Hello, It's Tom Donald from the London
Contemporary School of Piano. Today we're going to walk through
how to play Bach’s C Major Prelude. This piece of music has a huge
historical significance on music and musical history. But today I'm not going to talk
too much about the history. I'm going to go through the chords
of this piece with you. I'm going to show you
some really great practice tips. And I'm also going to show you
ultimately why this is a piece of music you really want to learn and study,
regardless of your level and regardless of the genre of music
you like to listen to. This piece of music is truly universal. It was written in 1722, yet you'll be
shocked by how contemporary this music is. I mean, when you hear major seventh chords
like this voiced in that way, if I ask somebody, Well,
when do you think that was written? Usually when I do this blind test
on students who haven't heard this piece before, I get told, well, 1950s,
I don't know, 1960s? No, this piece was written
before the piano was even invented. I mean, probably early prototypes of
pianos might have been out by 1722. I don't remember, but not the instrument
Bach chose to compose on. He wrote this piece on the harpsichord,
and the piano was really still not what we know of it as today. Having said that, I am playing today
on a beautiful 100 year old Bluthner grand piano, which was built in Leipzig,
the same town that Bach composed. His music in. So it's beautiful to play this music
on such an instrument of heritage as well. So let's break down this piece now. This beautiful piece of music comes
from the Bach Well-Tempered Clavier book, where he explores preludes and fugues
in all of the different keys, and that's because he was celebrating
the achievement of the equal temperament tuning system, which is really
the keyboard crowning moment, its ability
to play music in every single scale. I can't go into the historical
significance of that in just one tutorial, so let's just
talk about the wonderful chords. If you don't listen
to much classical music, if you play more pop music, jazz or blues,
you should study this piece. It's going to help your jazz playing
your blues playing, your pop playing. And if you're a classical player,
but you're looking for some foundations, even if you're a complete beginner,
this piece is very accessible. It's a true blessing. So let's just go through
a way of practicing it. Now, if you look at the music
of this piece, you'll notice every bar only has three notes
and that note forms a broken chord,
a broken triad with beautiful voicings. So for instance, the first bar G, C, E that's a
C major triad in second inversion. I'm using some pedal right now,
but you'll notice with that rhythm there's a little rest
between the repetition of the chord. I go to the next bar,
I've got a D minor chord, which is A, D and F, then a G seven chord, which is G, D, and F and I've got G, C and E returning back to a C major chord. Then I've got that lovely octave
and a fifth interval. I mean, we hear this
in a melody compositions today. It's sort of a type of voicing this open
voicing of a chord. It's octave in the fifth. Bach is here using it in 1722. Some things never change right? Then we have a D major, so you'll notice this is quite consistent throughout the whole piece. We have three notes
in each bar in the right hand, so that's a really good place
to start your study for this piece is just play the right hand part
and if you're not a strong reader of music,
you can annotate the notes. We're here
to learn this piece of music, by the way. So if you need to annotate those notes
in, I'll just give you a tip. Just write the three notes. Don't write the repetitions
because that's sort of pointless, but just learn each of those three notes
per bar. Now we can get on to a really,
really useful way to practice this piece, and that is to turn the chords or the broken chords into full triads
as block chords as a means of training our muscle memory
to remember the shapes of these chords. So I'll do this in the right
hand on a play each chord four times. And this really gives me a very good feel of Bach's
really lovely voicing that he's using in this chord progression. Okay, let's now talk about the left hand. And the left hand plays two notes from the chords
consistently throughout this piece. So in the case of the first bar,
it starts on Middle C, the left hand and plays notes C and E. But what is particularly important,
and you'll see this in the notation of the piece is you want to
voice these two chords together. So what you don't want to do is this That's not what Bach has actually written
down. He's asking us to hold those two notes
together like this. So I'm not using any pedal right now. I can call this
finger pedaling, this technique. So I'm just practicing the left hand by itself. And the left hand is expressing
these chords in groups of two notes. So effectively,
the left hand only has two notes per bar and the right hand only has three notes
per bar. It's good to just learn this baseline
thread by itself, practicing it hand separately just to get a feel
for the voicings and the shapes. Even though it will feel a bit threadbare. Just practicing the left hand. And even if you're a beginner
and not a strong reader, you can annotate these notes and quickly
start learning to play this piece. And because it is a piece of music written
by Bach, it has so much musical goodness to it, so many riches of musical ideas,
and just an incredible genius. And I'm not over using the word
genius here when I'm talking about J.S. Bach, but this genius magic
in the chord progression that just getting your hands onto this piece of music
is just absolutely worth it. So it doesn't matter what level you're at. If you're a beginner,
you can play this piece, it's accessible and you want to really enjoy the benefits
of playing this piece because it's going to teach you how to string chords
together into a musical narrative. And there is no better example of what a powerful musical narrative chords
