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"Learning and Teaching" pieces Arrangements for helping aspiring musicians learn to play from sheet music.

 
 
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Old 03-27-2012, 12:35 PM
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Sherry C Sherry C is offline
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Default Re: Beginning guitar - melody and chords

Hi,

Quote:
Originally Posted by s1y1n1 View Post
I'm confused on why the first note in "Melancholy" is written as a quarter note and sounds like one but takes up the whole first measure like a whole note. It doesn't seem to last 3 beats.
The first measure is what's called a "pickup measure". You'll also notice that the last measure is only two beats, and is called a trailing measure. The first one-beat measure plus the last two-beat measure together make up a full three-beat measure.

Quote:
Some of the other phrasing in the song is not how I'd write it either, example being the starting of a passage as the last note of a bar but I've never heard this song so maybe that's the common way of writing it. It could be possible that I'm hearing the song with a different "ear" than intended. Who knows?
Since I'm not the composer of this piece, I can't answer for the philosophical "why", but from a musical perspective, the phrasing is a sort of repeat of that opening pickup measure - pickups (and their corresponding phrasing) give a piece a different "groove" or feel to a piece, because the "pulse" of a measure typically emphasizes beat one. If that "pulse" beat falls on part of the phrase other than the first note, it does feel different than a "straight" measure. Sometimes those kinds of phrasing changes are used within a composition to lend a different feel to a chorus as opposed to the verse (or vice versa). We have a modernization of a hymn that we sing at church which uses this device quite effectively, and makes the chorus feel that it's moving at a different pace than the verse, as well as lends emphasis to certain words in the lyric that otherwise would fall on "lesser" beats.

Some others who have actual compositional training may be able to elaborate better than myself

ttfn,
Sherry
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