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Domenico Scarlatti

1685-1757

Domenico Scarlatti was a famous Italian harpsichord player and com-poser. He lived during the Baroque Period of music. He was born the

exact same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, but they

grew up in Germany. The harpsichord was an impor-tant keyboard instrument before the piano, and Scarlatti was perhaps the best player in the world.

His Early Years Domenico Scarlatti

was born in Naples, Italy. He came from a very large and musical family – he was the 6th of 10 children. His father Alessandro Scarlatti was also a famous Italian Baroque com-poser. Domenico’s oldest brother Pietro Filippo grew up to be an organ-ist and a composer.

We do not know a lot about his childhood, but his father probably gave him his first music lessons. His father was the con-ductor at the Royal chapel in Naples, and when Domenico was 15, Alessandro arranged for him to be the church’s organist. He also was composing music by this time as well.

Domenico was not content working with his father and rebelled against his wishes. He decided to concentrate on the harpsichord instead of the organ. He soon became a master at the harpsichord, and it was his favorite instru-ment.

Alessandro Scarlatti Famous composers and musi-

cians often come from musical families. The Bach dynasty of musicians is the best-known example of a large family responsible for producing gener-ations of successful composers and musicians. Although not as famous as the Bachs, the

Scarlatti family was an well-known musical family in Italy. A l e s s a n d r o was probably the most i m p o r t a n t opera compos-er of his time. (Opera was developed in

Italy, and during this time, musi-cians from all over Europe trav-eled to Italy to study opera.)

Alessandro lived in Naples for much of his life. Naples was the largest city in Italy at the time, and there were several opera houses for people to attend per-formances. Most of Scarlatti’s operas had a serious story, but he also wrote a few lighter works. Although he composed 115 operas, fewer than 40 have sur-vived. His operas influenced many other musicians and com-posers. He also wrote over 600 cantatas for voice, harpsichord, and viola da gamba (an early string instrument), chamber music, and religious works.

Who was Scarlatti?

Naples, Italy where Scarlatti was born

Do you recognize this mountain?

It gets a bit hot sometimes!

Alessandro Scarlatti

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Although he never met Bach, Handel and Scarlatti became friends when Handel came to Italy because he was interested in writing Italian-style operas. When they were both

23, they played against each other in a contest. The competition was held in a Roman palace and attend-ed by many govern-ment officials,

church leaders, and court musicians, who wanted to see who was the great-est keyboard virtuoso in the world.

Each man performed on both harpsichord and organ. They not only had to play the instruments though – they had to improvise the music that they played.

Handel easily won the organ com-petition, and even Scarlatti admit-ted that Handel was a brilliant organist who played with fullness and energy. However, Scarlatti’s favorite instrument was the harpsi-

chord. His s p a r k l i n g m e l o d i e s and blazing trills filled the room with excite-ment. At times Scarlatti even played with one hand crossed over the other, an unusual technique at the time. The judges declared that Scarlatti’s harp-sichord playing was elegant, expres-sive, and the best in the competition.

George Frideric Handel

Venice and RomeWhen he was 20 years old,

Domenico’s father sent him to live in Venice, where he stud-ied with a famous composer and first met Handel.

However, he was unable to find a job in Venice, so he moved to Rome, where he met Handel a second time.

He stayed in Rome for about 10 years. First he worked for a Polish queen named Maria Casimira and wrote operas for her theater. Later he was employed by the Portuguese ambassador and the Vatican.

Scarlatti vs. Handel In an Amazing Competition

When Scarlatti was 34, he moved to Portugal and took a job at the royal court in Lisbon as a music master and teacher of Princess Maria Barbara. This is where he wrote his most famous harpsichord works. When the princess married into the Spanish royal family, Scarlatti moved to Spain to continue as her teacher and lived in Spain for the rest of his life.

Lisbon, Portugal

Royal Palace of Aranjuez, Spain

Working for Princess Maria Barbara Moving to Portugal and Spain

Maria Barbara was the oldest child of King John V of Portugal. She was 8 years old when Scarlatti came to Lisbon to be her music teacher. She was very smart, well-educated, good at languages, and a talented harpsichord player.

