I need help playing Gates of Kiev in PIctures of an Exhibition by Moussorgsky?

Question

How do you play the part right after the big scale? On my copy it has all the notes as half noted with a bracket with a 3 over the notes. What does that mean? It's in 2/2 time so I know the half notes aren't really half notes.

Answer 1

Those are half note triplets. Three half notes played in the time you would normally play two.

Typically we learned to count duplets as "1 and 2 and" and so forth, and triplets were counted as "1 on-ly 2 on-ly"

In order to understand the rhythmic relationship, divide each of the two beats into three, so that you have six pulses in the measure. Each of the half notes in the triplet (under the bracket) then will receive 2 of those pulses.

You follow?

So instead of accenting pulses 1 and 4 (TA ta ta TA ta ta) you accent pulses 1, 3, and 5 (TA ta TA ta TA ta)

Good luck