I ended up not being able to spend as much time on this yesterday as I’d hoped, but I had a hard time with it…. I also didn’t read it while listening to the original but I’ll try to include time for that tonight, so that may help.
It’s hard for me to read, but I can’t decide why — I mention this because if I could articulate what’s hard about it, you all could probably offer me advice.
I sort of fumbled through the first few pages, but tonight I’ll try to zoom in on just the first page, and see if I can get the notes on the page to sound like what I hear in my head.
I think I’m having a hard time reading it because I’m trying to find the different lines but they’re running together….
How many voices do you think there are? I’m thinking there are three? The melody line, the bottom accompaniment and then the line in the middle, which I think of as the inner voice.
If that’s right, I’m wondering if it might help to practice just the melody and the bottom accompaniment line, and then the melody and the inner line, and then maybe I can “hear” it in my head better.
Also, I am having a hard time finding the count, obviously I can count the beats on counts 1, 2, 3, 4 (that reminds me, @Rubens did you know that you didn’t put a time signature on the score? 😃
And those beats are (mostly) easy to find for the melody line.
But where there are rests in the inner voice, I have to really stare at the notes, state at the score, to see what kind of a rest something is (i.e., 8th rest, 16th rest) and then I find I’m looking really hard to match up where notes in the LH and the RH line up, and where they don’t. If that makes sense.
I think maybe it might be easier for me to sightread if there was one fewer measure per line and that inner voice line was spread out more. (I don’t mean to complain, especially since you made this score out of the kindness of your heart! But maybe if you see where I’m struggling, you could offer some advice?)
Anyway, I assume that once I spend a little more time with it, that issue will dissolve.
I think I had a similar problem with September Song, because it has these inner voices and it took me sort of while to decide how to distribute some of those inner notes across the RH and LH. I think the music that is easiest to sightread is music where there’s almost zero on-the-fly decision-making needed about those kinds of questions.
So hopefully, since I eventually found my way into the score for Sept Song, that means I will find my way into the score for this piece.
@Rubens if, after reading this probably incoherent message, you have any playing advice (or reading advice) please share!
Also, @rogerch I’m curious what you might have to say, since you’re playing this without knowing the original. What tempo do you think you’re playing at?
That might be part of my problem, I can’t hear it slow in my head, but I need to play it slow for now.