When she became the Queen of Spain, Maria Barbara held great parties and

concerts at this palace.

t Harpsichord from 1720

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Working for Maria Barbara as a teacher and music master for the royal family in Spain was a wonderful job, and Scarlatti loved living in Spain. While in Spain, Scarlatti had five children and composed some of his most important music.

Although Scarlatti wrote 7 operas, many can-tatas, and music for church services, he is most famous for his 555 keyboard sonatas. He com-posed them during his years in Portugal and Spain, inspired by the sights, culture, and sounds of these two countries. Some of his sonatas have

parts that sound like the strumming of a guitar, which was popular in Spanish folk music.

Almost all of Scarlatti’s sonatas have one move-ment and are in binary form. They were meant to show off the technical abilities of the performer and include difficult runs, fast arpeggios, hand-cross-ing, quickly repeated notes, big jumps, and some thirds and sixths. The har-monies are bold and unex-pected, with some unusual chord clusters and lots of modulations to surprising keys. In the box below you can learn more about one of his sonatas.

Scarlatti was not very well known outside of Spain during his lifetime, and his works were not published until long after his death. In 1839, Carl Czerny, a famous piano teacher of the Classical period, was the first per-son to publish a collection of Scarlatti’s sonatas. A more complete publica-tion was not released until 1906. When they were rediscovered, Scarlatti’s sonatas became very pop-ular, and many famous pianists started perform-ing them at concerts. Go to www.peforkids.com to hear more of Scarlatti’s music.

Scarlatti’s Music

The Cat’s FugueThe Sonata Op. 30 is called the Cat’s Fugue because Scarlatti was

supposedly inspired by the sounds his cat made by jumping on the harpsichord keys one day. It has unusual intervals and wide leaps. Play these notes and imagine a cat delicately stepping across the

piano keys, hitting odd notes.

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Moderato ( = 120)q.

cat walking on keys

Scarlatti did not call the work “Cat’s Fugue.” The nickname was added for performances in the 1800s. Go to www.peforkids.com to hear how it sounds.

68 Time Signature

If you look at the music example for The Cat’s Fugue below, you will notice that the time signature is 6

8. This time signature can be a bit tricky to count and play. Most beginning pieces have a 4 on the bottom of the time signature: 24 34 44 . This means that a quarter note gets count-ed as 1 beat and an eighth note is a half beat.

When you see a time signature with an 8 on the bottom like 6

8, this means that an eighth note is counted as 1 beat and there are six eighth notes in each measure.

However, it is a little trickier than just count-ing to six. When you look at the music, you will notice that the six eighth notes are grouped together into two groups of three eighth notes. Musicians often feel music in 68 as two strong beats instead of six. They count a beat for each group of three eighth notes – so there would be two counts per measure instead of six. (This means that each q. is counted as a beat.)

If you have trouble feeling the two big beats, try counting in six at first. Rhythms with a quarter followed by an eighth note can feel a little tricky at first.

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Who wrote fugues? Fugues became very popular during the

Baroque period, and J.S. Bach was a master of the fugue. His Well Tempered Clavier is a col-lection of 48 Preludes and Fugues, and most of the fugues are for three or four voices. Look at an example from one of his fugues below.

During the Classical and Romantic peri-ods fugues were sometimes used as move-ments of larger pieces.

What is a fugue? A fugue is a type of musical work that

often sounds very complicated. There are usually several parts that are each equally important, unlike many pieces you play, where one part is the melody and the other is the accompaniment.

How does it work?

The fugue starts with a musical idea, A, called the subject. After the first part plays the subject, the second voice, B, follows, and then the third C. As each one joins, the composer plays around with the main idea. It might switch to a different key for example. When all the parts are going at once, the music sounds very busy.

A fugue is similar to a canon (or round) but after each voice

plays the tune one time, they begin to change it.

