a moment: what do you know about stems up and stems down? Have you noticed stems pointing in different directions in your music?

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OK, now that you've thought about this a bit, here's the basic rule:

• Notes on the third line or below are written with stems down.
• Notes above the third line are written with stems up.

Here's the first refinement of the basic rule:

• If there is a chord with some notes on or below the third line, and some notes above, then the stem goes in a visually pleasing direction. Look at the chord in measure 8 of Happy Birthday 1 as an example. (I suspect engravers have some precise guidelines for this -- MuseScore must have rules programmed into it -- but I don't know what they are.)

There are other refinements for more complicated music with runs of connected notes, or multiple voices, or indications for hands playing in the opposite clef, and so on. If anyone wants to fill those in here, please do. If you can link to a score showing an example, that would be great. Or we can wait until we meet examples in the music we're analyzing. Even if we talk about them now, I'll try to remember to point it out again when we meet them in future pieces.

Stems are up when the notes are on the middle line of the staff or lower and down for notes on the middle line of the staff or higher.

The stems can also be used to distinguish voices if more than one voice is played on the one staff, stems up for upper voices, stem down for lower voices.

Tempo indications are not a requirement. The absence of tempo markings is not an issue. Even if the composer states the exact bpm or duration, in hh:mm:ss, of a piece it is only an indication. Always, always, the performer has precedence on tempo.

The notes before the first measure are the anacrusis, pickup, pick-up, upbeat or up-beat. The influence of the anacrusis on the length of the last measure is contentious. Traditionalists would prefer the length of the anacrusis to be removed from the last measure but modernists prefer the last measure to be a full one. You should be aware of both conventions but the older is dying in the face of modern scoring software.

I have no comment on the chords and inversions used.

I would prefer no fingering marks in any music not intended to teach fingering to the student. One of the first things I do when I start a new piece is remove any fingering marks that were clearly not geared for my hands and are going to interfere with my own choices.

If they're supplied by the composer and not the editor I will, of course, give them due respect. And then obliterate them.

Re: stems when some notes are above and others below the line in a chord:

There are definite rules. Generally you go by which note is the farthest away from the middle line, and this determines stem direction. The chord in measure 8 illustrates this. The lowest note in the bass chord is C, in the space just below the middle line. The highest note is middle C, which is far above the middle line. Therefore the stem is pointing down.

For notes sitting directly on the middle line, the stem can point up or down, and it's a toss-up, but the default I learned is that in general the default is "down". You consider the line as a whole. If everything else is pointing up, then the solution suggests itself. A lot of the rules in music are common sense.

I am always learning about fingering! I appreciate fingering in a score, and I always try it first. Even if it feels awkward I try to feel if it's better than the alternatives I come up with. That's because the fingering in the scores I get often has elegant solutions that I like better than what I come up with. On the other hand, I feel perfectly free to change the fingering if, after trying it, it really doesn't work for me, or if my choice seems about as good as what the score shows, but I like my choice better for whatever reason.

Here is Happy Birthday with fairly exhaustive right-hand fingering. When a fingering isn't shown, play the note with the same finger you used the last time. In measure 5, I have shown Allard's fingering as an alternate in parentheses. Actually I often play yet another fingering in measures 5 and 6: G E C B A as 5 3 2 1 2. I'll give Allard's fingering a try later when I can get to the piano. Try these out and see what you think, or if you like yet another way.

I would finger the chords as 531, except for the first chord in measure 7 which I would play as 521, and the final chord in measure 8 which I would play as either 5421 or 5321 (not sure which, until I can get to the piano and try them under my fingers. I think I have a standard way I do this, but I can't remember which it is).

The chord inversion topic might be interesting here. We could talk about 1st and 2nd inversions and how to identify them from the position of the root note.

Then... I always wonder what is the reason behind using chords with more than 3 notes. I often see 4- or 5-notes chords and octaves in the final measure as you did here, I guess it sounds better and you can stress the fact that you're moving back to the "home pitch" (tonic)?

About Stems:

You are going to see two conventions going on, which might be confusing if you only know the set of rules that was just talked about. When you have one voice in the RH and one voice or chords in the LH, then the rules are what PianoStudent88 has set out: notes above the middle line will have stems going down, and vice versa.

However, sometimes music will have two or more voices in the RH or LH. Think of an alto and soprano singer both sharing the treble clef. There isn't always a singer - sometimes a composer simply wants to bring out different "voices". In that case, the "singer" (voice) that is higher will have stems pointing up, and the "singer" (voice) that is lower will have stems pointing down, regardless of where the note heads are.

To illustrate this stem convention, I've taken the liberty of adding an alto singer to P88's arrangement. Here the "soprano" line has up-stems, and the "alto" line has down-stems. If you see this kind of stemming in music, that's what's going on. The chords are the same, but I've done some inversions which makes it easier to fit in the lower notes. I have primitive software which won't let me do things either, so I'm afraid it's written by hand.

Here's a recording!

[video:youtube]3ctrEKgbjLI[/video]

Allard, thanks for the recording.

keystring, thanks for the two-voice example.

sinophilia, we'll definitely talk about inversions later but I don't want to say much about them yet until we meet more of them in the scores we're looking at, and people feel comfortable with root position chords. Thanks for bringing them up as a good topic. What do others think? Inversions now, or can they wait?

My view is coloured by my own background. I did rudiments before ever doing analysis. To me, understanding chords, intervals etc. feels a bit like understanding the alphabet and phonics being part of reading a novel and discussing its meaning or structure. You have already used inverted chords. It seems essential to be able to recognize chords in order to identify them in music. I could possibly put something together similar to what we had in RCM rudiments.