Week 2: Pianists and piano scores
Introduction
Last week, you learned a little bit about the history of Western music notation and you looked at melodies written on a single staff, listening and comparing different elements of the music.
You are now going to start combining staves and working towards understanding a typical piano score. You are also going to explore how to follow more than two lines of music at once, whether those lines are both to be played on the piano or by combinations of instruments.
In the following video, pianist Alexander Panfilov performs the first six variations of Mozart’s Twelve Variations on ‘Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman’. If you have spotify, you can hear a complete performance of the piece on the course Spotify playlist [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] and download a copy of the score as a PDF.
Alexander is a graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music where this video was filmed. He won the Arcangelo Speranzo Piano competition in 2013, the Hastings International Piano competition in 2015 and took part in the 2015 Leeds International piano competition and reached the semi-finals.