Guide/Tutorial Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Great Scores Sheet Music Blog

Tunes you didn't realise you knew – No3: New World Symphony/The Hovis Theme

Hi There

Welcome to the third instalment of Tunes you didn’t realise you knew. Today we will be looking at the music from the Hovis advertisement. For those of you who live outside of the UK, Hovis is a big British bread company. Yes, jolly foreigner, in the UK many people love sliced and packed bread made on an industrial scale (mind you, it ain’t my cup of tea!)

Anyway, I digress, back to the music. The music used in the ad is actually the 2nd movement (Largo) of Symphony No. 9 in E Minor “From the New World”, Op. 95, B. 178 by the Czech composer Antonín Dvo?ák. It is usually referred to as The New World Symphony.

We have the sheet music for it here.

Dvorak (Dvo?ák) was staying in the United States from 1892 to 1895, and the US was then (more than now) referred to as The New World (i.e. the world that Columbus discovered, hence “New” World). It is said that in the 2nd movement Dvorak was trying to portray the feeling of home-sickness, something which the music did so successfully that the main theme was later set to lyrics and turned into the song Going Home.

So, what important tid-bits should we know about Dvorak (pronounced D-vor-jak or D-vor-zhahk)?

Q: Was he a one-hit classical wonder?
A: No, but The New World Symphony is by far his best known.

Q: Ok, so what other stuff did he write that I may know (or should know)?
A: The Slavonic Dances and the Humoresque.

Q: What was he doing in the US for those 3 years?
A: Dvorak was the director of the National Conservatory of Music and was paid $15,000 a year – which in those days was an absolute fortune.

Q: Wow, so a classical composer who wasn’t broke?
A: Yep, there are a few, but not too many.

Q: Ok, let’s see the ad then.
A: Here it is, arranged for brass band (the setting of the ad is in Northern England, where brass bands were very popular due to large number of coal mining brass bands).

And here is the actual piece played by an orchestra:

Cheers

Lincoln Jaeger

Tunes you didn't realise you knew – No1: Clair De Lune/Ocean's 11

Hi There

We thought we’d run a little series on famous themes of classical music, that you probably didn’t realise you knew. That is because these themes are often for us, the consumer, associated with a tv ad or a movie (or sometimes several) in which they are used, rather than the original context of classical piece itself.

The result of course, is that we don’t know the actual name of the piece, we are left with “ah, that theme from that ad, argh, what’s it called…”

So today we’d like to introduce you to Clair De Lune by French composer Claude Debussy (click on his name to read a longer bio). Or, as you may know it, the theme used in the (almost) final scene of the movie Ocean’s 11.

So, what important tid-bits should we know about Debussy?

Q: Was he a one-hit classical wonder?
A: No.

Q: Ok, so what other stuff did he write that I may know (or should know)?
A: Arabesque 1, Golliwogg’s Cake Walk, La Cathédrale Engloutie, La Fille Aux Cheveux De Lin, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.

Q: Ah, that’s a whole load of French to me!
A: Yep, translated they would be Arabesque 1, Golliwogg’s Cake Walk, The Sunken Cathedral, The Girl With The Flaxen Hair, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (a faun is a spirit-like creature that lives in the forest).

Q: Ok, dude, I get it, he wrote quite a bit.
A: Yes, he was one of the eminent (important) composers of Impressionist Music.

Q: Yeah, yeah, very impressive.
A: Impressionist were concerned with giving you an impression of something, rather than describing it “exactly”. So in the piece La Cathédrale Engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral) he is giving us the impression of a cathedral (that is said to have sunk into the sea) re-emerging only to disappear again. (This refers to the legend of the sunken city of Ys, in Brittany).

Q: Ok, let’s get back to our piece.
A: Sure, it is actually originally written for piano (Ocean’s 11 uses the orchestral version), and is part of the so called Suite Bergamasque. He started writing it in 1890 at age 28, but did not finish it until 1905, (aged 43). Leopold Stokowski created the orchestration .

Q: Cool, enough knowledge, can we have a bit of Ocean’s 11 now?
A: Ok, one more thing: Clair De Lune is actually French for “Moonlight”.

What is a standard, a chorus, a head arrangement?

Let’s take a look at three terms that are often used when people talk about jazz improvisation: a “standard”, a “chorus” and the “head” or “head arrangement”.

What do jazz musicians improvise on/over?

