hello mini tail tellers welcome welcome to the music room here at royal clarence now today we've been looking at our new choices for the abrsm grade 1 pieces i'm going through the list this week and we'll be covering all of the pieces not just three we're going to cover all of the pieces in the coming weeks okay and then we're going to go on through the other grades as well so all these lessons are free and everybody is welcome that's the first thing to know now this one is a traditional irish dance piece and it's very very different to the other pieces that we've already done today um it's a traditional irish sort of folk song i guess an irish jig called john ryan's polka okay now these exam pieces are all for grade one and they are valid until 2023 which is pretty good isn't it so we've got plenty of time there's no rush but look you can do these pieces even if you're not doing the exam that doesn't matter at all it doesn't matter an iota that so let's have a look at it now the thing with this piece it looks easy but it isn't and it isn't easy because many of us don't have a focus on experience so we're you know we tend to be a little bit locked into certain styles of music many of us aren't familiar with irish music um or folk music and many of us may be you know more uh traditionally biased towards english choral type music or um you know other genres perhaps i think if you've come from suzuki you'll find this piece quite easy except for the string crossings there are some rather tricky string crossings which are really going to throw us a little bit um it's very lively though and there are lots of little motifs which are reminiscent of suzuki so i think you'll be okay let's see what you think i've slowed it down a tad um we'll just play the first two lines today do okay so that's pretty pretty straightforward really but remember the uh you'll have to play it a bit faster than that in the exam so you can catch this music on my facebook page so you can follow my um my annotations because they're very helpful um i can just play by ear as well of course and if you've got the music in front of you then you can annotate yourselves so what have we got we've got a four four it's an f major we've got an f sorry g major it's an f sharp nice and loud nice and lively i'd give it a little uh a little bit of definition i'd define all the notes and i define them because that makes them lively okay now here we've got string crossings galore at bar two so we've got open three string crossing open three string crossing four so suddenly is an awful lot to think about now move all your hands up fingers over um that's a closed hand run easy peasy and then bar four we've got that string crossing again and again and again string crossings everywhere you're really going to have to learn how to do those well smoothly very straight bow i really don't think you should be attempting this without a mirror in front of you okay so you really need especially when we've got we've got here because that's bar uh five six right over the other side okay so if your if your bow is not straight that's not that's going to sound grim isn't it so do you like this piece i think it's fantastic i mean it's really dancey i recommend we'll play it again now at this speed 90 bpm and what i recommend you do is you mime it over and over again and really feel the dance and then visualize the eating cake and dancing and swishy skirts and boys with caps and you know all that sort of thing just uh really visualize this party atmosphere and that's going to help you to play really really well and impress the examiner actually because when you're transferring feeling to um a listener it really makes all the difference all the difference now there's no phrasing in um in my copy but there will be phrasing in the uh abrsm copies i'm sure so when we go over this we'll talk about um how to phrase it according to the official copy that they give us okay so let's play it...