With Chinese New Year just around the corner, I could not resist writing a new ukulele piece. “Year of the Snake” for solo ukulele mimics the snake’s movements. Go up and down the ladder (snakes and ladders). Hammer on. Pull off. Slide up and down the fretboard.
Chinese New Year Calendar
In the lunar calendar, the year of the snake begins on 29th January 2025. All babies born from that date or thereafter will be forever known as “born in the Year of the Snake.” So are those whose age will be a multiple of 12 from this date onwards, until the next Chinese New Year (of the Horse which begins on 17th February 2026).
Pentatonic Scale
A lot of Chinese music is pentatonic. I daresay I grew up hearing and singing such music.
There are two kinds of pentatonic scales. Hemitonic contains half-steps. Anhemitonic pentanic scale does not contain half steps.
Most of the time when we discuss pentonic scales, we are referring to the latter — those with no half-steps between any adjacent pitched notes.
Anhemitonic pentatonic scales can be divided into two types: major and minor.
A pentatonic scale necessarily follows a specific formula. The scale can be extracted from a major scale by taking the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 6th degrees, to avoid any semitones (half-steps).
While composing the short pieces for high G ukulele based on open strings and mostly open strings, I thought of finding the fifth note to make it pentatonic.
My earlier pieces “Take Five on Five” and “The Five Note Dance” are not pentatonic despite containing only five melodic notes.
Move like a snake
How does a snake move? It has no legs. It slides.
It wraps its body around the ukulele neck and spirals to get where it wants to go.
I had many ideas about writing this piece to mimic how a snake moves.
In the end, I decided to keep it simple. Just choose five notes from a pentatonic scale. In this case, four of them can be played with open strings on the ukulele.
The piece deliberately invites the ukulele player to use the left hand techniques of hammer-on, pull-off, and one final slide up and down. These techniques are not necessary to execute the piece.
Next steps
This piece is so hot off the cyberpress that I haven’t harmonized it yet. Please revisit when I have. Then it turns into a duet!
Practice suggestions
Analyze this piece to find any repetitive patterns and to understand the structure.
Notice it only uses five different notes (with two C’s).
Practice each of the indicated left hand techniques several times. This piece is a great opportunity to practice such techniques.
More information
Get access to the sheet music, notification of new work, and table of contents of this Daily Music Writing Project.
After building a daily regimen of writing music and writing about my music, I find it hard to stop and take stock of the Daily Music Writing Project.
I will add this piece to my forthcoming book Chinese songs for ukulele, guitar, and piano.
