Hello! My family has always been involved with music, going back to my mother and her siblings and before that, their parents - my grandparents. Well, my grandmother, anyhow - my grandfather was not as directly involved in music, and in fact many probably assumed him to be mostly tone-deaf. That was, until one day they made us a recording on which he sang a couple of songs, including a touching duet with my grandmother on the Lerner & Loewe classic I Remember It Well from the movie "Gigi".

That song that deals (in a light-hearted way) with the impermanence of memory. I was thinking about this today as I posted this week's lesson for the Musicianship Skills Workshop, which is in part about the process of memorization, but is more generally about the role of understanding in music and how this relates directly to memory as well as to effective performance. If you're interested in exploring issues like that, I hope you'll join us!

MuseScore Café

This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, we continue our first-Wednesday "Ask Me Anything" series, so come prepared with your questions! As always, if you have a score you'd like me to look at in order to answer, be sure to post in the Conversation space.

The free MuseScore Café is live on Wednesday at 12:30 PM Eastern (16:30 GMT, or 17:30 during the winter months), and you can access past episodes in the archive.

Tip of the Week

Most note input in MuseScore is done by keyboard shortcuts or the mouse, or for people who own one, a MIDI keyboard. But there is one other input method you might not have realized MuseScore has - the Piano Keyboard window. You can access this from the View menu or using the shortcut "P". This will display a piano keyboard where you can click the keys to enter notes:

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Music Master Class

This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, I plan to feature some music that people are working on analyzing and memorizing as part of the Musicianship Skills Workshop.

The free Music Master Class is live on Thursday at 12:30 PM Eastern (16:30 GMT, or 17:30 during the winter months), and you can access past episodes in the archive.

In Theory

The piece I focused on in the musicianship lesson is the first movement of the famous Bach cello suite in G major. I've always had a fascination with this and other similar pieces, where a single melodic line tells the entire story in a piece Carrying all of the harmonies and rhythms of a piece in a single melodic instrument is an interesting compositional challenge. In the jazz world, a classic but perhaps not as familiar example is Coleman Hawkins' unaccompanied saxophone performance Picasso, which takes on the same challenge in the world of improvisation. Because piano is capable of of playing entire chords, it's not common to find entire pieces like this, but from time to time you do see extended passages that are carried by a single melodic line. One such piece I remember playing in my youth is C.P.E. Bach's Solfeggietto in C minor, which I loved even though it always struck me as a strange thing for him to have written!

What all of these have in common is a judicious balance between pure melodic statement, arpeggiated chords, and use of "compound melodies". A compound melody is one that is actually two independent lines in one, with the player (or singer) flipping back and forth between them - kind of a call and response dialog with oneself.

What other examples of pieces in this vein have made an impression on you, and what do you think makes them work? I'd love to hear about your favorites in the Share & Discuss space within the Community site!