Piano Video Lesson: Approaching Advanced Silent Night

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin here at VirtualSheetMusic.com. I want to share with you a real resource that I found on the website here at VirtualSheetMusic.com. There is all the different Christmas songs with all kinds of beautiful arrangements. You may have looked at them and some of them may have scared you with all the notes. I want to show you that, yes you can approach them and, I'm going to show you a number of ways that you can extract different parts and, over time play more and more complex arrangements but you can dive in right now.

So we have a beautiful arrangement here of Silent Night. Now let's say you get it together with someone and, they are a singer or an instrumentalist and they put some music in front of you and they say, "Oh can we play this together?" Just like this everybody wants to sing. Well maybe you have time to work out this wonderful arrangement but, maybe you just want to have fun with it right now and, I'm going to show you how you can do that.

First, I'm going to play this a little bit the way it's written so you can hear it, then I'm going to show you some tricks, how you can play music that might be too hard for you to read but, you can still enjoy it right away...

[music]

So there's a beautiful arrangement of Silent Night one of our favorite. Well here are a couple of ways you could simplify this arrangement. So even the first time you sit down, no matter what level you are, I'm going to show you basically two alternative ways you can play Silent Night and work through this.

The simplest way would be, take a look at the music and, just click the very top line and, the very bottom line..

[music]

Now as you progress you might be able to add more parts to your arrangement and play maybe, thirds on the top, maybe, even start adding some notes on the bottom. Listen to another arrangement just a little bit more complex.

[music]

And if you progress a little bit more or you're brave, play the first three notes on the left turn and, it's still not that hard to play this...

[music]

So you can actually work this up in several stages. That way you could play it right away and as you spend more time with it, you get more and more until you get to the full version. That way you don't have to wait weeks or months to learn it, you can play it instantly. Now why is it so important? Well, a lot of times music you play are arrangements and, there are many different arrangements that might be perfectly wonderful, just like when you play if you ever had the experience of playing an orchestra part reduced for the piano, you know that sometimes there are actually, there are more notes than you can physically play.

So it's important to make an arrangement, in fact if you get different editions of the same Concerto the piano parts will be dramatically different, so there is creative license here you could even add notes to your arrangements just endless possibilities. Let me skip to the middle section and, show you how you can approach that section in much the same manner. Now this section has all kinds of notes. So maybe, you don't want to play all those notes, you can just play the top notes once again...

[music]

Now that was just the top note with the octaves. You can have the thirds once again... So these are just some of the ways that you can simplify the music yet, you can also come up with your own arrangement. You can take the skeleton of this and add your own parts if you wanted to.....

[music]

I want to tell you a personal note of a situation that I had recently at a performance. I played an in-home concert and, after the concert there was a woman there who was a very fine singer and, she wanted to sing Silent Night of all songs. And she told me that she sings in multiple languages and, we would sing it, she would sing it, I play it four times along, four different languages which was very impressive to me.

But I felt that if we did it four times exactly the same, even with the different languages it could be a little bit boring. So I sat down and made up four different arrangements so that the music was enhanced. So this is what I want to encourage you to do. Experiment with your music, use the guides that you have here on Virtual Sheet Music and expand upon it and, see what you can come up with, with your music.

So have some fun this Christmas Season take out these arrangements and see what you can do with them. Thanks so much this is Robert Estrin here at VirtualSheetMusic.com, until next time...

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

Thank you for your comment, question or request!

Comment/Question deleted successfully.

Post a comment, question or special request:

Comments or questions must be between 3 and 10,000 characters long.

You may: Login  or  

Otherwise, fill out the form below to post your comment:

Add your name below:


Add your email below: (to receive replies, will not be displayed or shared)


For verification purposes, please enter the word MUSIC in the field below

---