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[Allegro maestoso]

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A

B C

A C D O R G A N Z O O S

F E A R P E G G I O G M

U S E T L S O E S I R E

G T V A E M G N R T A M

U Y E L D C N I A T T O

E H P F N A D A V A Y R

V A W E A Y H P C L I S

N D R O H C I S P R A H

A D Q A A S V I N A O F

T C M B X E E L A C S E

T P O R T U G A L S P L

U B R Y L A T I G Y P C

Word Search Find these words going up, down, for-wards and backwards and diagonal.

arpeggio

Bach clef flat

fugue Handel

harpsichord Italy

Naples organ

Portugal Rome scale

Scarlatti Spain

Dynamics are an important part of music and are how loud or soft you play. Many music students

want to focus only on the notes at first because they want to put their fingers in the correct places and play all of the right notes and rhythms. However, dynamics are also an essential part of the piece and help make music interesting.

A loud section or note will stand out and can sound exciting or important while a soft part might make a listener lean in to hear what is going on. There are so many ways to make music come alive with dynamics.

Usually composers write in exactly what dynamics they want played in each

part. They use Italian words to describe how loud or how soft to play.

Some dynamics just mean loud or soft. Others give a direction to gradually (or suddenly) get louder or softer. Above are a few of the common terms you should learn.

Because there is not much room to write words in music, composers came up with abbreviations and symbols for each dynamic. Look for them in your pieces.

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DynamicsCommon Dynamics

Italian Word What It Means Pianissimo very soft Piano soft Mezzo piano medium soft Mezzo forte medium loud Forte loud Fortissimo very loud Decrescendo getting softer Diminuendo getting softer Crescendo getting louder Subito suddenly (Subito is used with other words such as subito piano which means suddenly soft.)Pay attention to dynamics as you

learn each new piece. Play them right from the beginning. This makes them a part of the music and not just an extra that you try to remember to include – and maybe forget!

Italian Words in Music

When you look at a

piece of music, you may notice that there are words written in it that are not in English. Often they are Italian words. This is because many important early musi-cians and composers were Italian.

When they started to write instructions in their music, they naturally used the words from their own language. Musicians from all over Europe travelled to Italy to learn from the master musicians there. They began to use the same Italian words.

Italian soon became the language of music. Musicians all over the world under s tand these terms – even if they do not speak Italian

Beginner’s Corner

ff fortissimo f forte mf mezzo forte mp mezzo piano p piano pp pianissimo

crescendo decrescendo or diminuendo

The example below is a very famous use of dynamics from Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony. Supposedly he wrote a loud forte chord to wake up people sleeping in the audience! Try playing it with the dynamics. (You can just play a G for the final chord.) Go to www.peforkids.com to hear it.

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Your teacher has probably suggested that you should count while you play.

This can feel difficult at first. After all you are trying to read the music and play the right notes. Counting at the same time can be just one thing too many to do. However, keeping a steady count going – either by counting out loud or silently in your head – will help you play the correct rhythm. Often we think we are holding notes for the right amount of time but actually they are a bit too long

or short. This can be especially true with rests.

When you first start playing, you may be able to get away with not counting for a little while. A lot of beginning pieces are familiar songs, and you know how they should sound.

As music gets more compli-cated, you will make mistakes if you do not count. You will also learn these mistakes, and then it will be much more difficult to fix them later. Try the practice exercises below to improve your counting skills.

Exercises: 1. Pick an easy piece with simple rhythms, such as quarter and half notes. First just count the beat while looking at the music. As you say each beat (number) move your eyes through the measure. 2. Count the beat and clap the rhythm. (You clap the notes – quarter notes, eighth notes, etc. – that you see in the music while counting the beats – 1 2 3 4 etc.)

3. When you get good at this, play the music while counting out loud. Then try to play the music while counting in your head. (Be sure to count every beat.) Tips: Use a metronome or metronome app to keep your count steady. Count the rests! They are just as important as the notes. Keep counting even when you get to an easy place. After you can do this easily, try a slightly harder piece.

