A walkthrough of a new arrangement of "My Favorite Things" from A Sunday Afternoon. The presenter explains how the piece uses E minor and C, a tritone for tension, and shifts from minor to major for a celebratory feel. He describes performance techniques like grace notes and hand-crossing, and shares that he composes by ear with help from his assistant Joyce to notate the pieces.
Okay, the next song in this new book, A Sunday Afternoon— the cat's coming— is called My Favorite Things. And this is, yeah, this is the song from The Sound of Music, which actually wasn't originally in The Sound of Music. I learned as I was looking up who wrote it, which was Richard Rodgers. But anyway, he originally wrote it, Julie Andrews sang it, and it was just so good. She did such a good job. I don't remember exactly what the I just saw that it was in something else before it was in The Sound of Music, but it was so good that they said, "Hey, why don't you sing that in this movie? This is a good spot for that." So obviously amazing movie and people know it from The Sound of Music. So this is My Favorite Things. It's kind of a fun— see how many pages is it? 1, 2, 3, 4. It's not hard. But it's pretty and it goes kind of through— it uses a lot of grace notes which kind of add a little bit of fun to it. Anyway, I might stop and talk about it as I play through it, but here's what it sounds like. Okay, so up to here we've been in this kind of minor, going back and forth between this E minor on top of a C. Looks familiar to you, maybe. Um, anyway, same back and forth, and it's fun. I love doing that minor in my, um, in my race management of Carol of the Bells. They do that back and forth between that E minor and that kind of C. It's kind of— it's not— it's not— it's not a C major, like a C5, just kind of an open C. Anyway, it's fine because that C with the F sharp, that tritone, adds some cool stuff. Okay, so we've been going back and forth Now we're going to go major. So this is a really fun song. It's got a lot of fun things in it. That minor kind of holding out in this feel, and then all of a sudden shifting to It's almost like celebratory, right? It's very nice having that switch to major. And then it— so it's kind of— it gets to that big ending it's nice and grandiose. By the way, there is a— we've been doing this, lots of grace notes. We do add a grace note left hand here, so it adds— if I just go, let's see here, let's play without grace note. Okay. It's fine, nothing wrong with it. If you want to play like that, that's fine. But if you add the grace note, you get that right, it adds this little bit of tension that then switches to another chord that has tension, and it's kind of going back and forth. It's back to this, that tritone. That's not a pretty sound to most people, but if you put it in the right spot— John Williams, Jurassic Park, right? He's putting the C, that F, use it in the right spot and then resolve to something awesome. It feels good. Resolving tension feels good. Um, good life lesson there. I could probably talk about that. And then this is also another cool thing. There aren't a lot of— there's a lot of, uh, what do you call those? Glisses? It's not a gliss. That's a gliss. A roll. A roll. Goodness gracious. There's lots of rolls in songs, but they're usually— this is a down roll, and it shows an arrow down, and it's actually down. It's up on the left and down on the right. So you're going going towards each other. Your hands are going towards each other. And that's kind of fun. Also adds some more tension. We're still in tension until here. And a little Jessica's theme ending there. So anyway, My Favorite Things. I really like this song. I think this is one of the ones I'm most excited to have finally written down because I can sit here and read it. I often compose just by ear. I'll sit down and play a lot, and then it's a lot of work to sit down and transcribe it. And I also have somebody named Joyce who helps me out sometimes that helps write some of this music down.. And I'm really excited when I get an email from Joyce that says, hey, you've got a new song ready. Even though I wrote it, I'm excited to see it written down and see— sometimes I'm thinking like, what the heck was that, that, you know, section there? And what is that actually going to look like? And sometimes it comes back just absolutely terrible looking and we have to work on it. But, um, but anyway, so My Favorite Things, have fun with it. I really like that one. Enjoy.
