Clean or Annotated Music Scores? - 3 Essential Tips to Learn a New Piece More Efficiently
Many students tend to make the mistake of jumping into a new piece of music right away with a clean score - and most of the time, it remains clean forever. Perhaps some of you/your children may have their teachers write some simple reminders like letter note names, key signatures, circling certain important information on the score - but are they really all that helpful?
Do not get me wrong, I have no qualms about the above-mentioned annotations being helpful in the process of learning a new piece (and even I make those markings in my students’ music scores too). But there are even more helpful annotations - annotations that allow students, even young beginners, to write in their scores on their own - that cultivate good music-reading habits and set them up for greater success.
1) Beats
Writing the beats in a music score serves as a visual aid for beginner students to learn how to count and play in time. This is especially helpful once a student is introduced to time signatures. Of course, it is best to wean off writing basic beats once a student gets more familiar with counting.
What does writing beats help with?
Maintaining a steady pulse
Knowing exactly when each note is played
Knowing exactly how long and across which beats each note is held across - i.e. a minim that is played on the 2nd beat of the measure will be held across beats 2 and 3, and released on beat 4.
Subdividing each main beat into smaller beats
Complex rhythms - i.e. polyrhythms, changing meter, dotted rhythms
*For complex rhythms, it may be helpful for students of any skill level to write the beats in their score.
2) Fingerings
Without a doubt, fingerings help anyone play the piano more efficiently with greater clarity and improve a student’s visual memory of their hand and finger positions on the piano. It is thus essential that everyone indicates fingerings in their music score, especially for:
Turning points (Pro-tip: Draw brackets for notes that are played within the same hand position. With every new bracket, it is obvious that there needs to be a shift in hand position.)
Chord changes - Having to juggle several notes played simultaneously in a chord, it is definitely crucial to know exactly which fingers to use on very specific notes.
3) Chords
We all know that chords are a difficult concept, especially for a beginner. I would highly recommend labeling chords. For young beginners, colour coding chords allows them to eventually grow familiar with reading different chords through the association between a specific chord (and its shape on the staff) and a specific colour.
Here’s a simple example of how I would annotate a piece of music together with my students:
Friedrich Burgmüller
Op. 100, No. 3 (Pastoral)
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Happy tinkling! 🎹✨
Much love,
Gracia
