Let not your heart be troubled, by Stephen Foster
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Get the practice plan for Let not your heart be troubled
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- Hear it through at Slow (50 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 4 to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in E♭ major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: A♭dim7, E♭, B♭ 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, 50 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (75 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 3 minutes) from the start, at whatever speed keeps it going. A steady run with a few slips beats a fast one that stops.
About this piece
Let not your heart be troubled is an anthem by Myles Birket Foster, who lived from 1851 to 1922, and it was printed in 1891 in Novello's Octavo Anthems no.438. Here the choir's four parts are set on two staves for piano, soprano and alto in the right hand and tenor and bass in the left.
How to play it
Where two voices share a hand, keep the lower one a shade quieter so the upper line carries. Choose a calm tempo you can hold from the first bar to the last, and breathe at the ends of the phrases.
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 Stephen Foster sheet music
All 11 Stephen Foster scores →
Who Stephen Foster was
The first American to try to make a living purely by writing songs, and a cautionary tale about how that went. He wrote about two hundred, several of which the country still sings without knowing whose they are, and he sold them for almost nothing under contracts that gave him no share of what they earned. Much of his most popular work was written for minstrel shows and carries all the ugliness of that form. He died alone in a New York hotel at thirty-seven with thirty-eight cents in his pocket.
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 E♭ major.