The first group of movements for Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition have been posted at The Mutopia Project. I typeset all but the first promenade.  The rest will be uploaded over the coming months.  There is currently no one PDF with all the movements; that will come at the end.

The PDFs have a Share and Share Alike license from Creative Commons, which means basically that you can print and play the music all you like and you can use the typesetting in a derived work as long as you give an attribution and keep the source available.

Take a look around The Mutopia Project for more sheet music, all of which is free, both in the senses of freedom and cost.  I contribute to them as a public service and for fun.  (Yes, I typeset music for fun.)

Musical modes are one of those "tedious" things you learn about in music theory classes.  "Will I ever really need to know what the phrygian mode is?"  They aren't "sexy", but they can help you improvise over jazz chords.

I have a different way of looking at the modes.  Instead of writing them all in no key signature, I relate them all to a C scale so the order of whole and half steps are more apparent. 

You can view or download a PDF of this lesson or view all the lessons in a Google Drive folder.  I've included the LilyPond source file you can change it to your liking.  You can use or modify the lesson any way you want as long as it remains open and you give me an attribution.


Happy playing!

Just a quick note to tell you that I have written up a Jazz exercise for the ii-V progression and put it on Google Drive.  I've posted the PDF and the LilyPond source file so you can see both.  The license, from Creative Commons, basically says that you can use the material, even commercially, as long as the material remains free and I get an attribution.  It's a good way to keep your works "open" without too many restrictions.

If you like the exercise, post a comment and I'll create more.

UPDATE: I added a solo pattern to the ii-V chords.  You can find them both on this Google Drive folder.

"You listen to electronic music?"  People are often a little incredulous when they hear I listen "kid's" music or "weird" music.  At 55, I'm supposed to be over this phase.  Kids (usually meaning anyone 30 or under) either listen to Pop or Rock or Dance, but then they grow up.  Or if someone catches me listen to one of my weirder albums they say, "How can you listen to that?"  The word "crap" is not spoken, but it's there.

The fact is that you probably like some electronic music right now.  If you enjoyed the TV series House MD, you heard a theme song based a Massive Attack's, Teardrop.  Grey's Anatomy's original theme song was based on Psapp's Cosy and the Rocket.  

Just like some people help you to listen to Classical music, I want to help you listen more discerningly to Electronica.  (I'm using that term here mean any music that is produced completely or partially by electronic instruments, as opposed to acoustic instruments with amplification.)

Saying, "I listen to Electronica" is a little like saying "I listen to Rock."  It's a very broad range of styles from very soothing, ethereal sounds to driving pluses to virtual noise.  Electronica is broken up into hundreds of genres.  Yes, hundreds, of which one is "Electronic", so it gets confusing.

In Da Club

Let's start with what a lot of people think of as kid's music: a driving beat, much like the disco beat from the 1970s. The bass drum is playing on 1, 2, 3, and 4; the snare on 2 and 4; the high hat on eighth notes.  Genres like this include House, Trance, and EDM.  This is the kind of music you often hear in clubs.  When you listen to it, first recognise that it was probably written to dance to.  It is purposely repetitive but listen for subtle changes every eight bars or so.  A very accessible example is Underwolrd's Always Loved a Film.  Tiësto's Heroes is a more typical example.

That's Just Weird

On the other end of the spectrum is Intelligent Dance Music or IDM.  (This is misnomer.  No one would dance to it, and it's not so much "intelligent" as esoteric.)  This is the stuff I like.  It can range from slightly odd to highly experimental.  The common thread is that it usually still has a 4/4 beat in it, often with a very complex drum line.  This is the Jazz of electronic music.  Some people love, others hate it.  Listen for and enjoy the intricacies of the song.  Even if the music sounds random, there is often repeating themes and overall structure.

An easy listen is Aphex Twin's Flim.  For a more challenging listen, try Squarepusher's Go! Spastic.

Chill Out

If you want to hear something down tempo that won't put you to sleep, "chill out" is your genre.  It is characterized by a quiet but driving beat with ethereal layers on top. You wouldn't use this music for meditation, but certainly for work or study.  It usually doesn't have to be listened to closely to enjoy.  Try Zero 7's I Have Seen to see if you like it.