They usually use a song, and improvise over its chord structure. Very often these are so called “standards”. These standards are actually tunes from Broadway shows such as George Gershwin’s “Summertime” or “I got rhythm“. Often people don’t realise that these tunes actually originated in shows; jazz musicians just took them, played them, soloed on them, rearranged them, in short: they did their own thing with them. Over time these tunes had become so common in the world of jazz that musicians started referring to them as “standards”. You can now buy whole books full of jazz standards. These standards are usually 32 bars long. Most pop songs are 32 bars as well – this is due to the fact that most self-contained sections of a song are 8 bars long. So the first section, or A section, of a song would be 8 bars. You would then repeat those 8 bars (because they were so great the listener wants to hear them again), then play a new section (B Section), and then repeat the original A section. Hence you often hear people referring to an AABA structure, or a (8+8+8+8=) 32 bar song form.

You could also improvise over the standard 12 bar blues or an original jazz piece, such as “Cantaloupe Island” by Herbie Hancock. Cantaloupe Island happens to be 16 bars long, which is slightly unusual.

Now if you have finished one complete run through/improvisation from the first bar to the last bar of tune, you call that one “chorus”. If you’ve played through twice that would be two “choruses”, etc. There are no hard and fast rules over how many choruses one should play for a solo, but it depends on the player. John Coltrane for example didn’t know when to stop, and rumour has it that he once started playing in the taxi on the way to a gig, so I guess the audience (and the rest of the band) missed the first part.

The speed of the piece is also important. If you are playing a really slow ballad, you probably don’t want to play too may choruses, but naturally on faster pieces you end up playing more choruses. Musicians also usually play longer solos on a gig than they do on records. Drummers, when they do solo, sometimes have shorter solos, though there is also a tradition of giving the drummer just one solo for the night, and letting him have a really long one. There are many viscous rumours that most punters use this opportunity to pop to the loo (wc). Tut tut.

Once every member of the band (who wanted to improvise) has finished his or her solo, you would normally return back to playing the actual theme of the song. You call this the “head” or “head arrangement”. But on some occasions players may slot in “trading fours” (or indeed trading twos or eighths).

You may sometimes see a musician pointing to his head on a band-stand – this is the signal for everyone to return to the head of the piece.

Within a jazz performance the lead player would usually play the head first, which would be followed by the solos (of each band member who wanted to improvise) and the head to finish. So the most common form for a jazz quartet consisting of sax, piano, bass an drums playing a standard would be:

Head
1st Solo (Sax, probably 3-6 Choruses)
2nd solo (Piano, probably 3-6 Choruses)
Option 3rd/4th Solo (If drums/bass probably often one chorus, but could be longer)
Optional trading Twos/Fours/Eighths
Head

Take care,

Lincoln

Vivian Smith Smythe Smith Boogie (Great Scores Boogie Collection)

Welcome

… to the 5th and final piece taken from our Great Scores Boogie Collection. Today it is the turn of Vivian Smith Smythe Smith Boogie. Once again we have taken the, erm, “inspiration” for the title for this boogie from a character featured in the brilliant “Upper Class Twit Of The Year” sketch by Monty Python.

The video includes a little tutorial on how to play the left hand boogie pattern, one that is used in many boogies, so if you can learn to master it, it will allow you to play many other pieces in this style.
The sheet music for the piece is available here on our site.

Take care

Lincoln

Nigel "Incubator" Jones Boogie (Great Scores Boogie Collection)

Welcome

… to another piece in our Great Scores Boogie Collection. Today we are featuring the Nigel “Incubator” Jones Boogie. To all you Monty Python fans out there this character may be familiar to you as a contestant in the brilliant “Upper Class Twit Of The Year” sketch.

In our video we feature how to play the rather tricky left hand pattern as well as a famous boogie lick that’s in the right hand, so check out the video below. As always the sheet music for the piece is available here on our site.

Take care

Lincoln

Steam Train Boogie (Great Scores Boogie Collection)

Hello Everyone

Today we’d like to present you the third composition in our new Great Scores Boogie Collection: Steam Train Boogie. As the title suggests, I wrote this in the style of a steam train, with the slow chugging start, the build up of mementum and eventual break-neck speed that locomotives reach in mind, with the whole piece slowing down to an exhausted finale.

We will be featuring all 5 pieces in the Great Scores Boogie Collection with videos over the coming weeks.

I hope you enjoy the piece. As always the sheet music for Steam Train Boogie is available here on our website.

