Chœur des Pastorale, DO.287, by Massenet
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Get the practice plan for Chœur des Pastorale, DO.287
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- Hear it through at Slow (69 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 3 big beats to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in F major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: F, B♭maj7, C7 and Dm7. 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, 69 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (104 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
Chœur des Pastorale, DO.287 is a song by Jules Massenet (1842 to 1912), from Poème pastoral, to words by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian. It was written for voice and piano; here the singer's tune is folded into the top of the right hand, over the piano's own part, so one player gives the whole song. The first verse of the French words sits under the tune.
How to play it
Let the tune sing out on top of the right hand and keep the notes under it lighter, as a singer would be heard over the piano. Where the voice rests, the introductions and interludes are exactly as the composer wrote them.
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 Massenet sheet music
Who Massenet was
French composer of the opera house, prolific and fashionable and slightly looked down upon for both, whose gift for a long singing line has outlasted the plots he attached it to. The Méditation from Thaïs is an orchestral interlude written to cover a change of heart in the middle of an opera almost nobody stages, and it has become one of the best known melodies for the violin ever written. He taught at the Conservatoire and his students loved him.
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 F major.