Rock Out

On the other hand, sometime you want to rock!  "Big beat" is the style that was made popular by the film The Matrix.  (I'm not usually a fan of soundtracks, but the album from this film is excellent.)  The Propellerheads' Take California is an amusing example of a song having a lot of fun with sound bites.  This is the genre that is most likely to express overt emotion.  Like Funk, the drum beat often plays something on every sixteenth note in the bar, making the sound very "full".

What next?

We've seen a good sampling of some of the broader types of music in Electronica, but if you really want see what's out there, try the website Every Noise at Once.  It's a scatter map of all the musical genres that The Echo Nest knows about, not just Electronica.  It's a great place to discover new music and styles.  Have fun!

My dad once said to me, "There's no better deal than buying sheet music."  This is still true.  I recently purchased a Peters Edition of Bach's Goldberg Variations.  Looking at this and listening to Glenn Gould perform the piece really inspired me to get back some of my "Classical" chops.  All for about $20.  (The CD cost me $1.  Amazingly, I found it in a Salvation Army bin!)

All this said, there is a place for open source sheet music for editions and compositions that have passed into public domain.  One of those places is The Mutopia Project, where you can find a PDF and a MIDI file all sorts of music, such as the second fugue in The Well Tempered Keyboard.  

If you followed that link, you may have noticed that you can also download the LilyPond file.  What's that?  It's one of the things that makes me so excited about the site.  All the music is written in the GNU Project's LilyPond language.  It's a little like HTML, where a simple text file can be rendered as a beautiful graphic.  Being a programmer and a musician can having it's advantages!

The thing I like about having the text "source" file for the score is that if I know LilyPond, I can change the way the finished output looks.  Take our fugue from above.  It is very unadorned, which is good if you're not a beginner and you want to interpret the music on your own.  (This is something Peters Edition is good about.)  

We pianists write our fingering and expressions on the paper music.  This is fine most of the time, but what if you want to publish an edition yourself?  Or say you are a piano teacher who wants her students to have sheet music with her interpretation?  Marking up the music each time is tedious.  But with a few changes to the text source, the score could look like this:

Since I edited this myself, there's no copyright on it.  I'm free to email a PDF to my friend or, as I did here, make a PNG picture of it and post it on a website.  If you wanted to know how this sounds and you're not a pianist, you could create a MIDI file from the source.  Or, like the people at Mutopia, you could find old, public domain editions and make them available to everyone.

How about custom piano lessons?

If this doesn't sound exciting to you, that's okay.  We programmers just like to compile things.

You don't have to know comedy improv to be an improv piano player.  But it helps.

In improv (the acting kind) there is something called "pimping".  This is when you put your fellow comedian on the spot, either by giving them some unusual attribute (endowing) or calling for some difficult action ("Show us that dance routine you've been working on!")  For beginners it's considered bad form, but experienced improvers will do this all the time.  You may have seen the TV show Whose Line Is It, Anyway? where one by one the actors come to a party and are given some unusual trait?  It's like that, but unexpected.

So how does knowing this improve your performance as an improv musician?  Say you hear this on stage:

"I'm so happy to be a Bloboslovian!"

"That's great.  Hey, how does that national anthem go again?"

Player One is being pimped.  The first rule of improv is, you never deny the situation.  Player One needs to start singing.  Of course he or she can do this a capella but even better is for you to start playing some stately chords of the Bloboslovian national anthem.

In a sense, you're being pimped too.  Player Two is saying, We need to hear a song now! and it's up to you to provide it.  Why?

There's a scene in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? where Eddie (the detective) and Roger have been handcuffed together for a while.  Eddie is awkwardly filing at the chain and Roger slips off his side of the cuffs to help.  Eddie, incredulous, says, "You mean you could have taken those off at anytime?"  "Not at anytime," says Roger, "only when it was funny."

This is one of your guiding precepts: play when it's funny. If someone on stage wants to hear Bloboslovian national anthem, you play Onward, Bloboslovia.  If someone gets arrested, maybe you play the theme to Dragnet.

But only if it's funny.