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Comment by johtso | Hacker News Reader

Great choice of song! If you ever have access to a piano, I highly recommended trying to fumble your way through Beethoven's moonlight sonata, even if you don't know how to play piano.

Not quite sure how to put it into words, but it's absolutely exhilarating hearing your own fingers produce these huge sounds and intense chord progressions. Every time I managed to find the right chord I'd get such a rush. "Oh no he didn't.. he went _there_!?"

This webpage gives a little taste of that feeling. If you enjoyed it, try to give the real thing a go!

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When I started taking piano lesions a few years ago, one of the first rules that my teacher established was: "No Moonlight Sonata" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My guess is that it resembles in a way playing "Smoke on the water" in a guitar shop.

that's sad. a yearning musician should be able to learn and play whatever they want and whatever makes them feel a certain thing. moonlight sonata evokes something in me i can't explain (which is probably why it's a legendary piece). having strong opinions on what to play when learning feels so gatekeepy. i would have dropped that teacher quickly

Yes, but a teacher I think has the right to decide that after teaching the same song 500 times they never want to hear it again.

I think people can be allowed one song they are tired of.

I’d guess the reason would be different, I think that a person that gets bothered by music repetition would not work as a music teacher.

You might avoid moonlight sonta, but then it’s 500 servings of fur elise.

Or they've learned through their experience they simply don't like the kind of person who insists on learning the one song they like, and can't teach them well, so it's a good filter.

But hey, not every teacher is for every student and vice-versa; and that's okay.

a major rule should instead be: "choose the song you love and let's learn it" -- tells me a lot more about the kind of teaching they do than off the bat shooting down songs. sounds obnoxious. teachers can do whatever they want ofc. doesn't make them good teachers

Naw, the priority is the student not the teacher

My kids just started piano lessons last night and definitely I was a little unsure to hear one of them starting out with I Like Coffee ("the knuckle song"), but I quickly went through this same thought process myself: it's great they're off to a good start doing something that is fun and exciting for them.

Actually, teachers are human beings and they're allowed to have preferences, likes and dislikes. It's okay that not every teacher is for every student 100% of the time. Something can be a bad student/teacher fit without it being a negative value judgment ("sad", "gatekeeping", "drop").

teachers are held to a higher standard because their responsibility is a lot higher than the average citizen, so while theyre fully allowed to do whatever they want and have preferences -- i won't hold them to a standard that i do an average person. they need to above all have the highest patience and the least amount of gatekeeping, full stop.

I wouldn't be surprised if the reason it's so famous is simply because it has that title.

B. wrote 32 sonatas, only a few have titles, and they're usually the most known ones. No one remembers "Opus 27 No. 2".

Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful movement, but there's much better ones among his sonatas.

Stairway to Heaven, a la Wayne's World.

No Stairway? Denied!

There's a Highway to Hell

Smoke on the water is great starter song - and given that amateurs and new players are a large part of people buying guitars, makes sense as a guitar shop song too!

Agreed! And a skilled teacher would start by teaching Smoke on the Water with dyads (two-note chords) and then use that as a starting point for two discussions. First, one about barre chords and second, one about the same chords in their open format.

If the student is into classic rock, it's easy to expand this lesson into Cat Scratch Fever, Rock You Like a Hurricane, and Iron Man which are all similar to Smoke on the Water.

The bigger issue in guitar shops is that the least experienced player is the one salivating to hook up to the Marshall stack and play smoke on the water. Make them demo small combo amps instead and we are all good

Nobody should work with a pompous instructor who decides what is / isn't acceptable on an instrument. As a former guitar teacher, I would help my students learn whatever they wanted - Van Halen, Brittany Spears, Garth Brooks, whatever.

All music has something of merit if you're willing to look for it.

I mean I agree with you but I also understand not wanting to do the same fucking song done badly for millionth time.

> I also understand not wanting to do the same fucking song done badly for millionth time

My wife is a piano teacher. This describes a large part of her job, especially since she focuses on beginners. She'd be so happy if she could teach "Moonlight Sonata" all day. "Old Macdonald" is much more common.

My wife does feel looked-down-upon by some in her profession who see teaching advanced students as more prestigious. But the process of taking a student from beginner to Beethoven (not that she stops there with her students) is every bit as challenging as taking a student from Beethoven to Rachmaninoff.

