The source score is a piano duet — two players, four hands. This page reduces it to one player: the upper part goes to your right hand, the lower to your left. Every drill shows both hands on one grid, with the count written on every attack.
Read the counts down the column: 1 is the downbeat of a bar, 2 3 4 are the other beats, and e & a are the sixteenths in between. Any two cells sharing a column are struck at the same instant.
Bars 1–8 spin the figure A A E A · C A E G — the same notes, at the same pitch, as bars 1 and 2 of the white-key Wukong page. That arrangement takes this piece as its raw material. If you learned that one, section A is already in your hands.
Each part in the source is a single line, so the reduction is clean: upper part to the right hand, lower to the left, nothing dropped. No moment asks either hand for more than five notes or a stretch wider than a tenth — that was checked across all 65 bars, not assumed.
Each drill names the keys both hands need. Where a hand uses five notes or fewer, set it once and play the whole passage without shifting — that covers most of the piece. Where it does shift, the drill says so and treats the fingering as a suggestion.
Hear the whole thing before you learn any of it. The drills further down teach the sections in printed order; what you play is a separate decision. Move the blocks below and the whole piece plays back in that sequence — every bar kept, nothing dropped, just resequenced. Sections A–D are the Journey to the West theme; E and F are where the arrangement leaves it.
Playback follows the tempo at the top of the page. Switch between as printed and with rolls to hear the difference the spread chords make: bar 8 becomes a single roll instead of seven hits, the four held bass chords in bars 17–20 spread bottom to top, and the last chord of the piece opens out slowly. Everything else is identical, so the comparison is clean. Both settings play the voices no pair of hands can reach in bars 5–7 and 39–40 — a synthesiser has no hands.
This page is built from the duet score in your repository, transformed in three ways. Nothing else was altered, and nothing was added from outside that file.
Do not begin at bar 1 and grind forward. Section D is the only genuinely hard part, so it goes first and gets the most days. Section A is nearly free if you know the Wukong page.
| Order | Section | Bars | Why here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | D · Running sixteenths | 24–31 | The hardest eight bars. Half speed, hands separately, every day. |
| 2 | A · Ostinato opening | 1–8 | Free if you know the Wukong page — same figure, same pitch. |
| 3 | B · The theme enters | 9–18 | The tune. Keep the left hand under the melody. |
| 4 | F · Return | 41–56 | Sixteen bars, but much of it echoes B and C. |
| 5 | E · The still centre | 32–40 | Easy notes, hard control. The left hand must stay even. |
| 6 | C and G | 19–23, 57–65 | Short. Learn them last and join everything up. |
Change on the left hand's harmony, not on the melody. In section A that is once a bar — the left hand holds one chord per bar and the pedal can hold with it. In section E take a fresh pedal on each bar of the broken arpeggio, or the whole thing turns to mud.
The score carries no dynamic marks, so shape it yourself: A quiet and even, B growing as the tune arrives, C and D at full strength, E suddenly soft, F rebuilding, G thinning out to the single closing chord. That last chord is C major after a piece that has been in A minor throughout — let it ring long enough to register.