Piano Practice

I've Gone Elsewhere

2010-12-13T21:28:00.001-05:00

I won't be blogging about piano again until I'm playing regularly again. Meanwhile, I'm blogging at Life Downside Up. See you there!

Piano Preferences

2009-07-13T21:46:00.003-04:00

I got a new piano bench this weekend. It's an adjustable bench, and I'm hoping to have it for a long, long time. It replaces the kitchen chair, which replaced my old piano bench, which I'd used for 30+ years. So I'm a faithful piano bench owner, I am.

I didn't get to practice this weekend, so I was looking forward to tonight's practice session using the new bench (which I've named Gilbert). Sure, I planned to practice my Shostakovich ... but I also planned to experiment with the new bench.

My old bench was too high. The kitchen chair, obviously, was too low --plus, it wasn't flat, like a piano bench should be. I would get a backache before I ever made it through my warm-up scales.

I started with the bench low and practice for a few minutes. Backache.

I moved it up a bit. Backache.

Moved it up a little more. Backache, but not quite so bad.

Finally I found a good height and practiced for a half-hour before the sleepies started to take over. Then I compared it to my "too high" piano bench. It's slightly lower. It's also a lot more cushiony, which helps, I'm sure.

Deborah always has me adjust her piano bench to as low as it goes. Sure my elbows are at the right angle at that height, but it never feels right to be that low. I like to feel like I'm high above the piano--but not so high that it hurts my back. There's a narrow range in there, and I can find it with my new bench.

Another preference I have--one that Deborah has convinced me to abandon--is that I like to sit on the very, very edge of the bench. To do that, the bench has to be a little farther away from the piano than you'd expect. But I like the feeling of space. With it comes a feeling of freedom. It's like I'm giving the piano, and the music, room to breathe.

So I think I might start playing the piano the way that "feels" right to me. Maybe it's bad technique, but can it be so bad if I'm simply more comfortable in a certain position? I definitely feel like I have more control in my "preferred position." Sitting closer to the piano, and being closer to it due to a shorter piano bench, makes me feel crowded and claustrophobic. I've tried it for five years now, and I still haven't gotten used to it.

One final preference: As wonderful as my hearing aid is, and as drastically as it's improved my quality of life, I prefer playing piano without it. Maybe this is because I learned to play without it; I didn't get a hearing aid until I was 29, and I couldn't afford a really nice one until I was 38. I hear the piano differently when I don't have the hearing aid in. It's like hearing the voice of a treasured friend. I don't have that feeling at all when I use the hearing aid.

Again, I feel like I have more control when I play my preferred way (i.e., without the hearing aid). The notes sound clearer and louder when I have the hearing aid in, but they also sound harsher. Without the hearing aid, they sound ... considerate. Not clanging in on my consciousness. They sound like friends. Voices I can truly work with. And it's like my hands and fingers know what to do, whereas they always feel shy and uncertain with the louder, harsher tones.

I was supposed to have a lesson Saturday morning, but Deborah had to cancel at the last minute, so I won't have a lesson until this coming Saturday morning. I'm going to try an experiment this week. I'm going to go back to playing without my hearing aid, using a higher bench, and sitting a little farther away from the piano than usual.

What can it hurt? It's not like I'm training to be a professional. And it's not like I'm the Queen of Bad Technique, though I sometimes feel like I am during a lesson.

I really think it's time I started trusting my own instincts a little more. I have no problem trusting my instincts as a writer. With piano, it's always been a different story.

The Schubert Practice That Didn't Happen

2009-06-22T13:15:00.003-04:00

"Self, if you're going to be tired and super-sensitive and not pay attention, then you might as well be at work, where you don't *have* to think this hard. So just go back to work, Self."

That's what I told myself. So I packed up my music and went back to work.

There are few things I hate more than wasted practice time at the piano. I know myself well enough to know that today was going to be a bad practice. I was tired and fuzzy-brained, but that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was that I was distracted.

For one thing, I didn't want to take a long lunch hour. The knowledge that I was on a short (25-minute) timetable was disastrous for my concentration. Too bad, because I'm usually pretty good at making those short sessions pack a punch.

I also kept thinking someone was listening. Paranoid, I know. I don't usually worry about people listening when during a lunch hour practice session. So maybe I have a sixth sense and someone really was listening today. Either way, if I even think someone might be listening, my ability to focus on practicing goes out the window.

So I did my scales and arps and "practiced" for about five minutes, then I packed up and went back to work.

Maybe tomorrow's practice will be better.

To make this post a little less depressing, I'll show you what I'm focusing on for this week.

This is the Coda of the Schubert Impromptu in E-flat major, Op. 90, No. 2. Much of the piece falls right into the hands, but the Coda didn't look like it would feel quite as natural to play. So I decided to work on it first. Here's the entire Coda:

Yesterday I focused on the second half of the coda. It turned out to be much easier to "pick up" than I'd originally thought. The only parts that gave me a bit of trouble were the part where the chords went in opposite directions:

See what I mean? Also, the chords in the RH (right hand) are a bit of a stretch for my tiny fingers. Plus, much of this is played on the high end of the piano, which means I have to imagine what it sounds like, thanks to my high-frequency hearing loss. I know, I could practice an octave lower, but I'd rather not.

I was happy with yesterday's practice. I can play the second half all the way through, at a slow tempo. I actually have it by memory too, for the moment. I have the notes.

My practice for today was supposed to be on the first half of the coda. My goal was to have the first half up to the same standard as I have the second half. Specifically, I knew I would need to work on those parts of the first half that were similar to the second half:

I didn't get very far. But I'll be able to work on this tonight. I'm due for another good practice.

Musical Funk

2009-06-11T17:05:00.003-04:00

I am in a serious musical funk. Negative, negative, negative self-talk galloping through my brain. All though my lunchtime practice session today. All through my lunchtime practice session yesterday. Here’s what the negative little voice was saying:

"For someone so supposedly talented as you, who has worked as hard as you have at piano, you’d really think you wouldn’t suck as much as you do."

OK, I was going to make a list of everything that little negative voice was saying, but really, that’s pretty much what it’s saying right there.

Granted, I know I’m coming back to piano after a nine-month “fallow period.” I’m not in the pianistic shape I was in before. Deborah and others have said that fallow periods are necessary and good. That’s fine. But I think back to what caused the fallow period. It was basically a thought similar to the following:

"For someone so supposedly talented as you, who has worked as hard as you have at piano, you’d really think you wouldn’t suck as much as you do."

I can tell you when the fallow period started. It started at a group lesson where I played the C# major prelude and fugue that I had poured my heart and soul into for two years. When I took it on, I knew it might take two years (or more) to learn it. I was also learning Ständchen at the same time, which was no piece of cake. And I was working full-time, well, more than full time. More like 50-60 hours a week. And commuting two hours a day. So I went into this piece knowing I was going to live with it for a long, long time.

I was playing it really well in my practice sessions a year ago. I was aware. I was one with the piece. Playing that fugue was like having a million-tiny-fingers brain massage. It was like being part of a complicated dance where me and my dance partner were totally in sync with each other … only there were three dance partners—the three voices of the fugue. And the prelude … it was ready. I was ready. I looked forward to the group class, particularly because John Cobb, probably the most accomplished pianist in western North Carolina, was going to be there.

Well, I flopped. Maybe “flopped” is too strong of a word. But the prelude sounded mediocre, and I didn’t play the fugue well at all. I played it certainly … but it sounded like one of those “this-student-is-playing-way-beyond-her-means-and-shoudn’t-be” moments.

After I finished, I got some feedback. It included things like:

- Do you practice with a metronome? (Of course, this is a veiled and polite way of saying your timing sucks)

- Were you uncomfortable on the bench? I thought you looked really uncomfortable. (I wasn’t uncomfortable. But it was a comment on my posture, which I know needs work. Someone also said that I had some “strange body positions” when I was playing. Ah, nothing like knowing you looked stupid.)

I wasn’t uncomfortable on the bench, but I was uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable playing for other people, and always have been. So maybe that came through in my posture and “strange body positions.”

Whatever. After that session, I decided I really didn’t want to try anymore. And I’ve pretty much been stuck on the following statement ever since:

"For someone so supposedly talented as you, who has worked as hard as you have at piano, you’d really think you wouldn’t suck as much as you do."

So now that I’m back at piano and my time and energy are limited (amazing how much it takes out of me to drive an hour and a half on a Friday afternoon after work, or a Saturday, for an hour-long piano lesson), I’ve picked up an easier group of pieces.

I really want to learn all “Seven Dolls’ Dances” by Shostakovich. These are kiddie pieces, but I don’t care. Plus, I’m about to have a kiddie, and I want to play them for him/her. So I’m sticking with the Shostakovich. The other piece is a Schubert Impromptu (Op. 90, No. 2). I’ve dropped the Bach P&F I’d started, and I dropped the Beethoven Bagatelle, which I never liked that much anyway.

The Schubert is a late-intermediate piece. The Shostakovich is probably an early-intermediate piece. I’m working on them, rather than on more advanced stuff, to experience mastery and to play at world-class standard without having to struggle through learning the notes. "World-class standard." Those are Deborah's words. Heh. We’ll see about that. For someone supposed so talented as me, who has worked so hard … OK, we don’t need the broken record here.

So, that’s where I’m at. Feeling negative and kind of depressed about the whole piano thing. I really need to get back into the mode of loving piano and being thankful for my ability to play it.

