Beautiful Irish piano sheet music, now in Am for your late elementary students! Formerly, this piece was only available in Bm.
This very beautiful piece in a minor key will be loved by your students for its lilting melody and gentle broken chords.
We first heard this lovely song on a Irish harp CD some years ago, and one of my daughters came up with a piano arrangement. It has been a "must-have" piano piece for many of my students ever since.
(And now you can SING IT, too, if you wish! Check out the original vocal lyrics for Keegan's Waltz, contributed by a young musician named Matthew. Notice that Matthew has changed the order of the music to suit his lyrics.)
Please scroll down the page for the download links.
Here is the original version - just the same, but in a higher key, with black notes!
Also squeezed onto a single page - not quite as student-friendly:
Please scroll down the page for the download links.
An opportunity for putting emotion into the music
One reason I love to have students select this Irish piano sheet music is because there is so much room for expressive dynamics in Keegan's Waltz. A student who really works at it can learn a lot about shaping melodies, and going with the rise and fall of a phrase.
And learning how to execute grace notes
When the main theme returns in measure 20, it returns with a difference, a bit like theme and variation, but really just with embellishments on the melody.
Easy grace notes are attached to just a couple of the already-familiar melody notes, so young pianists aren't intimidated but intrigued instead. In fact, most of the students to whom I give this music try to sneak extra improvisations into Keegan's Waltz -- and I let them!
A light touch on the "echo" sound
There is a figure which appears three times in the song -- the right hand melody note "D" which softly rolls up to an "A," in which the notes of a D chord end up being held.
Watch your students as they learn these notes - some students look at the tiny grace notes and guess instead of actually reading. The correct notes are D, E, F#, and A. The chord tones are held, while the E is released. (In the A minor version, all these notes are down one step. We are looking at the 4th full measure for the first instance of this effect.)
This motif is perhaps the most difficult part of the music -- it should sound lightly brushed, almost like a whisper, and not at all heavy. Though tricky to achieve, it is one of the things that makes this piano piece so appealing. It should sound a bit like an echo, not like part of the melody.
I know you will enjoy this beautiful free Celtic sheet music! And check out the vocal version - you will enjoy it, if you like courtly poetry or Irish songs about love.
The links to the piano PDFs:
Download new Keegan's Waltz in A minor, 2 pages
Download Irish piano sheet music to print "Keegan's Waltz" in Bm
All the first-year material I give my beginner students.
Piano keyboard sheets, scales, chords, note-reading exercises, and over 256 pages of music!
This beautiful song book for piano & voice "Esther, For Such a Time as This", available as a digital download, tells the riveting story of the time when Jews in ancient Persia faced a foe named Haman, and how a brave young queen risked her life to save her people.
A good choice for a singing story-teller, an operatic group, a short theater production, or a class of children!
This book is also available from Amazon as a paperback.
This book is available as a digital download from this site. Visit this page to see some free examples from the book.
It is also available from Amazon as a paperback!
This is the perfect easy start for little pianists.
And when they start reading white-key notes on the staff, this is a fun easy resource to say each week, "Choose a new black-key song at home this week and figure it out to show me next lesson!" They will be spending more time at the piano.
A perfect read aloud storybook
for little boys or girls.
The Adventures of Tonsta highlight the travels of a very young boy with a good heart, who goes about helping folk in trouble.
With a red cap on his head and a sack of tools slung over his shoulder, Tonsta seems to meet people in distress wherever he goes.
Lots of trolls in this book - including one who gives him a Christmas gift!
Hi, I'm Dana! (Say that like "Anna".) I'm the owner of Music-for-Music-Teachers.com, and a newer site, SingTheBibleStory.com.
Like some of you, I've been playing the piano since early childhood, and have added a few other instruments along the way, plus an interest in arranging and composing music.
You can find out more about me and the reason for this website at my About Me page.