Ykhjuy

I'm a beginner at piano, and struggling to understand what I'm looking at here, and how to play it. I've bought and downloaded some piano sheet music from musicnotes.com. It's in 12/8 time, and part of it looks like this:

How am I to interpret the two-note chord I've circled in red?

As far as I can tell

• the note marked X is D below middle C,


• the note marked Y is A flat above middle C (where middle C is marked with a blue arrow), and


• the fact that they share the same stem in the treble clef suggests I should play them together with my right hand.

But that's really odd because (a) it would make more sense to write note Y on the treble clef itself, not on ledger lines above the bass clef, and (b) the interval between the two notes is a 12th, so the stretch is surely unreasonable for almost everyone.

This is just poor notation, plain and simple. My guess is that you're supposed to play the D and A♭ below middle C here, with both pitches in the right hand.

Do you have a recording of this piece? If so, your best bet is to listen to the recording and see if that is in fact D/A♭ there.

Otherwise, perhaps there's a system in place at musicnotes.com that allows you to report "bugs" in the notation, or the ability to contact the transcriber (if it was even a human!).

Implying this is not an error, I would play it like this:

• Using the Sostenuto pedal for the low C and G on the bass clef


• play the chord you highlighted normally, D on the treble clef with the right hand, and the A♭ on the bass clef with the left hand


• 'release' the sostenuto pedal when you have to play the E♭ on the bass clef.

I suspect this is the MusicNotes transposition engine failing at an extreme degree of transposition. What's the piece? DID you specify a transposition? My bet is on the interval of a 6th continuing, the lower note is intended to be F.

It is clearly an error, and without more context it is difficult to guess what the correct notes are. The right hand melody might make more sense if the D were an octave higher, of course, but the A-flat seems a bit out of place even if it's an octave lower.

My advice is to bring this error to the attention of the customer service department of the business that sold it to you and ask for a corrected copy.