Carried Away

2009-06-08T15:05:00.003-04:00

I got carried away today—carried away into a wonderful state of consciousness where I lost all sense of time and just enjoyed being enveloped in the music.

That tends to happen when I find myself with a grand piano, a Baptist hymnal, and a big, empty room with excellent acoustics.

Actually, it doesn’t. I’ve been practicing at that same grand piano at that same Baptist church at lunchtime for a couple of years now. Rarely have I let myself lose track of time. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I know I need to be back at work by a certain time because if I’m not, I’ll have to work later than planned. Who wants to do that? Not me.

Today I worked on a very tiny part of the Shostakovich, practicing for mastery of that one little tiny part. Spent a good half-hour or more on three not-very-complicated measures. Dug into the music, picked away at the layers, drilled in rhythms, and in the process played those three measures probably 60 or 70 times. That’s the way I like to practice. That is why I never had, and never will have, a future in music. (That, and I’m deaf.) I’d much rather tinker with the complexities of a single measure than, you know, learn the whole piece for a whole audience.

(Selfish? Probably.)

Anyway, after I finished drilling the Shostakovich, I decided to go back to work a little early, so I took out the Baptist hymnal to play through a few hymns, like I usually do at the end of a practice session. I’ve played them so many times, and I have fun improvising and trying out new interpretations. It’s kind of a “winding down” for my brain after the intense practice.

Usually, I play a couple of hymns, then I leave. Not today.

Today I played and played and played. And played. For probably an hour. I’ve been working on gospel-i-fying the hymns—you know, playing it in 3/4 or 6/8 time, using lots of grace notes, adding climbing and descending octaves, etc. It’s so much fun, even though some of my results leave much to be desired.

I also practice changing keys, usually just basic stuff like going from the tonic to the subdominant. I stick to the easier pieces—the ones that just have three or four main chords. It’s good training for my brain. (Training for what, I have no clue.)

I’ve long been at the point where I don't play exactly what’s written on the page. The chords in a hymnal are merely guidelines. I use them as such and go from there. It’s so much fun, even though the results are sometimes disastrous. This is part of why I have no future as a church accompanist. (That, and I have no desire to be a church accompanist. And I’m deaf.)

Anyway, I left for my “piano lunch” at 1:30 and didn’t get back to work until nearly 3.

What a great way to spend a long lunch.

Ready for an Update?

2009-03-13T11:31:00.004-04:00

Here goes.

I still have pinky problems. Not good. I feel like my poor hands are atrophying. I've been playing piano quite a bit at lunch, but nothing too difficult. Mostly I've been improvising new-age versions of hymns in the style of Jeff Bjork, David Nevue, etc.--not my favorite kind of music, but an unbelievably easy style to play. I really missed my calling as new-age Christian music pianist. Really.

Of course, I'm only 39 ... it's not like I'm on my deathbed. It's just a little depressing that I'm improvising the same old crap since the early 1980's. (My style is crap--not the hymns themselves. At least not most of them.) Truth is, I've played new-agey, beautiful and relaxing renditions of classics like "The Old Rugged Cross" and "In The Garden" for years. It's music I grew up to, so it's in my blood. Show me a hymnbook arrangement and I'll crank out a beautiful solo-piano rendition faster than you can say "Yanni Chryssomallis."

I love my music. I'm just really depressed about it right now. I don't know where I want to go with it. I'm not a performer--I know that much. But it seems like navel-gazing to practice, practice, practice all the time in my little George closet.

I know. I'm forgetting how Bach makes me sail above and beyond all the petty cares of this world. Someone please remind me. Robert? George? Sebastian?

Now that I'm having these hand issues, I'm suddenly feeling like the piano world is not my oyster. Not that it ever was ... but I was seriously considering auditioning for an amateur pianists competition, and now ... I don't know. I'm feeling a sense of ... maybe I can't do this after all.

OK. I just wanted to update the blog and let my reader(s?) know how things are. I'm off to play some piano ... and hoping the exercise lifts me out of these doldrums rather than dragging me deeper in.

Going to Practice

2009-02-17T13:52:00.006-05:00

I'm going to practice. Now.

I really hope I don't have to commandeer the sanctuary, Jack Bauer style, from the Organ Lady.

Seriously. Jack and I are both English majors who were born on February 18. Don't mess with the likes of us. And don't get between me and my piano.

Where My Pinky Hurts

2009-02-16T15:38:00.006-05:00

Pretend this is a left hand.

See those red arrows? I put those there to show where my pinky is hurting. It's at the joint between the intermediate phalange and the proximal phalange. It has definitely helped to lay off piano for several weeks. Massive doses of ibuprofen have helped, too.

Today I practiced, just a bit, before the Organ Lady came in. The pinky didn’t hurt too much. At this one point, however, I had trouble even lifting my pinky (the circled numbers are the fingers).

Note that the pinky holds down the G, then picks up and presses it right back down. My pinky doesn’t want to pick up, much less press back down. It would rather just stay down.

This could, of course, be due to lack of practice. I’m hoping it is.

Many thanks to my favorite arpeggist for pointing out that the IMSLP site is alive and kicking.

Kicked Out by the Organ Lady

2009-02-16T14:31:00.002-05:00

On weekdays, the Organ Lady haunts the halls of the stodgy Baptist church on the corner of First and Main. She's not the organist for this church, but she practices there. She wears shorts and a t-shirt, regardless of the weather. She's lonely. She's friendly, but only to certain people (or so I've heard). She's always very friendly to me. I think it helps, in this case at least, to be a Bach nerd and a half-decent pianist.

She was haunting the halls again today. I didn't know that this morning, when I got a wild hair and decided I would practice on Xan the Grand at lunch. For my faithful reader, you may remember that Xan the Grand is the old Steinway grand at the stodgy Baptist church on the corner of First and Main. I hadn't visited old Xan in ages. It was time.

So, shortly after 1:00, I braved the frigid winds and walked the block to the church. "Please, Organ Lady," I thought. "Don't be practicing today. I really want to spend some quality time with Xan the Grand."

I entered the sanctuary ... and oh, was it sanctuarious! Nary an organ tone to be heard! Nary an Organ Lady to be found!

"Waterfall, is it you?" cried Xan the Grand. "Is it really you?"

I blinked. I was hallucinating. I was so happy to have Xan the Grand to myself. I was so happy that the Organ Lady wasn't there. I proceeded to settle down with Xan and had played through two sets of scales and arps, plus a few minutes of Bach's G-minor sinfonia, when ...

She entered the room. It was the Organ Lady. My muscles tensed.

The sanctuary was no longer a sanctuary. It was a place of battle. And, as had been ordained from the moment I first learned that this church's organ is the only one within a 50-mile radius, I knew I was going to lose. I stopped playing. The white flag came out in the form of a smile and an apology. I began to pack up my stuff.

I chatted with Organ Lady for a few minutes. She'd only been taking a short break, she explained. And she was back to practice some more.

I don't resent Organ Lady. There's no rule that says I have to give up Xan every time the Organ Lady shows up, but, seeing as pianos are a dime a dozen around here and organs aren't, it wouldn't make sense to do otherwise.

Still, I wish I'd had more time with Xan. My back-up pianos were both taken, so I wasn't able to practice anymore.

I'm definitely disappointed. I'll plan to get there a little later tomorrow.

Well, It's Been a Year

2009-01-08T07:51:00.004-05:00

OK. Not quite a year. But almost a year.

Since I've posted anything on this blog, that is.

It's been a little less than a year since I've played George. And Thuddy. And Xan the Grand.

My job swallowed me. I'm still somewhere in the bowels of it. Development season, with its 60-hour weeks, it coming to an end, and support season, with its 60-hour weeks, is beginning. One of the major differences between the two seasons: during development season, we work until the work is done; during support season, we show up at a pre-scheduled arrival time, take a required one-hour lunch break, and don't leave until a pre-scheduled departure time.

Here are my hours for support season (now through April 15):

Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday: 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Tuesday: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Friday: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Saturday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The hours are long, but we're forced to take lunch breaks. I don't think I took a single lunch/piano break during development season. I worked 12 hours some days, and I haven't had a Saturday off since early October.

It's a fun job, but it does cut into my non-work life.

Anyway, I'm taking my music books to work with me today. Going to force myself to take a lunch break, even though the support season schedule hasn't yet been instituted for this year.

My left pinky has been hurting for several weeks now--enough that I'm going to the doctor about it next week. I hope it doesn't have too much of an effect on the joy of playing piano.

More later. Gotta get ready for work.

I Think Thuddy's a Girl

2008-01-31T17:10:00.000-05:00

Stephen asked for some manly pictures of Thuddy, and I felt obliged to oblige.

Thuddy was in a mood for pictures. Here he is, smiling for the camera.

Here's a nice one of Thuddy in profile.

But then Thuddy didn't want me to take a picture of him from the back. He thought his butt looked too big.

"Hmm," I thought. "It's not a 'guy' thing to worry that one's butt is too big. That's really more of a 'girl' thing, isn't it?" Sure, consoles and spinets and uprights have reason to be bashful about their butts, but still ...

"I'm sure your butt looks fine," I told Thuddy. "Now pose." I walked around to snap the picture.

Then I realized something.

Thuddy is a girl. No self-respecting boy piano would dress this way.

BTW ... My apologies for the grainy pictures. This was the best I could do with my cell phone.

Piano Practice as a Mardi Gras Thing

2008-01-30T18:00:00.000-05:00

Today’s analogy is a really bad one, but it’s the one that comes to mind, perhaps because it’s the “holiday season.”

