Pianist Jon Cheney walks through his arrangement of Silent Night from his Softly Christmas Piano Book, explaining how he uses descants and dynamic shading to create a peaceful, reverent sound. The piece is designed to be simple enough for beginners while giving solo pianists a richer texture through octave placement and careful phrasing.
Okay, this is Silent Night from Softly Christmas Piano Book. I have it, I'm reading it on my digital version. I love playing on the iPad because it's just so easy to tap through and I can carry a thousand piano books or a million piano books and it doesn't weigh anymore. So these are all available on my website to download and buy and feel free to do that. But I'm going to play through it today and let you guys and kind of talk through it, talk about what it's, you know, how to perform it, what I was thinking when I was writing it. So this is just Silent Night, pretty straightforward. This one's again pretty soft. All of these songs in Softly Christmas are soft and reverent. It's probably a good word for it. So it's supposed to help you fall asleep at night on a nice cold winter night, hopefully around Christmas time, and hopefully with snow outside. There's no snow outside right now. But it might start. It might start soon. I don't know. It might skip us here today. I know it snowed right over there. Anyway, back to Simonette. Here we go. So this starts again pretty soft. Nothing complicated here. I'm just going to play until I run into something that needs talking about. Sorry. Okay, so we played through 2 verses now. They're pretty straightforward. This is one of the easier songs in this book, and it's supposed to be just kind of some basic, really easy kind of back and forth, but it's really peaceful and nice to perform and just play through. I'm gonna keep going. So this is almost like a descant that's being played right here, right? You hear sometimes descants a lot in choirs where somebody, you know, the main melody is being played and then one person or two people will sing a higher, you know, something that just kind of accents, right? But now you as the pianist, the solo pianist, have to do the melody and the descants by yourself, and that makes it a little bit more fun. Okay, and you have to hold the melody, right? Actually played that wrong. It's supposed to be way, way high. Very pretty, very easy. So some very simple kind of just moving a few octaves. Kind of hit that B-flat a I hit the C sometimes. I'll hit that often, but I don't find myself up on that B. I also don't find myself playing the melody up here that much. It's pretty. So a couple little descants, little things. That's a pretty easy one for you to enjoy in The Softly Christmas, available obviously in the book. And, but you can buy each of these songs individually as well. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed. Let's play through another one here.
