Great Scores Sheet Music Blog

We’ve not posted for a while - very remiss of us! However, we have been very busy over the last few months, adding two new languages to our site: Dutch and Swedish as well as adding Swedish Kroner as a currency.

So a big welcome to our new users in Sweden and Holland, even if this blog is in English :-).

Soon we will also add Danish and Norwegian (as well as the local currencies to go with these new territories), which means we will have added a total of 7 new languages in the space of 13 months.

What else has been happening? Well we have been preparing the new videos that we have promised you in previous blogs, so get ready for more regular videos, blog postings and fascinating downloads that will open up the world of Jazz to you in the new year.

And finally we’ve also been celebrating our 4th birthday in October. The site went live in October 2005 in English and German with just a 1,000 arrangements. Since then we have grown to over 30,000 arrangements and have welcomed users from another 5 new languages to our site.

So to finish, who better to play us a little Happy Birthday tune than Wynton Marsalis and his Septet:

Hi

I often get requests from students to play Gershwin pieces. Rhapsody in Blue is however, hard to play and very long, though we do have it on our site here.

So I thought I might write a little piece in the style of George Geshwin that is easier to play, and not too long. We have two arrangements of this piece, one an easier level in G major, and the original version in Ab major. You can see me playing it below, and check out the sheet music here.

Take care

Lincoln

Hi everyone

If you are living in the UK, then you would have be hard-pressed to miss the furore about Susan Boyle, the 47 year old contestant on the TV talent show Britain’s Got Talent. For anyone who did miss, here is a link to youtube.

Even for someone like myself who has no interest in TV Talent show this is worth watching, as it’s great tv/theatre and a great story. It’s also a great lesson that you cannot always judge a book by its cover. The quick run-down is that the 47 year church-going Boyle, who has a very friendly, unpretentious, but also un-flamboyant appearance, walks on stage to general sniggering of the audience.

The panel also looks distinctly un-impressed. But then she sings, with what is a truly angelic voice, and seeing the reaction of everyone in the hall is priceless. If you’d like to emulate Susan, then you can get hold of the sheet music for I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables here.

Take care

Lincoln

Here is the answer to our teaser question about musical notation.

Just a quick reminder. I had given this one bar example, where there appear to be too many notes (6 beats worth) in the right hand:

:

The reason why this works is because there are two separate voices in the right hand.

This is the first voice:

And this is the second voice:

As you can see, there is a two beat rest at the start of the bar in the example above. Normally you would show this when adding the two voices together:

However, as you can see this means that the rest would have to hang in between two staves, which does not look very neat. As the second voice does not enter until the third beat of the bar, it is therefore fine to omit the rest at the start of the bar, as it does not lead to any rhythmic unclarity.

***

The second, more complicated example I gave looked like this:

Again, there are two voices, here is voice one:

And here is the second voice:

As the piece (Debussy’s Claire de Lune) consistently uses triplets, it is quite common the omit the triplet sign, which was done here. Furthermore the notes on beats 2 and 3 have been written into the right hand stave, indicating the the left hand part may be played by the right hand. So the entire left hand part written in the left hand would look like this:

And finally, as the two voices share the same note on beat three (G Sharp), you have to take the note head of the longer value as done here, or write the notes next to each other, which the editor did not choose to do. Had he done so it would look like this:

Hope that all makes sense.