Grace Notes
Piano music has always captivated me. When I was a teenager, I would hook up my dad’s Roland JV-1080 MIDI module to my Mac and listen to all sorts of MIDI renditions of classical piano music. Before mp3s littered the Internet and before YouTube, all I really had access to was MIDI files. Downloading everything I could via trusty dial-up modem connectivity, my musical vocabulary expanded significantly. I learned that some of my favorite piano composers were Chopin, Brahms, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Mozart.
My teenage years were also the height of my guitar discipline. I didn’t have access to real music notation software and for a long time, I didn’t know that you could import MIDI files into notation software, so I learned everything I could on the guitar by ear. I also began to compose all of my music as basic piano parts, which is something I still do all these years later.
Long past my teenage years, the world has changed and so has the Internet. There are now too many avenues by which I have access to new music and incredible performances. Occasionally, I will peruse YouTube searching for some of my favorite piano pieces. Tonight, I came across this wonderful performance of Chopin’s waltz from Opus 18:
And, of course, I had to go and find the PDF sheet music, which led to a night of brushing up on my music notation reading, which led to learning new things on the guitar. This waltz has always been one of my favorites and I can even play little bits and pieces of it on the piano. The melody is so sweet and Chopin is so playful in this composition. One of my favorite parts is with the series of cascading grace notes that sound like falling drops of water. It sounds incredibly difficult to perform on the piano, which means that it should present its own unique challenges to the guitar, right? Now you see where I’m going with this…
This post is going to focus specifically on page 5 of the aforementioned sheet music. The melody in this part is rather unusual and is even stranger with the grace notes. Let’s tab it out without the grace notes…
It appears that the tablature stuff broke when I upgraded WordPress… Give me a little time and I’ll get this fixed.
A simple chromatic melody, playful in its waltz time. Easy to play, no? Well, let’s make it a bit harder. But, first…
You need to know about grace notes. What makes this next passage technically difficult is that each of the notes above is preceded by a grace note. You might be asking yourself: “What is a grace note?” It’s a note that is played so quickly it has no discernible length and is usually illustrated in notation as a very small note just to the left of another note. It’s like a blip of a leading tone. Because the software I’m using to render the music notation is incapable of rendering grace notes, I am instead splitting each quarter note into two eighth notes, the first of each pair being the grace note.
And here’s a video of me explaining how to play the whole thing:
The musical effect of this passage is that each note is playfully skipping along a path as opposed to trotting its way confidently. I’ve not attempted to play the passage on the piano myself, but I can imagine that it’s quite difficult. It’s not easy on the guitar either. See the following video for a brief demonstration of how to approach the passage.
There are plenty of other grace notes and little melodic flourishes throughout the entire song, but none so complicated as the passage above. If you end up being able to play it well on the guitar, please share some audio or video with me so that I, too, may learn.
What I’ve most appreciated about this passage–and the rest of the song–is that I’m getting back to my former disciplined, practiced self. Generally I try to learn the gist of a song and play it well enough to get by. This song is not so gracious in affording lackadaisical effort. Thank you, Mr. Chopin, for restoring my need to practice technique in a musical way!
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