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Piano sheet music for kids · Classical · Level 4: Up to the C above
Largo from the New World Symphony (Goin’ Home)
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 4/4, 15 bars. Press Play to hear it on a real piano, slow it down, or hear one hand at a time; click any note to start from there; print it for the music stand.
The chords in this piece
Your left hand plays four chords in this piece. The shaded keys are the notes of each chord, and the numbers under them are the left-hand fingers (1 is the thumb). Slow held chords, two to a bar, with the oom-pah (low C, then E and G) in the middle section. All the common piano chords, with diagrams →
C – E – G · Left hand 5 3 1
C, E and G: the home chord. Little finger on C, middle finger on E, thumb on G.
C – F – A · Left hand 5 2 1
C, F and A. The same three notes as F major, rearranged so the little finger stays on C; the thumb stretches up one key to A.
B – D – G · Left hand 5 3 1
B, D and G. The same three notes as G major, rearranged so the hand barely moves: the little finger slides down one key from C to B.
B – D – F · Left hand 5 3 2
B, D and F: G7 without its bottom G. Little finger down to B, finger 3 on D, finger 2 on F.
About this arrangement
The cor anglais tune from the slow movement of Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony (1893), as calm as a hymn. The rhythm to learn is the dotted quaver and semiquaver (dotted eighth and sixteenth), “lo-ong short”, which opens most of the bars: E. G, G. Dvořák’s key is D flat; here it is C, so the right hand sits in C position, reaching the little finger up to the C above in bars 5 to 8 and the thumb down to A below middle C in bars 12 to 14. Bar 14 starts with a dotted crotchet, a beat and a half, on D. The left hand plays plain two-beat chords, mostly C and G7, with F in bars 6 and 8, so the right hand can sing.
Practice tip: Say “lo-ong short” for every dotted pair and keep the short note really short; it belongs to the long note after it. Play the whole piece softly and slowly, and let the left-hand chords change without a bump.
A short history
Antonín Dvořák wrote his Symphony No. 9 in E minor, “From the New World”, in 1893, during the three years he spent in New York as director of the National Conservatory of Music. The New York Philharmonic gave the first performance at Carnegie Hall on 16 December 1893, conducted by Anton Seidl, and the audience applauded after every movement.
The Largo’s theme, played by the cor anglais over soft strings, is Dvořák’s own, though many people take it for an old spiritual: he had been listening to the spirituals his student Harry Burleigh sang to him, and he said the music of America’s Black and Native peoples should be the basis of an American school of composition.
In 1922 another of his students, William Arms Fisher, set words to the tune as “Goin’ Home”, and it has been sung as a hymn ever since.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Antonín Dvořák, 1893
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 4/4
- Length
- 15 bars
- Tempo
- Slowly, like a hymn, crotchet = 60
- Difficulty
- Level 4: Up to the C above (piece 137 of 201)
- Type
- Classical
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Chords
- C, F, G and G7 (diagrams above)
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
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