My practices lately have felt like Mardi Gras. Only sober.

Let me explain.

Say you’re in New Orleans at a Mardi Gras parade. People on the floats are throwing all kinds of trinkets, beads, candy, etc. If you try to randomly catch everything that’s thrown, you’re not going to catch anything. But if you look a float-person in the eye and yell “Throw me something, Mister!” you’re likely to get a handful of beads zinged right at you (unless, maybe, the float-person is not a mister).

I don’t know if that’s how it really is. I haven’t been to a Mardi Gras parade since 1989, and I haven’t been sober at a Mardi Gras parade since … before that.

All these new piano pieces—Bach, Beethoven, Shostakovich—are like Mardi Gras trinkets and beads sailing past me. They’re all so pretty and shiny and fun … I don’t want to have to spend my limited practice time focusing on just one. I want to enjoy all of them! Now! Throw me something! Everything!

I think it’s important that I focus on at least three (if not all four) pieces each day. My practice time is roughly 50 minutes. If I spend five minutes—OK, ten minutes—warming up, that leaves me with about 40 minutes. That leaves me an average of between ten and 13.33333333333 (ad nauseam) minutes per piece.

So I’m trying to look each piece in the eye and hope I can catch whatever trinket is there for the offering.

Onward to today’s practice …

After warming up, I started with the Fugue. Worked on the RH for mm 37-46, focusing mostly on the last few measures, where the LH and RH are tossing the alto part back and forth. I think I got some good work done for those 10 minutes.

Next, the Prelude. Did rhythms for mm 12 and 14 for about 10 minutes. So much fun to play.

Next, Beethoven. Worked on the LH run sections: mm 12-15 and mm 26-29. Did some rhythms, but the truth is, the notes fall so naturally beneath the fingers that rhythms seem less than necessary. (Ha. Rhythms are always necessary … particularly, perhaps, when they seem otherwise.) 10 minutes.

I spend the final 10 minutes on Shosti. Worked on RH only, mm 21-27 and mm 45-53.

So, those were the trinkets. I think I did OK. I focused intensely on short sections for short periods of time. It’s a different way of practicing—these short bits and pieces of time—but I think it’s what I’m going to have to do for now.

I’m ready for Saturday—I get to have marathon practice sessions on Saturdays! Lotsa beads!

Another "Getting Acquainted" Session

2008-01-29T17:00:00.000-05:00

There was a ladies’ luncheon going on outside of Thuddy’s quarters, so I headed over to Zan the Grand’s sanctuarial abode today.

There’s something wrong with Zan. Sure, he’s a Steinway, but there’s something even more wrong with him than that. The high notes are sticking. As in, I try to play several notes in a row, and it sounds like I’m using the damper pedal for a foot-rest. Sigh.

Enough complaining. The kind folks at the church are letting me use Zan, Thuddy, and any other piano I desire for free, every single day, for an hour a day. I appreciate them a thousand times over.

Today was another “short bits and pieces” practice session.

After warm-up scales, inversions, and arps, I started with Shosti. I worked on the “A” section yesterday, so I went straight to the “B” section. A bit more of the “oom-pah-pah” in the LH—pretty simple—and lots of repeated notes (but some tricky fingerings) in the RH. I spent more time on the RH, playing and re-playing slowly, getting my RH fingers comfortable with what was being demanded of them.

Next: Kenny, a.k.a. the Beethoven. I love this piece so far. I love the “call-and-response” feel of the playful motives. I played HS, stopping at places that didn’t feel so natural, and, again, working to get comfortable with the fingering and the notes.

Then it was onward to the Bach Bb fugue. I played through each individual voice and made notes about the sections that seemed like they would be the most challenging. Tomorrow I’ll think more about that, and Thursday I’ll probably begin working on the “hardest” measures.

Last but not least: The Bach Bb prelude. I didn’t have a lot of time left, so I played through the first two pages (slowly), then went to the last page and played through individual measures several times each.

Yes, I’m still in “getting acquainted” mode with each of these pieces. Haven’t started anything HS (except for the prelude), and haven’t really started drilling anything yet. If all goes well, I’ll begin more intense work on all of these as the weekend approaches.

Practice for Monday, January 28, 2008

2008-01-28T16:27:00.000-05:00

After Saturday’s (somewhat) disappointing lesson, I decided to try to spend a few minutes of this practice on each piece.

Scales and arps, blah, blah, blah. Sounding fine. Deborah said we could start doing scales in thirds if I want … I didn’t answer. I don’t know if my brain is ready for that yet.

Beethoven: This is a fun little piece. It’s an interesting little piece. I started working on it HS and made analysis notes as I played through it. It seems a little schizophrenic, yet it is utterly charming.

I once knew a guy named Kenny who was schizophrenic yet utterly charming. Maybe I’ll start calling this piece “Kenny”.

So Kenny (the Beethoven piece, not the person) and I were on something like the first blind date today. I’ve run through and written in all the fingering, sized him up so to speak, and now it’s time to get to know Kenny, to start getting a sense of how he feels in my hands.

OK, this is starting to sound R-rated. Suffice it to say that Kenny (the Beethoven piece, not the person) feels quite nice, thank you very much.

So, after a whopping 12 minutes of Kenny, I moved on to Shostakovich. Didn’t do anything particularly challenging—just played through the “A” section HS a few times, using the fingering that Deborah recommended, replaying/drilling any fingering that didn’t come “naturally”.

The Lyric Waltz has the typical “oom-pah-pah” in the bass, and Deborah has said to use a my “3” finger on the low notes instead of the “5”. I understand her point—using the “3” is more forceful and gives a greater sense of balance—but it feels weird. So I did some practicing of this, and it wasn’t long before it started to feel more natural.

I took a short interlude to run through Schumann, blocking the chords for "The Elf". I’m hitting all the notes, but she said I’ve lost some of the dynamics that I had earlier. So I just blocked the chords and trained my laser-sharp focus on dynamics.

Onward to Bach. Didn’t allow myself to touch C#. (Yes, it was tantalizing. But I yielded not to temptation.) Went straight to Bb.

Just a few minutes allowed for the prelude. Did the same thing as I did for the other two pieces: played through the first couple of pages (up to the big chords), getting a feel for the fingering.

I’ll try to scan some of these pieces for this blog so my readers can get a better idea of what I’m doing when I say I’m working on the fingering.

I didn’t get to the fugue. Hoping to squeeze in a half-hour or so of practice tonight after I get home.

Negativity & Uncertainty

2008-01-28T07:07:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamed I was railing at my piano teacher. Then I dreamed I went to my old piano teacher--the one I had in junior high, the one I did not get along with--and told her how much better she was than Deborah.

Why did I do that? A student's attitude and motivation (and lack thereof) has a lot to do with how "good" or "bad" a teacher is. I had a bad attitude when I was 13. I like to think I have a much-improved attitude now, 25 years later.

Strange how times long past can pop up in dreams, and bring all the emotions and intensity with them.

So I had a lesson Saturday and had several moments when I just wanted to cry.

I hadn't had a lesson in a month. More than a month. For that time, I practiced 4-6 days a week, averaging approximately 50 minutes per lesson. Not as much practicing as I'd like, but it's what I was able to manage, so I was OK with it. Practice sessions were focused mostly on scales, arps, Schumann, and Bach. I didn't want to lose "The Elf" or my C# Prelude & Fugue, so I was playing all of it through, at least twice a day, and having a blast doing so. After all those months (OK, more than 20 months) of learning the notes, working out the fingering, and drilling, drilling, drilling, I was so happy just to be playing the blasted fugue, start to finish, at a nice tempo. It felt good, and it sounded good.

So at my lesson we focused mainly on things I hadn't focused on in practice sessions. I hadn't worked much on the Shostakovich because because I had many questions about the fingering and hadn't wanted to learn everything with the "wrong" fingering. I hadn't worked much on the Beethoven because I wanted to make sure Deborah was OK with me working on it. I hadn't worked much on the B-flat fugue because ... well, I spent more time on the prelude.

Her first comment upon seeing the C-major bagatelle: "That was the one I was least interested in having you learn." Hmph. I asked why, and she said it was because it had more of a late Beethoven and she wanted me to start with something that had more of an early Beethoven sound.

I said, "Well, I really liked A-minor, too. We could do that one."

"No, C-major is fine."

I'd finally decided against the A-minor because it reminded me of "The Elf," and I wanted something with a different "feel" to it.

My assignment for next time: Write in all the fingering.

Then onward to Shostakovich. I had written in the fingering as assigned, but I'd been very confused about it. She said I'd given it a good effort ... then proceeded to erase everything and work out new fingering (with my input) and write it in. Yes, I felt like kind of an ignorant, even though she said that Shostakovich is like a foreign language to me (since I've never played anything by him), which makes sense ... but still.

The low point of the lesson came before we started working on the P&F in B-flat. I asked if I could go ahead and play the C# P&F, since I'd practiced it and wanted to play it for the group class in February. "Sure," she said.

I made it about a page into the prelude before I finally gave up in frustration. Nothing was working. My hands were running over themselves. It sounded like I hadn't practiced for a month, when in reality I'd been playing it--and playing it well every day.

So I decided to play the fugue instead. Same thing. A page in, I stopped. Was this the same piece I'd been playing every day for a month?

"I don't know why I can't play these today," I said.

"Well, you haven't had a chance to practice them."

How many students have looked into their piano teachers' eyes and told this bald-faced lie: "But I did practice!"

