Pictures at an Exhibition: 5. Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, by Mussorgsky
Every score here is public domain, free to read, print and keep. Open it in the browser and it plays, at whatever tempo you can read it.
Get the practice plan for Pictures at an Exhibition: 5. Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks
Here it is. Check your inbox for day 1.
- Hear it through at Slow (40 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 F major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: D♭7, Cmaj7, E♭maj7 and C. 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, 40 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (60 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 1 minute) 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
Hartmann designed costumes of chicks in their eggshells for a ballet, and Mussorgsky's music cheeps and scurries with grace notes and quick chords high on the keyboard.
How to play it
Keep the grace notes very quick and light, almost on the beat. The whole piece should sound tiny and comic.
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 Mussorgsky sheet music
Who Mussorgsky was
Russian composer who wanted music to speak the way people actually speak, and who wrote a set of piano pieces about an exhibition of his dead friend's drawings that has become one of the most recognisable works in the repertoire, mostly in an orchestration by somebody else. He was a civil servant and an alcoholic and his life fell apart in his forties. Rimsky-Korsakov tidied nearly everything he left into shape after his death, out of love, and it took the twentieth century a long time to prise the original back out.
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.