B minor Rhapsody 1 Op. 79, by Brahms
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Get the practice plan for B minor Rhapsody 1 Op. 79
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- Hear it through at Slow (59 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 2 to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in B minor. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: F♯7, Dm, A7 and Fm. Play each one as a block in your left hand and say its name, so you know what the harmony is before the left hand has to move.
- Learn the left hand of the same bars on its own. Keep it quiet and even: it is the floor the tune stands on.
- Put hands together at Slow, 59 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (88 bpm) once Slow feels easy three times in a row. Then learn the next 8 bars the same way: right hand, left hand, together.
- Play the whole piece (about 8 minutes) from the start, at whatever speed keeps it going. A steady run with a few slips beats a fast one that stops.
What kind of piece this is
A rhapsody is a free piece that moves between contrasting sections at will, often built on national or folk material. Brahms wrote slowly and burned what he did not like, so what survives is what he was willing to be judged by.
How to play it
Treat each section as its own character and make the joins deliberate: the changes of mood are the structure.
Reading it, and printing it
The score opens in Artform's reader, which shows the music as engraved notation and plays it back so you can hear the line before you try it. You can slow the tempo down, loop a passage that is not working yet, and print the page when you would rather have paper on the stand.
The file itself is MusicXML, which MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and Dorico all open, so the notes are yours to keep whatever you read them in.
More free Brahms sheet music
Who Brahms was
German composer who idolized Beethoven so completely that he waited until he was forty to publish his first symphony, terrified of the comparison, famously grumbling about "the giant marching behind me." A close friend, and by many accounts a great unspoken love, of Clara Schumann's, he supported her and her children after Robert Schumann's death and stayed devoted to her for the rest of his life. He never married. His music, disciplined, autumnal, built on Classical forms but full of Romantic warmth, culminated in the technically formidable, deeply intimate late piano pieces of his Op. 118 and 119, written when he suspected, correctly, that his own life was nearing its end.
Learn the music behind it
Reading a piece and understanding it are different skills. If you want the harmony under this one, the chord trainer teaches chords the way songs use them, and the scale pages cover the fingering for every key, including B minor.