I felt like I looked the very picture of the lying student when I said that on Saturday: "But I did practice!" Only I was telling the truth.

She finally said that I shouldn't "perform" it every day, then gave me the one nugget that I'm going to carry away from that lesson: "Performing loosens screws. Drilling tightens them."

So I need to focus more on drilling and less on playing the piece through. OK.

I'm just so tired of drilling. I want, at least once in this life, to play that P&F for someone besides myself, and play it well.

Needless to say, I've been in a funk ever since that lesson. And I'm wondering why I ever thought I could be good at piano, or could quality for the Cliburn Amateur's Competition, or anything like that. It seems like I am stuck in "advanced intermediate" and will never get beyond that.

January 24, 2008 Practice

2008-01-24T18:02:00.000-05:00

Practices have been both wonderful and frustrating.

We’re working shifts, so I have one hour—no more, no less—for practicing. I’ve begun practicing on Thuddy Theodore every day simply because Thuddy is about four minutes closer to my desk at work than Zan the Grand is. Multiply by two, and I lose approximately eight minutes of practice time per day—that’s 40 minutes per week!) if I decide to practice on Zan. So Thuddy is my man these days.

My scales are up to 88. They’re sounding good, and they’re looking good—by that, I mean my arms are doing more of the work and my fingers are relaxed, even when I’m playing the sixteenth notes in contrary motion. Today I played through A and f#-minor and it sounded flawless. So much fun to play these scales when I know I’m doing them right and they sound good and my hands don’t get tired.

Arpeggios are at 56, or somewhere around there. The technique seems to be working there, too. I’ve never, ever felt comfortable with arpeggios, and I still don’t … but, as always, I get a little closer to the comfort zone with each practice.

“The Elf,” now a warm-up piece, sounds great. Each day I play it through a few times—sometimes slower, sometimes faster. Sometimes I have a lazy elf, sometimes a sprightly one, sometime a downright manic one. Sometimes an angry one, sometimes a sweet one. It really is a great piece for experimenting with different moods, since it’s so short (about 30 seconds, if that long).

The C# major P&F, my other warm-pieces, are among the greatest joys of my life these days. I am having so much fun with them. I am listening to myself more than I am concentrating on getting the notes and the techniques right--I have them down cold, so there are few, if any, missed notes or issues of lost concentration. I am listening to my own playing the way I might listen to a recording, focusing here, then there, on how this voice gives way to that one, or how the other voice melds with the first while the second one is picking up the main subject again … pure, unadulterated joy, it is. I feel like I’m dancing.

This week, for my “new” piece, I’ve focused mostly on the Bb Prelude. I can play through the entire piece; it’s really not that complicated (at least compared to the C#), though there are a few tricky places. But I’m not going to let myself be fooled by the “not-that-hard” myth, or I’ll end up putting not enough effort into it. I have been working on three- to six-measure bits each day. Drill, drill, drill. It’s been painstaking (though never boring), and when I played through the piece today, at a slow pace, without stopping, it sounded far smoother than it did last week, when I played it through without having gone through all the drills.

Shostakovich, Beethoven, and the Bb Fugue have been on the back burner this week. Oh … would that I had more hours in the day for piano!

It’s been a good week for practicing, though. Practice sessions have been all too brief (which has been frustrating), but I think I’ve made good use of what little time I’ve been able to take.

January 21, 2008 Practice

2008-01-21T15:47:00.002-05:00

Length of practice: about 45 minutes
Piano: Thuddy Theodora

Today’s lunchtime practice went quite well. When I got to the church, Lou the Organist was practicing in the sanctuary, and some old folks were meeting in the choir room, so I was relegated to Thuddy Theodora in the downstairs chapel.

I hadn’t played Thuddy in a while. I think Thuddy has been tuned. Thuddy didn’t sound quite so Thuddy today.

Of course, it may have something to do with the human element. My technique has improved by leaps and bounds since I last practiced on old Thuddy.

I went through two sets of scales instead of the usual single set. I was just having too much fun. It felt so good to be back at the piano again. Between work, being snowed in, and being away from home this weekend, I’ve managed to go several days without practicing. Not as many as are implied by my lack of posting here, though.

When I was playing my chords and inversions, a man knocked on the door and peeked his head in. “Those chords are beautiful,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that.”

Deborah has said the same thing at my last few lessons. Apparently my chord-playing is improving, too.

Then I went on to arpeggios and they’re sounding pretty good.

Then I played through my “warm-up” pieces of The Elf and the C# Prelude & Fugue. Can you “hear” love being played on a piano? Deborah swears that she can hear my love for these pieces coming through when I play them. If love for music can be heard, then it was ringing through Thuddy’s little chapel today. My hands felt electric (in a good way).

Then it was time for the Bb Prelude. I haven’t spent much time on my other pieces because I’ve been having so much fun with the last page (all of the scaly runs) of the prelude. These runs are addictive. I love them.

I can really tell that the “arm” technique is starting to feel natural. It’s taken four years, but I’m finally getting there. And what a difference it’s making.

I didn’t have time to move on through the queue of pieces—the fugue, the Beethoven bagatelle, and the Shostakovich lyric waltz. I’ll try really hard to work on one or more of them tomorrow.

I love piano. Can you hear the love? I can hear the love. Yeah.

Practice for Tuesday, January 8, 2008

2008-01-08T17:38:00.000-05:00

Duration: 55 minutes
Piano: Zan the Grand

Remind me not to schedule my Carnegie Hall debut for the week before my period.

Yes, I had a PMS practice today. (Sorry if that’s TMI for some of you.) My fingers feel like five little water balloons at the end each hand. In addition to that, I have the requisite UMS (Ugly Mood Swings) to go along with it. So you’d think today’s practice wouldn’t be so good.

It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t too bad, either. Kind of lukewarm. A four on a 10-point scale.

I started with the usual scales and arps and played them pretty well, considering I had water balloons for fingers. I’m at 80 for scales and 54 for arps. I’d gotten a lot faster on them until Deborah said (noticed? realized?) my technique had gone back to pot, and that I was being all finger-y and not arm-y enough. So ~~I was demoted~~ we backed up. Way up. Or down, I guess I should say. And now I’ve worked my way back up to 80 and 54 after what has seemed an eternity. As my arpeggist friend says of the glacial rate of improvement for adult students,

"It's like five years spread over fifteen; it may have only been five years of study, but because of intervening time making the total fifteen, it seems like fifteen years of study."

I continued the usual “warm-up” routine of the C# P&F and “The Elf.” Then it was onward to the new pieces …

Bach, Prelude & Fugue in B-flat

Prelude: Where to start? I’ve written in all of the fingering. I’ve studied it enough to have an idea of how the chords are progressing and how things are happening musically. I’m ready to start bumbling and fumbling my way through learning the notes.

The first step, for me, is to look through the whole piece and divide it into sections. I came up with 10 sections, which is a lot for a 3-page piece of music. The last five sections are all on page 3, though. Each new line offers a new cadenza-style challenge, so I figured each should have its own numbered section.

The next step is to eyeball the individual sections and determine which one is likely the most challenging, and to start working on it. I decided on Section 10, the very end. It was a good choice for two reasons: it looks like it’ll be the ~~hardest~~ ~~most challenging~~ most complex, intellectually stimulating, and downright fun. And I've long had a bad habit of learning the beginnings of pieces well, and then slacking on the endings. Not good. So the ending must come first, or at least not last.

So I started working on the last few measures, using blocked intervals.

It’s going to be a long road. I’m giddy, the same way I used to get, back when I was young and spry and in college, upon embarking on a really long road trip.

Fugue: I didn’t have a lot of time for the Fugue, but I did review what I had worked on yesterday. Amazing how after 24 hours, some things just seem to sink in. ("And then sink back out," murmurs Pessimist Self).

Shostakovich, Lyric Waltz

Next, I moved to the Shostakovich. The fingering on this one is tricky, and I am open to suggestions. I think I may be making this more difficult than it is.

OK, if the same note is to be repeated multiple times, it typically works best to let the fingers take turns playing the note. It helps keep the repetition from sounding tired and … well, repetitive (in a bad way).

What do you do if the same third is to be repeated multiple times? And then that third moves up by a half-step? And then that third moves up by a half-step? If I use the same 1-3 or 1-4 or 2-4, I get that tired and repetitive (in a bad way) sound. If I let my fingers take turns (on the higher note, at least), the sound is much better, but then I get a “back-against-the-wall” feeling when it’s time to move up a half-step.

Sadly, my practice session came to an end much too soon. I’ve been feeling PMS-y and yucky all day, and the practice session really helped me to get my mind off of it. Again, it wasn’t a great practice session … but I did get some good work done, I think. I do feel sorry for the church employees, who can't help but hear me practicing. I fear I treated them to what sounded like a bad rendition of the Raindrop Prelude, Shostakovich-style.

Ah, my days of playing through Bach and Liszt, working on “continuity” and “flow,” are definitely a thing of the past for those unfortunate listeners.

Practice for Monday, January 7, 2008

2008-01-07T17:58:00.000-05:00

Duration: 45 minutes
Piano: Stubby

I’ve found that I like to swing my arms vigorously (kind of like swimmers do in preparation for a race) before I start to practice. It seems to relax my arms and hands, get the blood flowing, etc. Does anyone else do this?

Scales: Sounding good. Sounding professional. Woo hoo.

Inversions: Sounding awesome. The four-note chords now feel very comfortable in my hands.

