Anticipation is crucial, for it allows one to play fluently, and seeing beyond the bar lines helps to avoid placing unnecessary emphasis on the first beat of every bar. I tell my adult students that reading music is like driving: one must look at the road ahead to anticipate hazards, speed markings, and stop signs. And so, from reading line by line, one goes on to take in the whole page in a single glance. With practice, one learns to read the music horizontally, and good keyboard geography will enable a student to stop checking their hand/finger position every bar. This is one of the great conflicts of playing the piano: the mechanical action of the instrument requires an up-down movement to produce a sound, but to produce beautiful sound – which is what we all strive for, whether the quietest pianissimo or the most forceful fortissimo – one must free arms, hands and fingers to play with looser, more parallel movements, and learn how to distribute weight through the fingers or to allow the arms and back to draw weight away from the fingers. Alongside this, I ask students to think about the movement of their hands, and to play with more relaxed, elliptical movements (“polishing” was one of the words I used with Bella to help her achieve a lovely fluidity in her Bach Prelude). Meanwhile, I try to encourage students to see music in terms of phrases, or “sentences”, as long strings of melody, and urge them to “read ahead” so that they are continually anticipating what is to come. Many novice students play music bar by bar, literally “vertical” playing, since seeing the notes contained within each bar as a single entity that must not be allowed to stray along the stave seems to force the hand and fingers to adopt a piston-like up and down action, which can result in very chunky, “notey” and overly accented playing. Quite soon after, students meet phrase marks, and are then presented with a conflict: bar lines forces the eye read music vertically, while phrase marks ask the eye to read horizontally. This immediately sets them up as notional hurdles to keep the unruly sheep of notes tethered in the right place. When I introduce the way music is constructed and written to novice students, I explain that bar lines are there to “keep the music tidy”, and that each ‘measure’ of music is separated by a bar line. Worksheet 13 comes in PDF and PowerPoint files, with attached audio so you can hear the melody.Ī great resource if you have a variety of knowledge within your class.Īnswer sheets are separate files making them suitable to upload/email for use with Distance Learning.The holiday is over, and my students return next week for the start of the spring term – which means I must get organised! As I start to plan the upcoming term, with the usual emphasis on finessing pieces for exams later in the spring, and encouraging students to think “musically”, a quote from the pianist Artur Schnabel comes to mind, that bar lines – like children – should be seen and not heard. Worksheets 11 and 12 ask students to add bar lines to some well known music. Worksheet 10 asks students to add bar lines and notes to complete music. Worksheet 8 and 9 ask students to identify incorrectly placed bar lines and to add bar lines to music. Worksheet 7 asks students to add bar lines to some Christmas carols. Worksheets 4, 5 and 6 ask students to complete music so each bar/measure has the correct number of beats. Worksheet 1 uses very simple music note values and graduates to more complex rhythms by Worksheet 3. They do not use Time Signatures, so are perfect for students with limited music knowledge. These worksheets are designed for students to add bar lines to music. Bar Lines explained along with 10 worksheets and answer sheets in English and American terminology.
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