Confusing minim and crotchet combination

[DavidYoung]

Could someone please explain what I am supposed to do with the left hand in the final two bars of this piece?

The minim is tied to the previous crotchet. I would ordinarily treat this as holding the note for three beats. However, there is a crotchet on the same line of the stave in the same place. Do I hold the note for four beats or am I supposed to do something else?

The piece is in 3/4 time.

[John Ruggero]

Hi, DavidYoung and welcome to Notat.io!

The up and down stems show two voices on each staff, soprano and alto on the top staff and tenor and bass on the lower staff. When two of the voices sing the same note, both notes must be shown. When the two voices sing the same note and the same rhythmic value, the two note heads can be consolidated as one note head with stems going in both directions. You can see this on beat three of the lower staff in the next to last measure. However, if the notes are of different values, as on the first beat of the last measure, then both note heads must be shown, in this case, a quarter note for the bass part and a half note for the tenor. So the tenor voice holds for three beats, if you include the previous tied note. The bass voice holds for two beats, if you include the previous tied note, and then moves on to the F while the tenor keeps holding the G. But then does the tenor voice stop singing on beat three? If so, there really should be a quarter rest showing on beat three.

I suspect that there may be an error in the last measure and a dot may be missing from the tenor note, in which case, the tenor voice could hold for a total of 4 beats, including the previous tied note, and thus all the way to the end of the piece and finish with the other voices.

Nothing changes if this piece is played on a keyboard instead of sung by voices. The notes would hold in the same way.

[DavidYoung]

Thank you for the reply.

For clarification, this is actually piano notation, even though it looks as though it is an SATB composition.

There is definitely something strange about how often the right hand plays notes that are already being played by the left hand, and the author's obsession with ninths.

[OCTO]

A composer must exactly follow notation rules, just as in mathematics.
Here is an example of voicing in Scriabin's Sonata No. 7. While it may first seem illogical, an 'aha!' moment is what comes afterwards! The total number of voices is—five.

Screenshot 2025-03-24 at 10.16.15.png (111.91 KiB) Viewed 119089 times

[John Ruggero]

This piece is written in four strict voices, no matter whether it is sung, played on a organ as designated, or piano. So all four voices have to be present even when the note is the same as a note in another voice and even when the note appears on both staves and therefore is played by both hands on a keyboard instrument. Many keyboard players play such a note with one hand only for convenience. I actually don't, in most cases, because I like my hands to match what is going on in the music.

I didn't find any 9th chords in the example; perhaps you mean ninths produced by passing notes. It's almost all major and minor triads and a few seventh chords, and it's totally orthodox in voice leading. All the dissonances including ninths are a result of passing tones.

In the first measure of your example the bass part would have gone out of range if the G had moved down a step to F and continued on an octave lower than it is actually written, so the composer displaces the second G-F and has the bass voice jump up a seventh G-F. That is the only "anomaly", I see in the example, which is written in quasi-modal harmony. Such octave displacement is a completely acceptable and common solution to a problem of range.

[DavidYoung]

Isn't it called a ninth when you play the the first notes of the left hand piece in the second bar of the lower line, or am I thinking of a tenth? Or is it something else? It's certainly the hardest part of this piece, and it appears in other pieces in this book of Christmas carols.

It's certainly larger than an octave.

[RMK]

May I gently suggest that you (the OP) learn a bit of music theory (interval names, for instance) before asking for help?

There are plenty of on-line resources for this.

[John Ruggero]

Actually that interval is a tenth, as you suspected. Intervals are named by counting all the lines and spaces including the lines or spaces occupied by the end notes. Hymn arrangements are often filled with tenths and even larger intervals to a greater extent than most pieces written originally for keyboard. Such intervals are less used in original keyboard music because, as you have experienced, they are less comfortable for the human hand. You will encounter the same in any hymnal, particularly in the lower staff, and a good way to handle this is to try to play the upper note with the right hand. This happens to be possible in your example. Or such notes can sometimes be transposed up an octave. Or you can simply play the lower note slightly before the beat and jump up to the upper note using the sustaining pedal to hold the bottom note.

Playing from a hymnal is excellent sight-reading practice and often recommended to keyboard players, but there is this unfortunate drawback of the wide intervals.

I should add that wide intervals are, of course, the stock in trade of advanced piano music, and whole careers have been made out of them, most notably Chopin's!

[DavidYoung]

Thanks for the advice on the sustain pedal.

I'm somewhere between Grade 3 and Grade 4, so pedalling is a new learning curve for me.

[John Ruggero]

You are very welcome, DavidYoung. This kind of quick pedaling is more advanced, but attempting it would be good practice in learning to use the pedal

Good luck with your piano studies and please don't hesitate to ask about anything else that comes up. I'd be glad to help.

One suggestion that is not often given to piano students but is one of the most effective things you can do to feel comfortable at the keyboard and advance more quickly: play all of the various intervals and three note chords chromatically with both hands using the various possible fingerings up and down through the entire keyboard and eventually without looking at the keyboard.

So, for example, you would play a three note major triad like C-E-G with the fingering 1-3-5 with the right hand, then slide over to C#-E#-G# with 1-3 5, D-F#-A with 1-3 5 etc. trying to find each chord by feel rather than sight. Exercises of this type will do amazing things for you; but you will need to experience this for yourself.

After you are comfortable with intervals and chords that lie within your hand span, that is, up to about an octave, you can move on to the larger intervals like tenths that are giving you trouble. In fact, if any chord or interval comes up in a piece, doing this chromatic exercise will be surprisingly effective in handling any difficulties you might be having.

However, this all depends on how you are depressing the keys. If you are not able to use your fingers to depress the keys with a simple tapping motion, and I mean without any help from the arm at all, you will never feel comfortable playing and have various difficulties.