Arpeggios: Sounding … better. Actually not sounding bad at all.

Warm up pieces:

Bach, C# P&F: Ahhhhh …

Schumann, Elf: Fun. Playing those last three notes is pure joy. (The rest of the piece is, too, but those last three notes especially so.)

Bach Bb P&F: This is all I had time for. I focused on the first 12 measures of the fugue, the soprano and alto voices. Played the voices separately, just working on getting them into my head. Played them slowly, concentrating very intently, listening, then played bits and pieces of the voices together to get a better understanding of what intervals were going on and how they sounded to my ear.

I am convinced that this is some kind of very intense, deep form of meditation. (I typed “medication” by accident at first … but then I thought, “It’s probably medication, too.)

So I felt like I was being awakened from a deep sleep when Lou the Organist tapped on the door to say hi.

Lou the Organist practices at the same church where I practice piano, often at the same times (at which times I am relegated to either Theodore or Stumpy for pianos, rather than Zan the Grand). Now, Lou the Organist is a very nice person and a talented musician, so I always welcome the opportunity to chat with her about music. But today I felt jarred and irritable at the interruption. She had no way of knowing this, so it wasn’t her fault, and I hope my irritability wasn’t apparent. I was glad to see her, except for the fact that I was so focused on Bach, and my ~~lunch~~ piano hour is so inflexible at this time …

So we caught up a bit, for about 10 minutes, then I got back to the fugue. I wasn’t able to get back into the meditative state, though, since I only had about 10 more minutes available for practicing. I used those 10 minutes to work out a right-hand challenge (the third beat of measure 9, for those who are curious … I’ll try to remember to scan it tonight so I can do show-and-tell, which is ever so much more interesting). By the time I packed up to head back to work, I felt good about that third beat.

OK, break’s over. Time to get back to work. Later, y’all.

The Latest

2008-01-07T17:56:00.000-05:00

I am long overdue for a piano update, am I not?

Does anyone even read this blog anymore?

Development season at my job is winding down, and support season has begun. Support season is more structured and less pressurized. So, while I have to be here at a certain time and take lunch at a certain time and take breaks at a certain time, I get to breathe a little easier while I’m actually at work.

The good thing about that required hour for lunch: take 15 minutes out for bathroom and transportation, and I get a good 45 minutes of quality piano time with Zan the Grand!

So … 45 minutes times 5, plus 2 to 4 hours on weekends equals … up to 465 minutes, or 7.75 hours a week, of practice time! I take what I can get, and I’m very happy with this arrangement.

OK, here’s that update I’ve been needing to post.

Bach C# Prelude & Fugue No. 3, WTC I: I’m very happy to report that I have “graduated” from these two, in that I’m no longer actively working on them for piano lessons. Of course, I’ve resolved to play them 3-5 times a day, every day, for the rest of my life so that I never lose them. I’ve been doing so for almost a month now, and can play the prelude and part of the fugue by memory (not just motion-memory; I’ve been actively working on memorizing it through the other avenues as well). It sounds good, if I may say so myself.

Liszt, Ständchen: Sad to say, I burned out on this one. I got so sick of it. The flame weakened, and practicing felt like resuscitation. How’s that for a bad mixed metaphor? (My creative writing skills have been temporarily taken hostage by my tech writing job.) Franzi and I talked about it, and Deborah and I talked about it, and George and I talked about it, and we all agreed that it was time to put this one to bed for a while. So to bed it went.

Schumann, The Elf: Deborah gets all happy when I play this one. She says it sounds like a professional recording. She sure knows how to shell out the compliments. I haven’t gotten the “professional recording” remark since I did the Bach A-minor invention. I’m playing it as part of my warm-up routine now and will play it for the February performance class if I’m able to go.

Now, for the new pieces … !

Bach, P&F in Bb-major from WTC 1: I’ve written in all of the fingering and am currently just playing with it, mentally and otherwise—working out separate-hands fingerings, analyzing the sections, thinking about how the voices are intertwining, etc. It’s kind of like being in that first phase of being in love—you’ve just met the guy, and now you’re getting to know him better, and everything but everything about him seems to offer something to love. Yep, that’s where I am with the Bb P&F right now.

Shostakovich, Dance of the Dolls, I: Lyric Waltz: There are seven short pieces in “Dance of the Dolls” suite, and I’m starting with number one—not because it’s number one, but because it’s lyrical and Deborah wanted me to have something lyrical and songlike. As with the P&F, I’m currently in the process of figuring out fingering (no small task—I have pathetically little confidence in my ability to do that) and getting a feel for the piece.

Beethoven, Bagatelle in C Major, Op. 119, No. 2 (I think I have those numbers right): Did someone say lyrical and songlike? I want to work on a Beethoven piece, and I wanted something short and not incredibly hard. I haven’t started on the fingering for this one yet, but will probably do so this week.

I’ll write my practice update in a separate post, just so I can say I posted twice in one day. Stay tuned!

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T07:57:00.001-05:00

Best wishes to all my faithful readers for a happy and prosperous 2008!

Wish I could write more right now ... but I have to get ready for work.

Happy New Year!

Wanted: A Moment to Think, & a Moment to Write

2007-09-11T06:19:00.000-04:00

Ever feel that way?

Work has been super-busy, particularly this week because I'm having to put in extra hours so I can leave early Friday--we have a piano group class at 4:00 in Asheville, which means I need to leave work no later than 2:00 or so.

Had a 2-hour lesson on Saturday afternoon. Awesome lesson. It wore me out, but it was a great lesson. I honestly think I may be playing better now than I've ever played in my life.

Prelude sounds great. I'll be playing it for the group class. I'm mainly working on speeding it up a bit, though Deborah said it sounds fine at the speed it is (about 76).

Fugue: She raved about how well I played the first two pages. The last four sounded good but not great. "You're not thinking in musical sentences." So I need to work on making the last four pages less of a run-on mess of notes. OK.

Liszt: I'm lingering a bit too much here and there, but for the most part it sounds good. I'm playing it for the group class, too.

Elfe: We worked on this one quite a bit. I'm pretty far along in it, actually. I can play the whole thing through, at a nice (but not fast) pace, in blocked chords. I'm starting to practice the broken chords.

That's all for now. It's 6:30 a.m. and I need to get ready for work!

I Like My Job

2007-09-08T00:02:00.001-04:00

I like my job. I love the fact that I don't love my job. The network folks monitor employees' internet rambles, so I'm sure I'll get "caught" sooner or later for blogging.

Thing is, I punch out before I blog, and I punch in after I finish blogging. I work hard at this job. I work from the moment I walk in until the moment I leave, save for the 45 minutes or so I take mid-day to commune with Sebastian, Franzi, Bob, and the rest of them. The only bad thing I'm really doing is using the company system for blogging.

I work for a good company. I have a good, laid-back boss, and I work with some really great people. I've made some friends. Life is good.

What Should I Do?

2007-09-07T23:55:00.000-04:00

It seems my blog is dead. Three years of blogging ... gone. I'm not sure what to do now. Should I just blog from here? Should I start a new blog that isn't just piano-related, since piano isn't the only thing in my life? I definitely don't want to use Blogger again. Should I go to squarespace or wordpress or one of the other blogging services?

I've actually been thinking about starting a piano podcast. As if I have the time.

I'm kind of depressed about this. Boo hoo. :(

Short & Sweet Schumann Session

2007-09-07T17:03:00.001-04:00

I had a whopping 25 minutes available for practicing today. I spent most of it drilling this:

Have I mentioned that "Elfe" is a complex little piece for a small-handed pianist? I did? Oh, OK.

It was fun, though. It's really, er, stretching my capabilities.

Piano lesson tomorrow! I can't wait!

45-minute practice

2007-09-06T15:42:00.000-04:00

Thursday's practice session lasted all of 45 minutes. I basically flew out of a meeting at 12:00, got to the piano as quickly as I could, let time stand still as I practiced for 45 minutes, then ran back to the office for another meeting at 1:00.

Not much time to write at the moment. (Being important at a job has its perks, but it also means never being able to slack!) Here's what I focused on today:

This is "Elfe." After the usual scales and arps, I spent 20 minutes--20 whole minutes--on this itty-bitty little section. This sure is a complicated "intermediate" piece. It would help if I had Rach-sized hands, but oh well. I'm playing block chords in rhythms, only I can't play block chords in the last two chords of the LH in the section circled above. So, I'm in rhythms, going from block chords to rolled chords for two LH chords. I'm not playing fast, but my hands seem to be scampering elfe-like all over the place.

I also worked on the second 9-against-4 section of the Liszt. (I can't find it on the IMSLP, or I'd post it here for you.) Spent about 15 minutes on that single half-measure.

Last night at home, I worked on Bach. I can play the fugue through pretty smoothly, but each time I play it, little "speed bumps" come up here and there. So I drill and drill and drill the speed bump, and it ceases to be a problem, and allows me to focus on other speed bumps. The good news is, the speed bumps have been getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

So here's what I drilled for a good 20 minutes last night:

Yup. Three beats. Twelve notes per hand. For twenty minutes. That's all I worked on last night.

What makes this passage complicated is that the ups and downs are not quite in contrary motion. It would be so much easier if the RH and LH came toward each other at the same time, and went away from each other at the same time, as in a formal dance. It would also be a little simpler if the notes were even and in the order of the scale, with no thirds, held notes, etc. But no. Notice that the LH is a sixteenth-note behind the RH. I made arrows so you could see how the upward and downward motions of the LH are behind the RH by just a smidgen:

This is a speed bump keeps coming back every now and then. Kind of like a PMS zit. But twenty minutes of drilling fixed it.

