Twinkle Twinkle Little Star Notes: Letters & Kalimba

Twinkle is the song most people pick out first on any instrument, and for good reason: six pitches, no black keys, no jump bigger than C to G, and a shape that repeats so much you only learn three lines. Below is every note in letters and kalimba numbers, the words matched note for note, and what to do with your hands.

If you'd rather hear it first, play Twinkle in your browser. It's the web sound demo for echoPi, a fidget slider in development: each click or push plays the next note of the tune, and you decide when the next one comes, so the rhythm is entirely yours.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star notes in letters and numbers

How to read the table: letter names don't say which octave a note is in. The number column takes C as 1 (so 1 to 7 are C D E F G A B); a dot under a number means the octave below and a dot over it the octave above. Twinkle needs neither. Its range is C4 to A4, middle C up to the A above it.

The words, one syllable per note

Seven syllables, seven notes per line:

• Line 1: Twin-kle twin-kle lit-tle star → C C G G A A G
• Line 2: How I won-der what you are → F F E E D D C
• Line 3: Up a-bove the world so high → G G F F E E D
• Line 4: Like a dia-mond in the sky → G G F F E E D
• Line 5: Twin-kle twin-kle lit-tle star → C C G G A A G
• Line 6: How I won-der what you are → F F E E D D C

"Dia-mond" is two syllables here; sing it as three and you run out of notes before "sky".

You only need to learn three lines

Lines 5 and 6 repeat lines 1 and 2, and lines 3 and 4 are the same line twice. The song is three phrases arranged A, B, C, C, A, B:

1. A climbs: C up to G, a step up to A, back to G.
2. B walks home: F, E, D, C, one white key at a time, two notes each.
3. C is B shifted up one key: G, F, E, D. It stops on D, which sounds unfinished. Played twice, it builds a small "are we there yet?" before line 5 brings you home.

The 42 notes are really 21 pairs plus a wait on the last note of each line.

Where the rhythm comes from

Every line has the same rhythm:

• six even notes, each the same length, one per syllable;
• a seventh note held about twice as long ("star", "are", "high", "sky");
• a small breath before the next line.

No dotted notes, no pick-up beats, nothing off the beat. Count "1 2 3 4 5 6 hold-hold" under each line. The usual mistake is rushing the held note: "star" played as short as "lit-tle" turns the song into 42 equal taps. Wait on the seventh note and it suddenly sounds like the song.

The second mistake is uneven pairs. "Twin-kle twin-kle" is four equal steps, not two quick pairs with a gap. The browser demo makes this easy to hear, since nothing plays until you click: tap the first six like a metronome, then pause.

How to play Twinkle on the piano

It's a right-hand song that nearly fits one hand position.

Starting position. Find middle C, the C just left of the pair of black keys nearest the centre of the keyboard. Put your right thumb on it and rest one finger on each white key going up: thumb C, 2 on D, 3 on E, 4 on F, 5 (little finger) on G.

The one stretch. A is the only note outside that position, twice in line 1 and twice in line 5. On "lit-tle", reach your little finger from G to A, then come back to G for "star". Your thumb stays put.

Fingers by line (1 = thumb, 5 = little finger):

If the stretch feels awkward, play line 1's G with finger 4 and A with 5, then slide back for line 2. Use whichever keeps the pairs even.

Adding a left hand. Optional: hold the C an octave below middle C under lines 1, 2, 5 and 6, and the G below that under lines 3 and 4, changing only when a new line starts.

How to play Twinkle on a kalimba

Kalimbas don't run low to high like a piano. On the common arrangement the lowest note is the long centre tine and the scale climbs outwards, alternating right and left (Wikipedia). If your tines are marked with numbers, you can read the table straight across. If they aren't, find the centre tine (1) and check which side your 2 is on; the rest follows from it.

Two things make Twinkle comfortable on a kalimba:

• Everything is in one octave. The table has no dots, so you only need 1 to 6 from a single octave. If your kalimba is tuned to C and its lowest note is 1, every note of the song is there.
• The thumbs take turns. Because neighbouring scale notes sit on opposite sides, lines 2, 3 and 4 move thumb to thumb in pairs: 4 4 on one side, 3 3 on the other, 2 2 back again. Only line 1 reaches further: from the centre 1 out to 5, then across to 6.

Let the seventh note of each line ring; the kalimba's sustain does the hold for you.

Where the song comes from

The words and the tune have separate histories.

The words are the first verse of "The Star", a poem by Jane Taylor (1783–1824), published in London in 1806 in Rhymes for the Nursery, a collection by Jane and her sister Ann (Wikipedia). The poem has five stanzas. When it's sung, the first two lines come back as a refrain after each stanza, which is why lines 5 and 6 in the table repeat lines 1 and 2.

The tune is older and French: "Ah! vous dirai-je, maman", first published in 1761 and traced to an anonymous pastoral song (Wikipedia). Taylor's words were first printed with it in 1838, in The Singing Master: First Class Tune Book.

Mozart's part is a set of variations, not the song itself. His 12 Variations on "Ah, vous dirai-je maman", K.265/300e, is a theme and twelve variations for piano in C major, probably composed between 1780 and 1782 and first published in 1785 (IMSLP.

Versions you'll run into

• Same tune, different words. The ABC Song and "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" use the same melody, with the syllables landing a little differently.
• The longer song. Sung in full, each of the poem's five stanzas is followed by the opening two lines as a refrain, so a full performance is far longer than these six lines.
• The parody. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has the Mad Hatter recite "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat", a parody of Taylor's words.

Play it now

Once the three phrases are in your fingers, the rest is timing, and you can practise that without an instrument: play Twinkle in the echoPi browser demo, where every click is the next note and the pauses are up to you. For something with the same shape and a bigger jump, try the Happy Birthday notes next.