I can't understand why someone would look down on people teaching beginners. If you teach beginners you play perhaps the most critical role in someone's development. For one, it is the stage where someone is going to decide if this is something they enjoy, and want to carry on doing, or not. Second, you are taking someone from nothing to something. That's a huge step.

We as a society need to step down our high horses. All jobs have a purpose without which our society would not be what it is today, good or bad.

You're spot on.

My wife is a middle school mathematics teacher (and a damn good one). Sooooo many former students (now high schoolers) have approached her and said, "Because of you, I excelled in math in high school...and I love it!"

She had a student last year who actually told her in a very long letter, "You taught me that math matters. You taught me that I MATTER."

The earliest teachers / coaches / mentors set the foundation which is absolutely critical for all future learning.

Want to experience the highest of highs? Become a teacher. Alas, being do close to kids who are changing so rapidly (and often struggling with things outside of school) it also comes with some pretty deep lows.

I was a teacher and the enormity of the highs and lows is spot on. It's not a job for the faint hearted.

I remember someone many years arguing in the media that we shouldn't have the best coaches for the national soccer team. We should have the best coaches for our kids, and in a few years that would pay off tremendously. While I don't know how to do that in practice, that upside-down thinking kinda struck a cord with me. We should do that with more things.

I think it's more it's probably not a very effective piece to learn with. You can learn a few techniques from your teacher and then it's just practicing the variations and transitions, because it repeats roughly the same changes over and over. Learning the piece during your lessons is likely a waste.

I have bad news concerning pop music.

Very little pop music is as repetitive as the moonlight sonata. In that respect it is more closely related to trance than pop. Most pop music is also shorter, and an easier mix of even shorter movements.

In other words, most of it will be over a lot sooner for the poor, suffering teacher.

Do you play piano?

Wonderwall :-)

Smoke on the Water in a guitar shop is annoying simply because people playing loudly in guitar shops are annoying and that's one of the most widespread stereotypes of something an annoying person would play loudly at a guitar shop (incidentally, I'd argue that Stairway to Heaven is the more widespread stereotype).

A guitar instructor shouldn't criticize a beginner student for wanting to learn Smoke on the Water, at least assuming it's in the instructor's wheelhouse—it's also okay for a particular instructor to offer a specific curriculum rather than taking requests from the student.

I had a similar teacher, but it was no fur elise

My guess is that reason is that Moonlight Sonata is not hard to learn, just tedious to teach a beginner, because of the endless repetition of relatively short phrases shifting and changing a little bit at a time.

This is what makes it fantastic, but learning to play it is mostly learning a few phrases and recognizing the shifts, which I can imagine would drive your teacher nuts until you're at a stage where you can pick up the changes rapidly enough sight reading to not have to remember every transition.

I'd guess - as a very mediocre piano player - that it's as a result low "bang for the buck" for a beginner on top of annoying to your teacher.

Upside is once you get even just relatively mediocre at sight reading it's fairly simple to work your way through yourself.

Whilst the first movement is fairly technically straightforward, the last movement is pretty tricky and requires solid technique; I certainly wouldn’t characterise it as “easy” even if it’s not the hardest piece in the repertoire.

If anything, the issue is that as a whole, the piece is fairly technically demanding, but the first movement is simply enough for most intermediate pianists to sight-read, so something that seems approachable soon becomes impossible for anyone below a certain level.

I can buy that it's technically demanding to do the last movement well, in the correct tempo, but learning it to a standard a relative beginner will be happy to achieve was not hard for me. But that may well be another distinction that makes it frustrating for a teacher to try to teach to a beginner, because, yes, it will likely be noticeably flawed.

A lot of music teachers are like that. I personally consider it shitty. My friend's first violin teacher (when she was 10 years old) made her do empty string bowing for a year. Just pull and push bowing. Now, don't get me wrong, technique is extremely important, and a lot of teachers have "if you can't do it well, don't do it" mentality. But really these people miss music is also tons of fucking fun. For a 10 year old infant, you really need a better curriculum to motivate her than just perfecting empty bowing.

I tell people: you wanna play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto? Go fucking play it. I mean you're not gonna play it well, even some world-class pianists can't, but if it gives you pleasure to try, and motivates you to play piano, that's fine. If you're gonna be a professional pianist, or you're a student at university, it's an entirely different matter. Some people are just hobbyists, or they want to be composers and learn piano to help compose (which is an extremely important core skill for a composer). Those people can just sit down and play whatever they want, along with things that are at their level that they can perfectly play.