Take care,

Lincoln Jaeger

Linus Jude The Dude Boogie (Great Scores Boogie Collection)

Greetings

Today we are featuring the second piece in our brand new Great Scores Boogie Collection: Linus Jude The Dude Boogie. The piece is for my little baby son, who turned one year old on the 20th of May, so happy 1st birthday little Linus Jude!

Our Great Scores Boogie collection consists of five pieces, the previous piece we featured here being Grahame’s Grindhouse Boogie. We will post videos of the remaining three over the next few weeks. As always, the sheet music is available here directly from our website.

I hope you dig this piece, I certainly enjoyed writing and playing it!

All the best,

Lincoln

The Great Scores Guide To Intervals

The first of our theory guides has arrived: The Great Scores Guide To Intervals.

We have made a video, that functions as an introduction to intervals and covers the very basics you need to know. Intervals can be a bit daunting to learn, so we thought we’d make it easier by introducing these to you with a video:

The guide itself consist of three separate parts (which you can purchase together at a reduced price or separately).

Part 1: The full 21 page guide to intervals, explaining anything you’ll need to know about intervals, including:

how to recognise them,
the difference between major, minor, diminished and augmented intervals,
tricks and tipps on how to work out intervals
an extensive list of the opening of famous tunes with which to associate intervals so that you can recognise them easier
intervals larger than an octave and unusual intervals such as double diminished intervals explained
enharmonic intervals explained
inverted intervals explained
the tritone (the devil’s interval/diabolus in musica) explained and demystified

Part Two: 18 pages of worksheets with answers. Especially useful if you are doing music exams or ABRSM theory exams and you need to practice a bit more :-).

Part Three: our 15 page Interval-Finder: a compendium of all basic intervals (major, minor, augmented and diminished) in all 12 keys, in case you ever get stuck or need a quick reference.

We hope you enjoy our guide.

Lincoln Jaeger

What does "Trading Fours" mean?

Trading fours is not something you should walk up to a person on the street and enquire about.

“Hey. Do you want to trade fours?”

Or they might well reply:

“You’re asking for a bunch of fives!”

But on the jazz bandstand this is a very common technique used to introduce a little variety into a piece.

Once members of the band have finished their improvisation, you would normally return back to playing the actual theme of the song. You call this the “head” or “head arrangement”. But on some occasions players may slot in “trading fours” (or indeed trading twos or eighths) before playing the head to finish the performance.

Now trading fours involves the following: the lead player (saxophonist for example) improvises four bars, then a different player (pianist for example) improvises four bars. The lead player does another four bars and the 2nd player another four, etc.. All of this is done over the form of the piece, so you could do several choruses of fours. The shape of this is in the form of a musical conversation, so the two players usually react musically to the phrases in the four bars the other player has just played. Quite often the lead player in the group will “‘trade” fours with the drummer, as this means the texture of the whole piece changes. This would mean that while the lead player is playing his four bars, the whole band would still be accompanying him, but the drummer would usually play his four bars solo (though the pianist and bassist may but in little stabs here and there).

Now you could also trade 8 bars or 2 bars with someone, but 4 bars are most common, as is usually “feels” like the right length. This would obviously again depend on the speed of the piece, so you may want to trade “8’s” on a really fast piece, but “2’s” on a slow ballad.

How would you know when the lead player wants to start trading fours? Well there may be a prior agreement that you want to trade fours on a specific piece. Sometimes however, it is better to be spontaneous. If the lead player, after, say the piano improvisations, will start soloing again rather than returning to the main tune, then this would usually indicate to the rest of the band that it’s time to trade fours. The lead player might then, through a little nod indicate which player he wishes to trade fours with.

Of course there are many silly variations of this one could some up with. Trading fours around the band for example, or trading odd numbers – though this is tricky and has great potential for a train wreck (the performance falls apart) as well as sounding a little contrived and not fitting onto the lengths of a “standard” (32 bars). The scenarios I outlined above however are the most common.

Lincoln Jaeger

Christmas Number One Singles (UK) – The Seventies

Welcome to the Seventies, where we witness the next instalment of our UK Christmas Number One Singles review. Could you think of a more diverse group of artists (in the most broad sense of the word) than Pink Flloyd, Benny Hill, Little Jimmy Osmond, Queen and Boney M? Well, they all shared number one hits in the Seventies.

1970 Dave Edmunds “I Hear You Knocking”