Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts, Z.58b, by Purcell
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Get the practice plan for Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts, Z.58b
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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 B♭ major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: B♭, F7, F and D7. 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 2 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
Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts, Z.58b is an anthem by Henry Purcell, who lived from 1659 to 1695, and it was printed in 1677 in Funeral Sentences. 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
Hold every note its full length so the voices overlap as a choir's would, and lift only where a singer would breathe. Find the pulse first by tapping it, then keep it through every change of note length.
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 Purcell sheet music
Who Purcell was
English composer of the Restoration, organist of Westminster Abbey and the finest thing to happen to English music between the Tudors and Elgar, dead at thirty-six with a body of work that includes anthems, theatre music and one short, perfect opera. Dido's Lament is built on a bass line that falls, over and over, the same five notes under everything the singer does, and it is still one of the most devastating things anybody has written with so little material. He was buried beneath the organ he had played, and the country did not produce a composer of his stature again for two hundred years.
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♭ major.