Little Prelude in F


Walkthrough (1)

Introduction

Like the famous first Prelude of The Well-Tempered Clavier, this lovely miniature is a harmonic prelude – an elaborated chord progression with no melody as such, though there are short melodic motives. It is therefore natural to begin our study of this piece by making a harmonic reduction. Reducing the prelude’s 354 notes to 39 chords allows us to see and hear much more easily the overall shape of the piece, its patterns, phrase lengths, and harmonic rhythm. It also gives us our hand positions, and a basis for making decisions about dynamics. From this basic harmonic skeleton, we’ll gradually...

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