5. Londonderry Air

This song was already familiar to me from a childhood spent in church. Apparently someone had taken this Irish folk tune and set Christian lyrics to it. So this prior knowledge of the melody meant I was always acutely aware of any mistake I made while tackling this piece. The cross-hand playing we did in Nobody Knows made a come back, but for me the most interesting and novel aspect of the song was that the score's given on three staves. J. T. assures us that, rather than making things more complicated, it actually simplifies things. It certainly makes things less cluttered—and since clutter is actually an aspect of notation that bugs me, I definitely find this three-stave anomaly to be helpful. 

All in all, I think this song was good for me. I'm sort of conservative when it comes to flailing my arms all over the keyboard, and this song eases me into that. Apart from repeatedly crossing hands, a couple instances exist in which its necessary to walk arpeggios some distance down the keyboard—not too extreme, but graduated in a sense that makes it the perfect stepping stone for someone of my modest (but growing!) capabilities. 

I am utterly enamoured of the particular chord pictured above—the one the diminuendo sign seems to also find necessary to point out. It's located in one of the final phrases of the song and consists (as is apparent) of two flattened C's, one flattened G, an A, and an E. It was murderous to read when I first encountered it because just about every infernal note has an accidental against it! But I was more than rewarded at the end of that effort. (Turns out to be an inverted B7 chord when all the key-signature dust clears.) And, if I recall correctly, my response to the combination was to find it at first peculiar and unexpected, then almost in the same instant it became interesting, and finally it settled on just being really satisfying.

Alan Chan's rendition