are than this piece of music. So now put it hands together
and this is what we get now. The first thing we're going to do,
we're going to be a bit tricky for us. We're going to train our muscle memory
by playing an outline of the piece all as chords, as block chords,
and I'll use a bit of pedal. It's okay to use pedal. I'm not going to be a purist
and not use any pedal at all. This is just a good way to practice it,
to hear the narrative of chords in this piece. And of course, I do need to lift my pedal
when I change chords. That is the universal law of peddling. After all, lift your foot
when you change chords so you're not bleeding the chords
together. Okay,
so let's play it in this configuration. I'll play each chord
for each bar four times. So this
gives us a skeletal outline of the piece. And by the way,
if you'd like to just get a hand, if you'd like to just get your hands
on the chord progression of this piece written in contemporary lead sheet style,
head on over to our website, Contemporaryschoolofpiano.com,
and ask for our lead sheet resource. Our Free Resources pack
and a copy of this Prelude in C Major has been annotated
into contemporary chord progressions, which is a really good way
to see this piece, because it will really improve your sight
reading because you start to think of music in larger shapes rather than, you know,
the worst thing you want to do is be that student
that thinks of this piece as say, GC. GC And you're just chasing notes
and you're just typing out notes on the piano by rote
without understanding the deeper musical shapes and meanings behind
what bar is composing here. I hear so many songs
when I play it like that. I mean, I heard Gounod’s Ave Maria,
which he took from this chord progression. He just put a melody over the top of that and he thought, well, Bach wrote
this lovely piece without a melody, put the melody over the top,
which is really cool. So now what we're going to do now,
and actually not just Angela Webber, the beginning of Don't Cry for Me,
Argentina uses this exact chord pattern as well,
and there's probably other examples that I don't even know about. So yeah, that's handy. When Bach is well outside copyright. So now let's try
and look at different ways of playing the piece now hands together
and interpreting in the piece. And I'm not going to go
into historical interpretations and get caught up
in all of those semantics. I just want you to be able to interpret this piece
in a way that's authentic to you. I think that's the most important thing and there is just different ways
you can play it. There are no dynamics
written on the sheet music for this piece. Bach is not telling us to play loud
or soft because he wrote this piece on the harpsichord,
which does not have a dynamic range to it. So that is entirely up
to our discretion on the piano. So I'm just going to play it
in a bunch of different ways and I'll give you some tips
and suggestions that might help you. I think it's good to consider
the first two notes in the left hand. You don't want all of your notes
to sound exactly the same, but this that's just a little mechanical,
so it's good to put a bit of weight on the first
two notes without exaggerating it. Maybe on certain bars
you can bring the bass out more and on other bars
you can bring the bass out. But let me try it I'm really listening to the bass note. I can't go down. That may go down to the D now. So that's one way of thinking of it. But I can also listen to that note
that just sits in the tenor line above the bass. So that just makes me more aware
of those lower note movements, those bass movements
and how it threads the piece together. And it also stops me from thinking
of the right hand as a melody. It's not a melody unless you're amazing,
like Bobby McFerrin, and you can actually sing all the notes
like it's a melody. And if you haven't seen his video of him singing it, it's definitely worth
checking out. He actually sings that as an accomplishment for a choir
to sing Ave Maria over the top. But putting Bobby McFerrin aside, it's
not a melody. It's broken chords. So it's not all It's not that it's a broken
chord, it's a chord value. It's not a value of individual notes. So you want the right hand
to function as chords. And that's why practicing with some light
pedal is useful. It sort of helps
you think of the piece like that. So my right hand is slightly, I guess, softer than my left hand,
and it's not functioning even when I want to get louder
in some of the dramatic stormy middle parts of the piece
with the diminished chords, doesn’t this piece just sound glorious
on this 100 year old Bluthner piano? just having a ball playing it
and filling the space with this piece? And that's I always think that's what's
great about music, where we don't have dynamic marks on the score
because it makes us think for ourselves. I see too many pianist who are slaves to the dynamic
marks on the score the composer put. And by the way, those dynamic marks
are not scientific, they're artistic. So, you know,
when Chopin puts in a mezzo piano marking on a scale that means something completely
different to when Beethoven does it. So it always should be taken
with a pinch of salt. Those dynamic marks, you know, imagine
if on all of the music you were reading, just do this for a week or two. I promise you
it would transform your play. Imagine, just ignore the dynamic marks. Just put some white out on the score
and just and think about the dynamics. Think what should this be about? Should this be new? What should this be?
What is loud and soft anyway? And play to the space
you're in, play to the piano you're own. It will make
you think deeper about the music rather than you making
sort of strange guesses that soft. And when I see students
looking at a pianissimo in the music, they just often play with a really weak
technique and and get scared. Or it has to be so sort of soft. Like that's not what soft means.
