I'm relatively new to the piano and learning Pure Imagination. Here a part from early into the piece:
In the 4th bar, there are 2 Ab's in a row and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do at this point - do I treat it as a quarter note + the dotted half or just hold the Ab the whole time? I feel this would be obvious to most people and I'm missing something here.
Personally, I would play the Ab twice (once for the chord, once for the dotted minim/half note) but then hold it down after playing it for the second time. The second Ab has its stem upwards which signifies that it's a different voice - and from what I can see, it's part of the melody of the piece, so it's a pretty important note.
Different voices need to each have their notes' lengths add up to one bar. So, this is okay.
Because each voice adds up to 4 crotchets/quarter notes in that bar (you can tell which voice is which by looking at the different directions of the stems).
However, this isn't:
You'd need to add a rest before that note to make it okay:
This applies to situations where the notes cross over:
It's not obvious what to do, but in the context given, playing the Ab twice is probably the best thing to do.
The notation shows musical intent: if you had an instrument that could play two A's at the same pitch, you'd hold the first A, and then add the second one. But a piano can't do it, so you have to interrupt the first A and begin the second one, while representing the intent that the first A is "held". Since you use the pedal, you have the leeway to release the A early. Otherwise, you'd probably be aiming to make the interruption as short as possible while still getting the full attack for the second A.
You could also invert the chord a bit, and separate it between hands differently: change the first A4 to A3, and play it in the left hand.
X: 1
M: 4/4
L: 1/4
%%score (T1 T2 T3 T4) (B1 B2)
V: T1 clef=treble
V: T2 clef=treble
V: T3 clef=treble
V: T4 clef=treble
V: B1 clef=bass
V: B2 clef=bass
K:Db
[V:T1] E4|
[V:T2] F4|
[V:T3] cA3|
[V:T4] x2B,D
[V:B1] D,4|
[V:B2] A,4|
This is one of those piano/vocal/guitar arrangements. They're written to be as flexible as possible. The piano part includes the melody in case you want to play it as a piano solo (which it sounds like you do), but also leaves the melody separate so that you can easily omit it if you were accompanying a singer. Then there are chords for a guitarist to strum along too.
That's what's going on. There's actually three layers for some reason:
In my opinion the latter two should be combined into one layer, so you'd have the whole notes plus a layer of 4 quarter notes. I can't figure out why it's split like that.
But at any rate, the idea is that there's an accompaniment and a melody separately, and they happen to overlap. They give you all the info you could need, and it's your task to figure out what you want to actually play.
