Five Minutes On Clair De Lune
This video is five minutes of instruction on how to listen to one of the most famous and best known compositions for piano.
I’ll be 74 next month. I began playing piano at the age of 5. That’s 69 years worth of listening, studying, and performing. You’d think I would feel that there’s nothing I could learn from someone who purports to teach me how to listen to a piece I’ve been playing for decades….
What could this guy possibly teach me that I don’t already know?
What could I possibly learn by listening to this?:
Enough said…
07/11/2020 @ 10:36 pm
To answer your question, I’m not sure. I’ve never played this, though my mother played it a lot when I was a kid. There are things I didn’t know about the piece but if I’d read it and learned it I’d have figured them out if I was paying attention. I didn’t know it didn’t start on one but the sheet music would make that obvious. The second chord in the piece is a four chord that a minor 6 and the next time it comes around it’s a major 6. On one take of the opening major chord he ads a seventh, turning it into a dominant seventh chord. If you play this, this is all written. As a listener I get why I wouldn’t know this (and I didn’t, but I’d never tried to figure it out by listening) but as a player I’m not sure what he told you that you wouldn’t be able to figure out pretty easily.
07/11/2020 @ 11:52 pm
The instructor invites us to listen to his left hand in a particular place…
What I did was listen to the left hand of Debussy as he plays it in the video I have linked here…
What I discovered by listening closely to the left hand all the way through was that Debussy’s recording of Clair De Lune contains the Doo Wop chord progression of the ’50s toward the end of the piece as single note accents to the melodic chords he played with his right hand.
Variations of the progression are the bedrock or anchors of a wide variety of blues and jazz progressions in many popular pieces.
Some Jazz pieces owe their popularity to the fact that the cadence is easy to listen to and easily recognizable as very pleasant to the ear…
Actually the progression was born of the Blues progressions that preceded Doo Wop by several decades…
“…but I’d never tried to figure it out by listening…”
I learned the piece while taking lessons as a kid…
Some years later, the sheet music long forgotten, I “figured out” how to play it as an improvisational jazz piece by ‘sampling’ some of the chord structures and modulations…
As I recall, you play guitar in addition to piano. You might enjoy this:
07/16/2020 @ 8:32 pm
I could use times as to where the progression is you’re talking about. That’s a really good performance of the piece but there’s no pianist credited, which is really strange.