Would that PMS zits were so manageable and fun!

I'm Late! I'm Late! But Franzi Wouldn't Wait!

2007-09-05T14:28:00.000-04:00

Not a bad practice today. I started with the usual scales and arps and really, really focused on using my forearms and not just my hand/finger strength to strike the keys. This "fingery playing" is a technique issue I've been dealing with for some time, and habits are hard to break--particularly when no one's ever corrected the habit before. But the arm-thing has begun to feel more natural. I'm getting there.

My "intermediate" piece, "The Elf," is from a series of short pieces by Robert Schumann. Here's a blurb from Music Web International:

"The Albumblätter are twenty miscellaneous little pieces, sounding much like other miscellaneous little Schumann pieces; the playing is precise, dramatic, and idiomatic, but at times I found it hard to keep my attention on them, even though number 17, ‘Elfe,’ is a marvel of pianistic skill. Some may prefer these rather cool performances, but I look for those uniquely Schumann passions in this music and I don’t hear them here." -- Paul Shoemaker

"Elfe." That's the piece I'm learning. I like it with an "e" at the end.

Here's the main part of "Elfe" I worked on today:

To be honest, I'm not crazy about this piece; I much prefer the lushness of Liszt, or even of heavier Schumann pieces. But this one is a nice change of pace, and who knows--since it is "a marvel of pianistic skill," it might be a fun little encore piece, if I ever find my way to a concert stage of any kind (and if I ever learn to play it half-decently).

I didn't have much time after wrestling with "Elfe" for 25 minutes, but I wanted to touch on all the other pieces if nothing else. So I didn't spend a lot of time on the prelude and fugue. I spent last night's practice on a few glitches that had come up in the first two pages of the fugue, so I played through that section again today and it sounded nice. The prelude ... ahh. What a wonderful piece of music. And it is slowly becoming mine.

I really didn't have time for Liszt, but I couldn't stand to leave my practice session without at least checking in on him. (I don't know why I've adopted the principle, "Save the Liszt for Last," but I have. Actually, I do know why. Maybe I'll write more on that later.)

Sounded good. That piece is mine, too. Except for the second 9-against-4 measure, which continues to drive me batty.

Oddly enough, the first 9-against-4 is no longer a problem. It's played with passion and drive. But the second is a bit slower, and a lot more reflective. It's hard to give a sense of whimsical reflection while trying to play 9-against-4. It really is.

So I was late getting back to work. Sadness.

I love the way music messes with my mind. I got the giggles on the walk back to work, picturing a little elfe-like figure riding on the subway in D.C.: A Metro Gnome.

I'm Still Alive

2007-09-04T21:08:00.000-04:00

I'm still alive. I'm just very, very, pre-occupied with the day job. I worked my first 45+ hour week last week, and I'm well on the way to my second.

We were gone all Labor Day weekend, camping near Boone, NC, home of the Appalachian State Mountaineers, who beat Michigan in football on Saturday. (Hubster is an Ohio fan and was delighted.) It was a pretty good weekend, but not a restful one.

"A Sort of Notebook" is gone. I'm glad it's gone. I was so tired of it. I don't know if I'm going to pick up blogging again, but if I do, you, dear readers, will be the first to know.

I managed to eke out 45 minutes of practicing today, most of it on Schumann's "The Elf." Last week was a disaster for practicing, as I didn't take one single lunch break all week, and then I was piano-less for the entire Labor Day weekend. My next lesson is Saturday, so I'm going to try for two practice sessions a day from here until then ... even if those sessions are only 15 minutes long.

I'm two weeks behind on e-mails and am trying to catch up while at work, but it's tough because a lot of my job lately has been spent sitting in meetings. So I haven't had much time or opportunity for "personal business" while at work.

This is just a quick update. More later.

Well.

2007-08-25T20:44:00.000-04:00

It looks like "A Sort of Notebook" is an ex-blog. I'm not going to post a link to it because it's been taken over by spammers.

It's Saturday night and I love merlot. No, I'm not drunkly. I went to a 50th birthday party tonight and had two lovely glasses of merlot. Then we went to a toy store. (I should never go to a toy store after two glasses of merlot, and after running eight miles. I bought some yellow teeth, a remote-control fart machine, two crazy pencils, and a present for my future niece who has yet to be conceived.)

We went to an art gallery earlier that happens to have a grand piano and I played the Bach Prelude. Oh my, but it's sounding nice!

Deborah (my piano teacher) has a grand (I can't remember the manufacturer. Forgive me.) that she wants to sell me for $8,800, or $100 a key. Hubster thinks that's too much. I told him it's a steal--we get the pedals, and the wood, and the wheels, and the bench for free!

Lightning struck last night. It fried our computer, our television, our stereo, and our telephone. I was thrilled. We could finally get rid of the T.V. and replace it with a piano. An $8,800 piano. But no. Would you believe, Hub has already bought a flat-screen TV to replace it? Poor Hub. But at least he called and asked my permission. I said, "No, I don't want a T.V.," but then I said, "But I love my Hubster, and my Hubster loves college football. Yes, dear, go ahead and get the T.V."

As soon as we get a house that doesn't have serious humidity problems, I'm getting myself an $8,800 grand. I can't wait.

Piano Lesson Yesterday ... Finally

2007-08-25T11:21:00.000-04:00

I had a two-hour piano lesson yesterday. It was awesome. I was afraid it wouldn't be.

I had to work extra hours Monday through Thursday so that I could leave at 2:00 on Friday so that I could make it to piano for a 4:00 lesson. Which means I didn't get to take lunch on Monday through Thursday, and lunchtime is when I practice. So no practices. All week.

No practices at home either, because once I've run/worked out, I don't get home until after 8 p.m. And I'm exhausted by the time I've had dinner and a shower.

Work has been extremely busy, but in a good way. I'm enjoying the job. I can't say I love the job, but I like it. It's a paycheck, and it's somewhat challenging, and I work with good people. It's a good way to support my piano and writing habits.

I'll write a little more later. For now, I'll just let the world know that I had a great lesson. And Robert, I'm planning to e-mail you this weekend, so don't lose hope! :)

Yes, It Has Been Awhile

2007-06-23T11:21:00.000-04:00

But the blog isn't dead. Not yet anyway.

I've been practicing regularly but haven't made the time to post about those practice sessions. I haven't had a lesson in several weeks, and won't have one until the first week of July or later. But I've been practicing.

I'm going to talk a little bit about my intermediate piece right now. I've spent more time on it than I imagined I would, but you know how we musician-types get when our perfectionist gene kicks in ...

I'm playing an "easy" Bach prelude in F. It's in a piano book I bought in England, something called "World's Greatest Piano Pieces" or some such, and it has a few dozen "popular" pieces, mostly from early-intermediate to intermediate, with a few late-intermediate pieces thrown in.

The prelude has been a challenge for me. The notes are easy enough--they are mostly broken chords, typical of a Bach prelude. Nearly every measure has some form of an F chord, a Bb chord, or a C7 chord. One good thing about having played piano so long (and having practiced arps and inversions in I-IV-V progressions) is that I really don't have to think about moving from one such chord to another. My hands just sort of do it naturally.

The problem with this prelude, however, is that it calls for six or seven fingers on each hand, and I only have five.

OK, it doesn't really call for that many fingers. But it would be an easier piece to play if I the arps didn't keep jumping by a fifth, even after I've run out of fingers.

So the challenge with this piece has been the same challenge I've faced in previous pieces: figuring out the fingering. Deborah has done a stellar job of helping me to become more confident in my ability to work out my own fingering. Or, I guess I should say, I've become a lot less reluctant to try every fingering pattern under the sun until I stumble upon the one that works best for me. I try to follow the usual arp fingering for much of it, with a few adjustments.

I think I've figured it out. So now I'm at the stage of playing through the whole thing and listening for the patterns and repetitions in the piece, and thinking about the voices and how they work together and apart. (It's not an invention or a fugue, but I think of everything as being in "voices" now.) I guess that's a way of saying that I've moved from "learning" the notes, to working out the fingering, to being able to play the piece smoothly, to where I can really hone in on interpretation and style--the fun part! (Of course, it's all fun.)

What's cool is that I went through all of these steps this week. I've had the intermediate piece for a couple of months, but I've never really looked at it or thought seriously about it until several days ago.

I love Bach.

Thursday, May 30

2007-05-30T21:07:00.000-04:00

Scales: A-flat major and F minor. Ah, evidence of my lack of practice reared its ugly head tonight. The scales sounded OK at 92, except for when the LH is at the bass end of the scale (all the way to the left) and the RH is far at the treble end (all the way to the right). That's when my LH starts acting a little drunk, stumbling around and acting, well, uncouth. Pianistically speaking. I did some drilling on the "turnaround" sections of the two scales, and it helped. A little drilling goes a long way.

Then, I went on to arps.

Folks, I don't deserve a breakthrough. If anything, I deserve to move back a few notches on the metronome, particularly when it comes to arps, which have always gave me fits. Granted, I was working on the "easy" F major and D minor arps tonight ... though I kind of find white-key arps harder because they provide no black-key "anchors" to touch down on.

I played F major at 72. Then I thought, "I really hate that jumpy silence when my hand crosses over!" So I practiced hands separately, in chunks, just for fun. Then HT in chunks. Then in bigger chunks. Then the whole contrary-motion arp routine. Then with the metronome. Then with the metronome just a bit faster ... and a bit faster ...

