Keyboard Sonata in C minor, K. 11, by Scarlatti
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Get the practice plan for Keyboard Sonata in C minor, K. 11
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- Hear it through at Slow (51 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 8 to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in C minor. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: Cm, G7, G and E♭maj7. 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, 51 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (76 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
The eleventh of the thirty Essercizi that Domenico Scarlatti published in 1738, in the usual two repeated halves. The nineteenth-century edition this was taken from printed it under the name of Johann Kuhnau, but the music is Scarlatti's. It opens with a rising figure and trill, then runs in semiquavers and quick demisemiquaver turns.
How to play it
Keep a steady four in the bar and play the quick turns lightly, as ornaments, without letting them hold up the beat. The left hand's detached quavers keep the pulse, so make them even.
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.
Edition: Mutopia Project #141, in the public domain. Converted to MusicXML by Artform and checked note for note against the original.
More free Scarlatti sheet music
Who Scarlatti was
Italian composer who spent much of his career at the Spanish and Portuguese royal courts, teaching keyboard to a princess who would become Queen of Spain, and who left behind 555 keyboard sonatas unlike anything else being written in Europe at the time: full of hand-crossings, guitar-like strumming effects, and the sharp rhythmic snap of Iberian folk dance. He wrote almost nothing else, no symphonies, no operas of note, just sonata after sonata, each one a compact, often mischievous experiment in what two hands on a keyboard could do. Most weren't published in his lifetime; they survive largely through manuscript copies made for the queen he taught.
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 C minor.