This happened to my sister. She was having fun playing Disney and ABBA songs, then changed to a different teacher who discouraged her from playing anything but classical. She quit playing within a year and now refuses even to play her favourites.

I give the Moonlight Sonata credit for me becoming a decent pianist. It was above my level when I was a kid, but I wanted to learn it, and my teacher encouraged that. With enough practice on a piece that was so far above my current ability, I seriously leveled up as a pianist.

My teacher's ability to help me learn what I wanted to learn made me so invested in piano as a kid. Many kids don't stick with music because (IMO) they can't find a way to enjoy it or be invested in it. For me, what I enjoyed happened to be Beethoven, but at other times I just wanted to improvise various modern songs. (Which can be as simple or as complex as you want, but a lot of classically trained teachers can't/won't/don't teach improvisation.)

Technique and theory only get you so far. Being able to emotionally invest in your playing is what sets musicians apart, imo. And as you're growing as a musician (even when you're a kid), you're going to sound like shit if you just try to monotonously follow the instructions. I'm not sure enough music teachers get the importance of being personally and emotionally invested in the moment as you're playing. (One-buttock playing is a good word for this: https://youtu.be/r9LCwI5iErE)

The choice of what you want to play is pretty important in keeping you invested.

This hits the nail. I agree that there are tons of music teachers, especially classically trained teachers who are like this. They can't/won't/don't teach improvising, composing, encourage you to develop your personal style, ask you to bring your favorite pieces to play, teach you musicianship etc... My own violin teacher taught me nothing other than playing Bach et al. I did pass all those ABRSM violin exams, so people would call me a "good" violinist but I had absolutely zero idea when it comes to ear training, interval training, composing, improvising, listening to music, rhythmic training, notation, music theory etc. Nothing. Now as an adult, I'm composing, writing my own pieces I like that other musicians play, and I'm only now realizing how incredibly shitty my music education was. They made me a robot. I didn't learn any music, I just learned how to correctly move the bow.

I started piano lessons at age 5, I’ve taught piano, and I still arrange music and accompany professionally from time to time, so I’m a fairly snobbish classically trained pianist, and it is my considered opinion that that is a lovely piece of music and every pianist should play it any time they want. If you teach, and you don’t like the Moonlight Sonata, you should hold your nose and teach it anyway.

The first movement is one of the only pieces I can play on the piano. Yes indeed, anyone can learn it! I came from a musical family, but never really put the effort into learning the piano.

I'm not sure where I heard this, but Beethoven wrote this for one of his students that he was in love with. The first movement was purposefully written for a newcomer to be able to play--such as for whom he admired, but the third movement was a representation of his anger over being rejected, and is one of the hardest piano pieces to play.

That story is about Fur Elise, not Moonlight Sonata. The name, of course, meaning "for Elise," the name of the woman in question.

The 3rd movement is not one of the hardest pieces to play. It’s like medium-hard. It’s not even the hardest sonata - that would be the Hammerklavier.

If one wants to play a well-known sonata I'd rather start with the Tempest. Considerably easier than Moonlights 3rd. And as beautiful imho, the 3rd movement especially.

Not sure that was the goal, but the text accompanying the first run makes it seem like I'm supposed to get the rhythm exactly in the spacing indicated on paper/screen.

But one thing I love about the moonlight sonata is exactly how amazing one can play with the spacing of the notes. So yeah, I had a lot of fun with this but I'm not sure it's the best choice of piece. :P

What you're talking about is called playing rubato (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempo_rubato), and I think that is part of the point here. The control that you get over the timing allows you to express yourself musically / perform the music with your own interpretation.

The instructions may be a bit unclear, but I think they are suggesting that it works better artistically if you play some parts evenly (the three-note sequences that repeat) and add your timing variations to the other parts. This creates a kind of a baseline of regularity that makes the variations stand out by contrast. (It also gives the feeling that you're capable of even, steady timing and the timing variations you do incorporate are there on purpose.)

Indeed! I think this is what makes this so fun. I can also highly recommend listening to various recordings of the moonlight sonata and notice how different it is depending on the precise timing the pianist uses.

Not a bad idea for the first and maybe the second movement. The third is definitely for advanced students. Nevertheless if you have command of a few basic keyboard skills, learning to play a passage or two from a really advanced piece can be advantageous for later work though few teachers will recommend it. Let's go for the ultimate but assume you're not actually taking lessons!

