Flight of the Bumblebee, by Rimsky-Korsakov
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 Flight of the Bumblebee
Here it is. Check your inbox for day 1.
- Hear it through at Slow (72 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in A minor. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: E7, Fm, Am and Fmaj7. 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, 72 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (108 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
An interlude where an opera prince becomes a bee, which became the piece every instrument uses to prove its speed. It is the chromatic scale as special effect.
How to play it
Read it slowly and marvel: evenness first, speed someday. The bee is a long-term resident.
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 Rimsky-Korsakov sheet music
All 14 Rimsky-Korsakov scores →
Who Rimsky-Korsakov was
Russian naval officer who wrote his first symphony on a three-year cruise and only afterwards worked out that he did not properly know how music was put together, at which point he took a professorship and taught himself in front of his students. He became the greatest orchestrator of his generation and wrote the textbook on it. Scheherazade is his; so is the tidying of half of Mussorgsky. Stravinsky and Prokofiev both came out of his classroom.
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 A minor.