Counting While Playing

“I hate to count.” “I can’t count while I play.” “I just play the music how it sounds.” “It’s too confusing.” “I only count the long notes.”

Why Count?

When musicians do not count, they make mistakes with the rhythm. They can hold notes and rests too long or too short and play with an unsteady tempo (getting faster and slower without meaning to.)

Have you made any of these excuses?

1 2

34

Counting is even more important when you play with other musicians. If even one person does not count, the

parts will not go together the way they are supposed to, and

the music will sound terrible.

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Learning to Sightread

Patterns When you were learning to read, you

almost certainly started with the alphabet and what the letters sound

like. Then you discovered how to put those letters together and sound out words. After some practice, your brain started to recognize combinations of letters together as words. When that happened, you no longer had to decode and sound out each letter separately to read a word. You just knew what words many common letter combinations spelled.

Reading music is very similar. First, students learn the names of the notes, where they are on the keyboard, and what they sound like. At first you have to read one note at a time. After a while, you will begin to see notes together in groups and not just as single notes. And just like in reading words, there are certain pat-terns in music that repeat often. If you can rec-ognize these patterns, you will read and learn music more quickly. Steps and Skips

One of the basic musical patterns is the scale – a series of step-wise notes going up or down. You can recognize steps easily because they look like a staircase. On the staff, steps move from a space to the very next line or from a line to the very next space. On the piano, steps are one letter away (From A to B or from D to C) and often neighboring keys. Be careful, however, if there are sharps or flats, steps on the piano are not always from one white key to another white key. If accidentals are involved, black keys are also used in steps.

Skips are easy to spot in music because they

skip lines or spaces. If a note is on a space, a skip up or down from it will also be on a space

in the music. On the piano, make sure to skip a letter name (like from A to C – skipping B) and take into consideration any sharps or flats. There will be at least one white key skipped – but sometimes it might be 2 white keys.

Fifths

When you span 5 different letter names, this is called the interval of a fifth. An example of that is when you go from C to G (C, D, E, F, G is 5 notes). Fifths in the music go from a line to a line, with one empty line in between or from space to space, with a space in between.

Chords and Arpeggios

Chords are easy to spot in music. They have 3 or more notes stacked on top of each other. The best way to read them is to start at the bottom note and read the other notes from the bottom up. Notice the distances between each of the notes. Are they skips, fourths, fifths? Noticing this will make it easier to find each note of the chord.

When you play the notes of a chord one after another, instead of all at the same time, this is called an arpeggio. You will read music faster if you can think of arpeggios as the notes of one

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& www œœœ ˙̇̇F major C major

first inversionG majorsecond inversion

> 3> 3 > 3

> 3> 4

> 4

chord – played separately – rather than as sep-arate notes.

Playing Patterns on the Piano When you get good at recognizing patterns,

the next step is knowing how to put those pat-terns on the keys. If you want to read smooth-ly, it is better not to look at your hands. As you get better at the piano it will become easier to know your way around the keyboard. You want to be able to feel the distances between the keys without having to look at them.

Try this exercise: Put your hands on the piano on any note and close your eyes. Then play the following patterns without looking: 1. Steps: Play 5 notes going up and then down in step-wise motion 2. Skips: Play 2 skips up and then back down. (For easy fingering in skips, the basic rule is “Skip a note, skip a finger.”) 3. Fifths: Put each finger of your hand on a different white key (with no skipped keys in between), then play only the bottom and top notes.

4. Chords: Start with a chord that is made of two skips in a row. Then open your eyes and move the bottom note of that chord to the top of the chord (by an octave). Close your eyes and feel the skip between two lower notes and the bigger interval (a fourth) between the top two notes. Open your eyes and move the bot-tom note up an octave, then close your eyes again. Now feel the fourth between the bottom two notes and the skip between the top two.

5. Arpeggios: Play the chords as you just did but one note at a time.

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? œ œ œ œ œ œ œG major chord, arpeggiated

Question: When would you have a skip in which you skip two white keys? Hint: it will involve a flat or a sharp.

