O Come O Come Emmanuel

Do you have intermediate piano students who just are hesitant to improvise? Often, it's easiest to start teaching improvisation within restraints. This brings a little bit of stress off the student when they know they have limitations on what notes to choose. In this seasonal piece, I've built in a few places for improvisation with restraints given to use the notes of certain pentascales to improvise. The rhythm is also given for the student as well, narrowing down that for them!

The left hand on this piece focuses on an extended arpeggio pattern with finger crossing, while the right hand plays the melody.

I hope you find this a useful piece to help bring out some improvisation skills with your early intermediate students!

Something teaching tips:

Go over the different pentascales in the improvised sections.
This piece should be played with pedal - discuss good pedal technique with your student - when should they change, how often, etc.
The left hand accompaniment pattern has two main patterns - on the starting tonic (e) and subdominant (a). Practice these sections first and discuss different fingering options to work through these accompaniment patterns. I intentionally left out fingerings in the score so that students could come up with options that work for them!