It's March 2025 tomorrow. Time for another circle of 5ths. This time, it's Shamrocks.
Download the March Circle here:
It's interesting how one thing leads to another.
It started with using key finder cards, which made it possible to have students play more things from their first lessons.
From last month's Polovtsian (embarrassingly misspelled on the blog earlier) dance theme, all sorts of interesting connections popped out. (pieces for the moment, can be downloaded here for free)
Here's the timeline
Polovtsian Dance on single staff- Left hand 3rd finger and right hand 5th an octave apart on a natural minor scale. Going around the circle gets students familiar with both the sound of the natural minor scale, and gets students comfortable with the keys of the natural minor scale.
Playing the first 3 notes of the minor scale reminded me of Burgmuller's Arabesque Op. 100 no. 2. So I had many of my students play that because they are becoming familiar with these patterns.
The Arabesque's A-B-C-B-A pattern reminded me of Grieg's Puck Op. 71 No. 3 which uses that melodic fragment all over the place.
So, I created a Puck around the Circle exercise which is the around the circle exercise of the month.
Puck uses a 5 note minor pattern followed by something very similar in major. When my students played it around the circle, they started picking up on the relationship between the relative major and minor scales. In Puck, the pattern is used all over the place in different keys.
This lead to creating the New Piece Checklist. Puck has 6 flats, so starting to understand 1-4-5 relationships connects the movement from one key to the next which is happening over and over again in Puck.
The Puck around the Circle exercise has an added bonus of encouraging students to play fast. Once they get the pattern in the fingertips, we are having races. (crashing disqualifies a student)
After playing Puck around the Circle, the first section of the actual Puck is fairly easy; in spite of having 6 flats in the key signature.
The last measures of Puck around the circle use a descending minor scale with a 5-5-1 left hand pattern, which has the bonus of training ears and eyes and ties directly to the left hand in the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.
But wait- there's more. . . the second section Puck Op 71 No 3 is based on an inverting diminished 7th chord pattern. However, when Grieg wrote it, he changed the spelling of the chord each time. And because of the 6 flats in the key signature, it's an ugly read. However, if you understand the diminished 7th pattern (I'm testing several versions of an exercise to familiarize students with how this works and hope to have it done in a few weeks) the whole next section becomes much easier to understand and play.
After going through those last 10 steps, a student who comes for coaching every so often pulled out a Scott Joplin piece, and the first thing that popped out of the page was one of the same diminished patterns from the Puck, and so it goes.
Interestingly, Puck is a piece built with 5 note scale patterns, one diminished chord, and chromatic movement, being comfortable in all 12 keys with major and minor 5 note scales helps.
I use key finder cards with the students who need them, and we stop using them when they don't need them any more. The accuracy of playing and familiarity with all keys is super gratifying. Yesterday an 8 year old was playing stuff in A flat major, and another student brought pieces in D flat - on purpose.
Here's Puck Around the Circle:
Burgmuller Arabesque Op 100 no 2
Puck Op 71 No 3
A friend said that I was making a mistake by not charging for the music here. I will eventually, but for the moment, making it available for free is the quickest way I can find mistakes and correct them.
It's my hope to get more teachers on board with teaching around the circle from the first lessons because you will find it changes your thoughts on what students can and can't do from the very beginning.
The cards that have been the most helpful for Puck are:
Happy Playing!
Sarah
Thank you That was fun!