I got up to 100. Yes, friends, I was playing arps at 100. I was playing them well at 92, not too bad at 96, and definitely not horrible at 100.

I'm in shock. I cannot claim the excellent execution of arpeggioes that my friend The Opinionated Arpeggist can. I never could. When I play arps, I always feel like I'm trying to jump across a chasm that's just a wee bit too wide for me. (OK, so a bit of cognitive self-therapy/ thought-retraining is in order here.) I much prefer scales and runs to arps and big broken chords when learning music. This is probably because I have "petite" hands.

Now for some creative visualization and thought-retraining. Yes. My eyes are closed. I am imagining that I have large hands. Yes. I am Rachmaninoff. I am Rachmaninoff. I am Rachmaninoff.

clicking heels three times, opening eyes

... um ... it didn't work. Not yet, anyway.

No Bach tonight, except for a couple of play-throughs on the intermediate piece. Then I moved on to Liszt before that mean old bully, WTC 1, jumped onto the keyboard ahead of poor old Standchen like it always does.

It was a close call. But Franzi got my attention tonight. It's too bad Bach and Liszt can't show up in the flesh whenever I choose to practice them. I'd probably meet with Liszt more often.

Hmm, I just got an idea for a racy novel ...

Anyway, here are some notes I wrote down as I was practicing Liszt tonight.

mm 1-4 intro: sounds really nice. I could use a bit more control in my hands, though--control I think I had three months ago. It shouldn't take me long to get that back.

mm 4-5 transition: needs to be smoother.

m 13: LH is not hitting the C7 chord inversions boldly enough. This is partly because I changed the fingering rather late in the game. Not that I'm making excuses ...

mm 62 & 66: The bane of my existence, these two measures are. Not really. I love playing 9-against-4, I truly do. One day I will be so caught up in the music (and so well-practiced at those measures) that everything will just fall nicely into place and I'll never again have trouble with measures 62 and 66. But in order to do that, I have to quit thinking of them as "the bane of my existence." (OK, so I don't really see them in that light. But I do get a little ... on edge ... whenever I approach them, thinking, "Will I do it? Will I finally get it right this time?" And of course that spoils the entire mood.)

mm 71-78: sloppy, and it shouldn't be. I always play this section really well, even if all of the other sections don't sound so good. I can't let this one get sloppy.

The measures after 78 are also rather sloppy, but they're definitely salvageable. It will be just a matter of drilling them a few times. I had them down cold before, and I still do. My hands just need to get themselves back into the rhythm.

So, for my next Liszt practice, I'll work on some of those areas that need the most work.

I will admit, the Hubster came up while I was playing and had this look of wonder and delight on his face and said "That's really beautiful," or some such nonsense. He's not much of a Liszt lisztener (I'm punny tonight), but considering he's heard me practicing this piece ad nauseam (his nauseam, not mine) (apologies to any classical scholars that may be reading this) for the past eight months, I was happy to see him so pleased.

I'm being silly. Music does that to me. It's so good to be practicing again. Very good.

Day 2 of New Leaf

2007-05-29T15:49:00.000-04:00

I spent the morning working on Chapter 16 of my novel. Then I went and got my oil changed. Then I was going to come home, change clothes, and go work out (yes, I'm making the most of this last "free" week before my new job begins).

So I got home. I thought, "If I don't practice now, I'm not going to practice at all today." After all, I do have a meeting from 6 to 8, and then a conference call from 8 to 9, and we can't forget that the season finale of "House" comes on from 9 to 10.

I know. Pitiful. "House" shouldn't trump piano. Ever.

So I sat down at around 2:30 p.m. and practiced.

Scales: G Major and E Minor. Both sounded fine. I'm at 92 still--as I said in an earlier post, I'm pretty much picking up where I left off when I stopped practicing regularly a few months ago.

Onward to arps at 72. Today I did B Major and G# Minor. They sounded fine. Not great. I don't know if I will ever be remotely happy with my contrary-motion arpeggios. I can't avoid that messy little "jumping" sound (or actually the jumping "silence") that occurs when the fingers cross over. I want my arps to sound like a machine is playing them: perfectly even, perfectly smooth. I'm not there yet. They sounded fine, but not fine enough for my ears.

No intermediate piece today. I have no love for the intermediate piece, delightful as it is. It always takes me a while to warm up to a new piece. Always.

Bach Prelude: Played through a few times. No real practice on this one today.

Bach Fugue: Yes, it's a guilty pleasure, the fugue is. I worked on mm 35-38 primarily, including the transition from 38 (with the trills in the RH) to 39 (where the bass voice swoops in to begin playing the primary "melody").

In case I haven't mentioned it before, I just love practicing Bach. I love practicing this particular fugue. I think I would love practicing any fugue. I just love to practice very slowly, listening intently to how the different unbroken intervals sound, how the tone and color of the piece change from sixteenth note to sixteenth note.

I worked pretty hard on mm 35-43 then, playing all in rhythms and then playing them through at increasing tempos maybe 25 times. By the time I was finished with that practice, I was no longer thinking about the fingering and was focusing more on how to get the different voices to sing out at different times, how to control my hands so that there are no sloppy changes in dynamics as the different voices intertwine.

Then I played through the entire fugue. Yes, it's rusty, but I really can't complain. It doesn't sound bad, and it still feels good and familiar in my fingers.

Liszt: I played through the Liszt a couple of times. I'm going to need to devote several whole practices to it--to picking through it, playing in rhythms, getting to know the piece again. I've gotten sloppy.

No. I haven't gotten sloppy. I've always been sloppy. So that's the news on the Liszt: several months of piano sabbatical have not decreased my sloppiness, not one bit. So much for that experiment.

All in all, I was happy with the practice, which ran for about an hour and fifteen minutes. I'm picking up where I left off, and am thrilled that I don't seem to have "lost" any of these pieces.

I Practiced!

2007-05-28T20:05:00.000-04:00

I practiced, and now I'm paying for it. Music has a way of catapulting me into manic mode, so here I am in manic mode. I played scales and arps to start with, as usual. Once again, it was like I'd never left the piano. I flew through contrary motion Db and bb like I'd been practicing them all along. Same goes for Bb and g contrary motion arps. Smooth as silk. I am not lying.

Then again, I usually play pretty well when I sit down to play for the first time after a piano sabbatical. I'm embarrassed to say that I've taken more piano sabbaticals than I'd like to admit. This little 2-month sabbatical has been nothing compared to some of my previous ones.

I declined to play my "intermediate piece," a Bach prelude that isn't a "P&F" prelude. Instead I played through the Prelude in C from WTC 1. Can there be a perfect piece of music? If so, can this prelude be it? No? It must be the unfortunately monikered "Air on the G String," then? No? Let me guess. It's something by Bach. It must be something by Bach.

Yes, I am manic. When I get manic, I get a little silly about my beloved bewigged one.

I played through my C#-major prelude, not at a fast tempo ... but I didn't miss a single note. Weird. I played it through again, just to make sure. Yup. I haven't played it in over a month, and I didn't miss a single note. I really wanted to focus on the fugue, so I played through the prelude a couple more times, just to get it back into my fingers (though I wonder if it's ever left), then moved on to the fugue.

My sweet, beloved fugue. Sigh. I played through the entire six-page piece, not at tempo, but not at a creepy-crawly pace, either. The first four pages were similar to those of the prelude: not a single missed note. (Mind you, I was only playing to see if I still had the notes; the interpretation, tone, etc., left much to be desired.)

I played Page 6 with very few missed notes. Page 5 was a different story; the first half was fine. The second half, not so fine.

Guess why.

When I left off practicing, I had learned the entire piece HT, at tempo, more or less, except for the second half of Page 5.

It's as if I never stopped practicing.

I hesitate to start explaining why I still had all of this in my noggin. I'll wait a couple more weeks. If the "good playing" stays with me, then I'll outline my theory of why George and I are like two old friends. You know how old friends are: they can go for years without seeing each other, and when they finally do get together, it's like no time has passed at all. They pick up right where they left off.

I love George. Yes, I'm manic at the moment, which means I should probably go out and run a few miles to burn off the excess energy. Instead I'm eating crackers and drinking wine.

I love George.

Piano Issues

2007-05-28T10:47:00.001-04:00

I don't know where to start. I've been forced to prioritize over the last few months and, unfortunately, and in contrast to my usual priority ordering, piano has had to sit on the back burner. I didn't plan it this way, but it's how it worked out.

The months of April and May were very busy, between volunteer work and freelance jobs. My piano teacher, Deborah, was planning a recital at the time, and a couple of my "lessons" turned into listening/critique sessions where she played her pieces and I listened and gave feedback. We did this for several reasons: (1) I hadn't practiced; (2) she needed the practice; and (3) I think it was good for me as a piano student (piano colleague?) to have these experiences. Deborah said she would give me those lessons back, since they hadn't been actual lessons where I played and she critiqued/guided. That was fine with me.

I was working a contract tech-writing job through part of April and most of May, so I suggested that we not have lessons for the rest of the spring semester, and that the tuition I'd paid in March be applied to summer lessons instead. Deborah was OK with that, I think. Disappointed, as was I, but things were OK.

But now there's a huge obstacle.

I've taken a full-time job that requires a one-hour commute ... in the other direction of my piano teacher's house.

I have some decisions to make. Here are my choices.