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Exercise:

Look at the music below. Find places where there are patterns mentioned in this article. You should be able to find steps, skips, fifths, and a chord. Then play the music and try to feel each pattern on the piano, under your fingers.

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Answers to September Puzzles Word Scramble (page 5): Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Chopin, Schubert Missing Barlines (page 5):

Quiz (page 15): 1. a 2. various answers 3. a 4. a 5. b 6. d 7. a October (page 2): Mount Vesuvius

Q: Which composer got hurt? A: Scarlatti (SCAR-latti)

Q: What do you call an anxious piano? A: High strung

Q: What composer produced the most art? A: Mozart (Moz-art)

Sent in by Ethan McGlothlen

Jokes

Practice Tip If you make a mistake in

the same place more than once, don’t ignore it. Even if you think it is just a silly error, a repeated mistake means there is something you need to work on. Mark the notes or measure with a pencil. Then go back and work on just that small spot at a slow speed until you can play it very comfortably. Then try the whole line or section.

A mistake can be a missed note,

an incorrect rhythm or even a

wrong fingering or skipped

dynamic. They all make up

important parts of the music!

Aretha Franklin (1942-2018)

Aretha Franklin was an

American musician who was best known for her singing and song writing, but did you know that she was also a talented pianist? She mostly taught herself to play as a child and often accompa-nied herself when she sang. One critic described her piano playing as magical and inspirational! (Hear her play-ing at www.peforkids.com.)

Piano Trivia Questions

1. A standard grand piano has 88 keys. How many of them are black keys and how many are white keys? ___________ black keys ___________ white keys 2. What hits the strings when you press a key? ______________________

pp 14-15 October.qxp_Layout 1 3/23/20 12:15 PM Page 1

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1 - Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989) Russian/American pianist 9 - Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) French composer 10 - Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) Italian opera 10 - Evgeny Kissin (1971- ) Russian/Israeli pianist 12 - Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) English composer 12 - Luciano Pavarotti (1935-2007) Italian tenor 14 - Gary Graffman (1928- ) American pianist 20 - Charles Ives (1874-1954) American composer 21 - Sir Georg Solti (1912-1997) One of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. 22 - Franz Liszt (1811-1886) Hungarian composer and pianist 25 - Johann Strauss, Jr. (1825-1899) Austrian composer known as the “Waltz King” 26 - Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) Italian composer and harpsichord virtuoso, son of Alessandro Scarlatti 27 - Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) Italian violin virtuoso and composer

Happy Birthday These musicians were all born in October.

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Ann Rohner Callis, editor; Ryan Callis, assistant editor; Malgorzata Bagley, consulting editor. ©2018 Piano Explorer Co., all rights reserved. None of the content may be duplicated or reprinted without advance written permission. Telephone: 888-446-6888 or 847-446-5000 or fax 847.446.6263 www.PEforkids.com, e-mail: circulation@pianoexplorer.net or editor@pianoexplorer.net. Clavier’s Piano Explorer, ISSN-0279-0858, Vol. 39, No. 2, is published monthly except June and August for $6 per student per year for 5 or more copies, $12 each for less than 5 copies (Canada: groups $12 per student, regular $26; Other Foreign Delivery: groups $17 per student, regular $34) Periodicals postage paid at Northbrook, Illinois & add’l. mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Clavier’s Piano Explorer, 1838 Techny Court, Northbrook, IL 60062.

Quiz1. Domenico Scarlatti was born in ________. a. Germany b. Portugal c. Italy d. Spain 2. Scarlatti was most skilled at playing the _______. a. organ b. harpsichord c. violin d. piano 3. Name two other composers who were born the same year as Scarlatti.

_________________________

_________________________ 4. A time signature of 68 is often counted in 2. a. true b. false 5. Which term means the same thing as diminuendo? a. pianissimo b. crescendo c. decrescendo d. subito 6. In a fugue, there is a strong melody with a chord accompa-niment. a. true b. false 7. If the bottom note of a fifth is on a line, the top note is on a __. a. space b. line

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