That's not what a whisper is. A whisper still needs to have intention
and a shout still needs to have some sort of passion to it. Or it's about the context
of the composer as well. So it's great that this piece we've freed
from being restricted to a dynamic, you know, bunch of instructions. We actually have to think the dynamics
through ourselves. And I'm playing this piece differently
to how I would play it on another piano in another space because I'm
being influenced by the instrument I'm on. So we now get onto the topic of dynamics,
a good place to start. Like if you need a bit of structural
template, is to think of the piece as you could think of it
as a stretch of crescendos. And yes, we're not on a harpsichord,
so if any of you were saying, but it was written for harpsichord,
so we must have no dynamics at all. Come on, don't be so boring. We're not on a harpsichord. If you are on a harpsichord, fine. Great. I love harpsichord, by the way. It's beautiful instrument, but I'm not playing on the harpsichord
right now, so I'm not going to pretend that an orange
is a lemon or a lemon is a banana. A banana is an apple, right? I'm playing on a piano. And the pianoforte means loud-soft. It's an instrument with dynamics. So I feel you purists out there, sorry,
I'm going to put dynamics on it. So we're going to make the music
get louder because I'm going to think of it
as a crescendo and then when I feel I can't crescendo
any more, it's becoming inappropriate. It's reached its point. I will then drop the music immediately
down. This is the nice template for this piece. You can play around with the crescendo. It could be for longer periods of time or
shorter periods of time or on the middle. You can experiment. I'm just going to sort
of feel it out, react to it. Now, that's not to say
that I would play it that way every time. That's the great thing
about exploring the different peaks and swells
you can add to the dynamics of the music. The first time I played it,
just how I felt when I went to that C major seven chord,
I wanted it to go down a little bit. I wanted it to get softer there and that
brings me on to the topic of the chords. This is with so much richness
in this piece. What chords do we have? We have C major chord here. Go into a D minor seven
with a C in the base to G seven with a B in the base to C major A minor. Where the piece really gets interesting
is his use of major seven chords with this seventh
voicing at the bottom of the chord something he does
a few times in the piece. He also plays a major
seven year moving to a diminished series of diminished chords here with a bunch of suspended dominant sevens, the diminished chord over the dominant C major over the dominant of the G suspended,
fourth, seventh finally resolves. And then when we think it's
going to go back to C major, he makes it a C dominant seven, a C seven
which leads us to an F major with the scene,
the base G seven with a C in the base. And finally the piece inevitably ends. It's it's truly testament to how to use chords and harmony
to create narrative in the music. It's not just like a pop song
with four chords cycle around over and over
and over and over again, which gets a little bit dull
after a while. This is music with narrative. It's just this endless thread of chords
and it's developing and the story through the chords is being told. And that's why
I think Dynamics is great for this. However, some of you. Yeah, All right. You might not want to use
as many dynamics, so I'm going to show you an alternative way to interpret this piece
that still might have a contemporary twist to it, but might satisfy those of you
who want to have more of that austerity. So you're playing, I guess, what
the word might be emotional, slight, being slightly
pulled back on an emotional level. Not been so romantic with it, so to speak. So it doesn't have to be played
in a romanticized way. It can be played in a more rhythmical way,
perhaps. That still has really good energy to it,
so we don't have to play it in a romantic way. So firstly I would use my pedal and I would be a little bit
more rhythmical with my chords so that's another way you can play it. Those of you who have more modern sounding
pianos like Yamaha's and so to speak, playing
in that rhythmical way will potentially work really well,
or even on a digital keyboard. As I sit here on this 100 year
old Bluthner it feels more appropriate
to this instrument to play it in a more romantic way because
this is such a romantic instrument. But the thing with Bach's music, again,
I don't think Bach's music is for purists. Even Bach's music itself, because Bach's music
has this incredible ability to sort of dart
between different eras in musical history and be adapted
and played in different ways. And this piece is very much
an example of that, is also an example of fantastic
chord progression, voicing, writing. And I think this is a piece
everyone at some point should study. So I hope you've enjoyed today's tutorial. What you should do
if you're a fan of our work at the London Contemporary School of Piano
is head on over to our website, at the London Contemporary School of Piano
is head on over to our website, contemporaryschoolofpiano.com
to get the lead sheet we have created of this piece
from our Free Resources pack. Or if you're really serious
about taking your piano playing to the next level,
you might be interested in enrolling in one of our courses,
such as the Complete Musician Course, which is a new holistic approach
to musical education. This is one of the pieces on the syllabus,
as well as many other great pieces from all genres of music
popular, jazz, classical. We melt it all together
in our special London Contemporary School of Piano, melting pot of chords and music, and having a deeper understanding
of playing the piano. Thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you soon,bye bye!