How about Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit? Certainly one of the most difficult pieces ever written. It's quite possible to work productively on the first page of 'Ondine' and as with the Moonlight sonata, it's exhilarating to hear yourself play that exquisite tune - distilled as it were, into its essence. Plenty of other possibilities such as passages from Mozart piano concertos. A bonus is that one's appreciation of great artists becomes much enhanced.

Moonlight Sonata 3rd Movement is one of the most exhilarating songs I've ever heard, if not the most. I can't believe a piece of music written a few hundred years ago still sounds so modern and exciting and new, it's an incredible work.

I urge everyone to listen to it, specifically the 3rd movement. It really shocks me that Beethoven or anyone could write a piece of music so brilliant like that!

One of my favorite 'reinterpretations' of the piece is by Meganeko, link here:

https://soundcloud.com/meganeko/beethoven-moonlight-sonata-3...

There's many movements like that through his sonatas. You might enjoy the Sonata no 27 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLzQbyWfBnY

it starts with a catching rhythmic pattern, it gets calm and lyrical but it builds up to incredible heights.

I agree! This really gives a taste of the feeling of playing moonlight for real on the piano.

I also realized there are some notes I might have been playing wrong for many years (oops)

Moonlight Sonata is a good example of how you can be "brain-limited" in learning a piece, rather than limited by technique and finger dexterity.

Moonlight is very easy on the fingers. But the constant variations are a challenge for people with poor memorization and slow recall like myself. You hit an F# instead of G# on the third repeat of a pattern and it's all over.

Totally agree with this. Moonlight Sonata one of my favorite pieces to play while I was growing up. I recall showing my piano teacher I wanted to play it - she was classically trained and taught very advanced pianists (I was not one of those) - and I remember her just rolling her eyes. I kept playing it anyway in my free time...

Moonlight sonata was hard for me, still is… because I only ever became fluent up to three sharps and three flats key signatures. And moonlight is in a key that is 4 sharps. Makes it very hard to fumble through

That's interesting. I suppose I was lucky, because I started as a kid with traditional piano lessons but lost interest around age 12, but my interest in piano was rekindled when I discovered the guitar and was introduced to the idea of playing by ear. I got back into piano by playing along with a lot of pop and rock songs, so E major has been a very comfortable key signature for me since it's such a great guitar key signature.

Ease of playing the piece vs ease of sight reading the music is different though

5 flats is easier to play mechanically, imo, because hitting black keys is often easier

True. I never found it difficult to play aside from sight reading the key signature

A lot of classical music is this way to be honest, there is a lot of formulaic composition (I don’t mean that derogatory at all) and once you get the patterns it’s easy to extend, maybe even play it like a fake book.

I recall a lot of what we know was originally something closer to figured bass in the first place and later fully arranged by someone who wasn’t the original composer. Or, take a look at Mozart Requiem for example, only a small percent of which was actually manuscribed by the man himself.

One thing to think about, if you're in common practice music, most of the accidentals will be there for a specific reason (e.g. chromatic grace notes, applied dominants, harmonic or melodic minor, parallel key borrowing, augmented sixth chord). Music theory classes can help understand these if you're not familiar. But the thing to know is whether the particular reason involves raising or lowering the natural note in the scale.

One thing that frustrates me about music notation is that when you have a key signature with lots of flats or sharps, it's hard for me to tell at a glance what the accidental is doing relative to the key signature. I've gotta look back and remember what was the unmodified note.

For me, my brain kind of locks in to the key signature eventually. It might be worth practicing scales and simple chord progressions in each key to try to imprint it in your brain. I found keys with lots of sharps and flats intimidating for a long time, too.

Moonlight Sonata is a great choice, the arpeggios makes the song quite recognizable.

(I don't play the piano but have learned the guitar version of Moonlight Sonata, and it looks very much like this version.)

I can't not cringe slightly when someone calls something like Moonlight Sonata a "song".

Reading back my comment now, I know what you mean! I guess "piece" would have been a better word, or even just "music".

Yeah, just music. I have heard people use song to mean any music before, though, so it's probably something I have to deal with. I do like some songs but 90% of the music I listen to is comprised of either tracks/records (electronic music) or pieces (classical).

You're right. It is amazing.

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