Turkish March
Loading the instrument… Pitch runs up the page and time across it. Touch a note to hear it, or play the whole melody. Sound could not load.
How hard is it?
Hard, and not because someone remembered it that way. These five numbers come off the melody itself, the same way the app grades its lessons.
- Fastest passage
- 227 ms
- Ornaments
- 0
- Quick leaps
- 0
- Span
- 12
- Black keys
- 50%
per note, at 132 bpm
nothing to decorate
of a fourth or wider
semitones, F#4 to F#5
of the notes
- its quickest sustained passage runs at about 227 ms a note - a running figure
- 50% of its notes fall on black keys
- it covers 32 notes across 7 phrases, which is how it is taught in the app, one breath at a time
What you can play it on
4 of the instruments in the workshop can teach this tune. Where the number differs from "all of them", the reason is the instrument, not the song: a diatonic kalimba has no sharps, and a pentatonic handpan or guzheng has no fourth or seventh at all.
- Piano at written pitch
- Guitar down 1 octave
- Violin at written pitch
- Accordion at written pitch
- Kalimba not this one
- Handpan not this one
- Guzheng not this one
- Drums not this one
- Xylophone not this one
Where this transcription came from
Beethoven, Six Variations Op. 76 (1809) - the theme is his Turkish March from The Ruins of Athens, the one used everywhere since. Public domain, from mutopiaproject.org/ftp/BeethovenLv/O76/Six_Variations_Opus76 - midi_read.py Six_Variations_Opus76.mid 0 32 --track 2 --scale 2 Both halves of the eight-bar theme, written with the eighth as the beat for its 2/4. Not to be confused with Mozart's Rondo alla Turca: two different composers wrote a Turkish march, and both are here.
Every melody in this catalogue is public domain and was transcribed from a named source, then checked against it by a tool rather than by ear. None of them was written down from memory - which is the usual reason two versions of a folk tune on the internet disagree.
Learn it properly
Tapping the ribbon is not the same as playing it. In the app this melody arrives as a lesson: the notes fall in time on the instrument you picked, the board waits when you miss, and it counts the phrase again rather than moving on.