What Is This Feeling Wicked Sheet Music

Getting Started With the Wicked Score

What Is This Feeling is one of the more straightforward numbers in the Wicked score, but it trips up a lot of people at intermediate level. The left hand does a lot of chromatic movement with rapid hand shifts, and the vocal line requires clean articulation without pushing too hard. If you can handle basic show tunes at around grade 5-6 level, this piece is accessible. It is not beginner material, though. The original piano-vocal score published by Music Theatre International lists the difficulty as moderate-advanced. You will see it used frequently in college theater auditions and community theater callbacks, which tells you something about its practical value.

What Is This Feeling Wicked Sheet Music

I have spent years helping students and performers navigate this piece, and the most common mistake I see is rushing the tempo too early. The mark is quarter note equals roughly 112, but most people start at 120 or above because they want to sound energetic. It falls apart quickly. The character of the song is smug confidence, not urgency. Play it slightly slower than you think you should and it actually sounds better. The official piano-vocal score is available through MTI's website and major sheet music retailers. Expect to pay between twenty-five and thirty-five dollars for the paperback version. There are also digitized copies floating around on sites like Sheet Music Plus, but I recommend sticking with the authorized edition because the page turns are properly placed and the orchestration is cleaned up for solo piano. One thing people do not always catch on first read-through: the B section where Elphaba reveals her real name, "Elphaba," sits on a sustained high D in the vocal line while the piano plays broken chords underneath. The hands have to be very even there. I had a student who kept accenting the wrong beat in measure forty-seven of that section, which threw off the entire phrase. The fix was to practice that passage with a metronome at sixty percent speed, emphasizing only beats two and four in the left hand until the muscle memory locked in. That took about four sessions, fifteen minutes each. After that, the problem disappeared.

Practical Tips for Learning the Piece

Start by singing the melody while you play. Even if you are purely a pianist, this song has some tricky intervals in the vocal line that the piano copy mirrors closely. Knowing how the melody breathes will help your phrasing at the keyboard. The chorus entry after the verse is where most performances lose clarity. Mark your score with pencil at the rehearsal letters so you know exactly when the tempo feels like it should push forward versus stay steady. The right hand carries a lot of the chromatic running figures in the second half. If your fingers are not conditioned for chromatic runs, isolate those passages first. Ten to fifteen minutes of slow practice on just the right-hand figures in measures eighty through one hundred will make a noticeable difference within a week. One limitation worth noting: the original orchestration includes brass hits and a fairly full band sound, especially during the finale of the number. The piano-vocal arrangement reduces this significantly, so the piece can feel thinner than you remember from hearing it in the show. If you want more weight behind certain sections, consider adding a simple bass line with your left hand on the strong beats. Do not overdo it. A quarter note on the root and fifth is usually enough to fill out the sound without cluttering the arrangement.

Another detail that is easy to miss: the bridge modulates up a half step toward the end, and the sheet music marks this clearly with a sharp sign on the F in the key signature area. Some printed editions fudge this and leave it ambiguous. Always double-check that the modulation makes sense harmonically before you commit to practicing it, because playing the wrong accidental there will send the whole section off track. If you are preparing this for an audition, keep the cut to about one minute and forty-five seconds. The standard audition cut runs from the opening through "Now I am a witch" and stops before the final reprise. Most directors prefer that range because it showcases the shift from playful sarcasm to genuine intensity. Practice the transition between those two emotional states slowly, measure by measure, before you try to perform it at tempo.