(1) Quit the job before I ever start: Not actually a choice. I need the money, and I want the job. Just wanted to make that clear before I present the real choices.

(2) Quit piano: I'd like to say that this is not actually a choice. I definitely don't want to quit piano, even though I've taken quite a sabbatical from it this spring. I'm even trying to arrange with a church near my new job to practice on one of their spare pianos during my lunch hour.

(3) Balance the job and piano: This is the choice I want to make. It's easier said than done, though, because, along with the job and piano, I also want to balance writing, running, husband, and home. I know I can't do it all, but I'm loath to cut out any of these. To try this, though, I can choose from several approaches.

(a) Meet with Deborah for after-work lessons: The earliest I could get to Deborah's house after work would be 7:30 p.m., after a long day of early-morning running, the commute, a full day at work, and another commute. This plan could work if I committed to it, but just thinking about it makes me tired. If we do this, we'd need to meet once every two weeks at most.

(b) Meet with Deborah for weekend lessons: Again, I think this would work best if we met bi-weekly. I like this idea best, even though it would mean shuffling my Saturday morning runs and not attending some Saturday morning races. I mean, this is piano. Writing has always trumped piano, but piano must trump running. But the question is ... would Deborah be willing or even able to give up her Saturday mornings? And if she is, will I be able to practice the piano diligently enough to make it worth it for both of us? It's hard to say because I have no idea how drained my job/commute is going to leave me at the end of each day and week.

(c) Find a new piano teacher: I really don't want to do this. Deborah and I "click," and she has been a wonderful teacher for me. I'm tempted to say this is another "not an option" option. But I've forced myself to think about it. It feels sacrilegious to even write down my options here.

(i) Find a teacher in my town: There are several teachers, but they are mostly teacher of kids, and I don't know how many would be willing/able to take on an advanced NAPS. We NAPS types are a special breed, we are. I may be able to find someone willing to take me on at the local community college, however.

(ii) Contact the music department of the university closest to my new job: The university is about halfway between the new job and my house, so it would be more convenient if I were to find a teacher there. Again, though, it may be hard to find someone who would be willing to take on (1) a non-university student who is also (2) an adult amateur at this keyboard thing, not to mention (3) a full-time professional in a non-music career.

(iii) Ask around and find a non-university piano teacher near my new job: An option, I guess, but I would need to find someone with a doctorate or at least a master's degree in music, and it seems like Option (ii) would be the best place for me to start.

I'm at a crossroads. I started to e-mail Deborah about scheduling summer lessons, but found myself hesitating to make definite plans. I have to think through some things, and probably spend quite a bit of time with George the Piano before I decide what I'm going to do. It would also be nice to work a couple of weeks and see how much this new job is going to take out of me.

And it makes me feel sick to think of quitting lessons with Deborah, who is my friend as well as my piano teacher.

So, instead of finishing my e-mail to Deborah, I wrote this post instead. Any feedback you NAPSters want to give will be appreciated.

New Title, New Leaf

2007-05-24T11:21:00.000-04:00

Stay tuned. I'm going to start posting on this neglected blog again soon.

Wednesday's Lesson Cancelled

2007-02-15T08:44:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, Deborah and I made the mutual decision to cancel my lesson. I've been estranged from the piano all week, and was going to need a "practice lesson" anyway. And Deborah had an unexpected schedule change. It wasn't a change that would interfere with my lesson, but it would have required her to race around and be stressed and have to hurry ... just to get home so I could have a practice lesson. And I wasn't all that crazy about the idea of the hour-long drive for a practice lesson.

We both agreed. Not worth it.

So, did I practice yesterday? NO. Why not? I worked at the bookstore, then ran four miles, then came home. My husband was home early, and it was Valentine's Day. It would be really bad form to lock myself up in the piano room when one's spouse comes home early for Valentine's Day. So I didn't practice.

And I won't get much practicing in this weekend because I'll be on the road and piano-less for most of it.

I'm not stressed about the lack of practice, though. Piano is a priority, but it isn't always the top one. And this week, my novel and my friend Jan's book (which I'm editing) have been the priorities. And piano's going to have to play second fiddle (is that a pun?) for a few more weeks, I'm afraid, until Jan's book is done.

Still, I hope to do better than I did last week. Two hours a week on this music is simply not going to cut it.

Feb. 9 Practice

2007-02-10T10:33:00.000-05:00

My February 9 practice was short and sweet. I worked only on the Liszt, playing in rhythms. Do you know how hard it is to play a piece in rhythms when the LH is even and the RH is all over the place, with 2-against-3 and later with 4-against-9? Don't worry--I'm not trying to be impeccably exact when I'm doing rhythms. And I've discovered what a *rut* I've gotten into with the Liszt. It's so beautiful, and part of me is content just to play it through, again and again, and be done with it.

But rhythms are forcing me to look at the seamy underside, at the 0's and 1's that make this piece what it is. And it's not an altogether pleasant experience.

But it's waking me up. The beauty of this piece has lulled me into a sort of sleepy complacency when I play it. I think that's why Deborah said not to play the piece through a single time this week. It is so tempting to just play it through and listen to the beautiful music.

But when I do that, I'm limiting myself, and I'm limiting this piece. I don't fully know this piece yet. Parts are still a little sloppy. I still trip up on the 4-against-9 section, though not always. My fingers may hit the right notes, but I'm not always certain that they'll do so. The slowness of the piece allows me to "fudge" as I play it. If I were to try to play it through faster than tempo, my hands would have no clue what to do.

Rhythms are forcing my hands to figure it out. They are forcing me to jump from chord to chord faster. They are forcing me to think, and then to not think and let my hands do the thinking.

Like I said, it's not the most pleasant experience. And it is most unpleasant, not being able to play through this entire piece that I love so much. But I know these less-than-pleasant exercises will yield wonderful results.

And so the rhythms continue ...

I Need an Intermediate Piece

2007-02-08T10:25:00.000-05:00

Deborah wants me to pick out an intermediate piece to start learning next week. I went to the ARCT Syllabus guide that Robert so graciously sent me and looked up all of the pieces that I considered "intermediate." They were mostly Grade 6 and Grade 7. Not intermediate enough.

I looked up my Beethoven Sonatina in G, my most recent intermediate piece. It's a Grade 3--a very early intermediate. So I'm looking for something in the Grade 4-5 category. And I'd kind of like to work on one of those pieces that everyone loves to hear--Fur Elise, Chopin's Em prelude, the Brahms waltz in Ab--all pieces I learned in junior high, but pieces that I'd like to re-learn, and learn to play well, and not like my junior-high self, whose heart wasn't in the music. And they are pieces I love, and that others love hearing as well.

Hmm. Fur Elise is Grade 7. The Chopin Prelude is Grade 8. The Brahms Waltz is Grade 8. Too advanced for an intermediate piece? I'll talk it over with Deborah.

I looked up my C# major prelude and fugue and couldn't find them at first. They're in the "Performer's ARCT." My Liszt isn't in there, but I would put it at a Grade 10, since the Consolation No. 3, which I learned in college, is a Grade 9, and is much more basic than "Standchen."

So I guess I'm better than I thought. Or more advanced, at least. But I still need an intermediate piece.

I also made a BIG realization last night as I dug through all of my old music from junior high and earlier. I found another reason that I hated piano back then. Nearly everything I learned was 20th century, mostly things like Kabalevsky and Bartok. I don't dislike either, and sometimes I really get in the mood for Bartok ... but a steady diet of it for a 13-year-old? (I can see why my teacher gave me these pieces. But I can also see why I dreaded practices and lessons both back then.)

Asheville Piano Teacher

2007-02-08T09:47:00.000-05:00

I've titled this post "Asheville Piano Teacher" for a reason. If anyone in western NC is looking for a good piano teacher and googles "Asheville Piano Teacher," I want this blog to come up. Deborah Belcher is probably the best teacher I've ever had. My last two lessons have been quite good. I think that's partly because my practices this week were good.

I've really made strides in the fugue. I've been working exclusively in rhythms and can play the first two and a half pages at a decidedly faster tempo than my usual creeping pace. The notes are starting to feel natural (there's a joke in there somewhere, since this piece has seven sharps) to my hands. Really. I'm getting to where I don't have to think about every little movement and gesture. They're just happening. I sometimes doubted that I would ever get there.

So I played the first two pages for Deborah, and she wrote "Great Work!!!" in my piano notebook. Of course, the last four pages were stumbling and bumbling because I haven't done the intense rhythm work with them yet. But again, the gestures are feeling more and more natural.

I have a gazillion metaphors for this piece. One is the "spinning plates" metaphor. I get the RH down in a measure, then by the time I learn the LH, my hand has forgotten the RH and I have to re-learn it. Or I'll get one section down, HT, and lose it because the next section takes all of my energy. Once I learn the next section, I find that I've lost huge chunks of the sections I've already learned.

It's been frustrating because I generally have very good practicing techniques. I practice very ... intentionally. Not passively, never just running my fingers over the notes just to hear myself play. So it was a little discouraging to find that I kept "losing" things into which I'd put a lot of time and concentrated effort. Spinning plates, and the plates keep falling. But I'm slowly, slowly learning to keep more plates spinning at once.

I'm not sure what the other metaphor is. But with this piece, it's been necessary for me to go through numerous phases, over and over again, it seems. Learning the piece HS took forever--a couple of months. Then, learning it HT took a couple more months. While I was learning it HT, I got to where HS was relatively easy.

HT has taken a long, long time. I started learning it (in sections) HT back in ... oh, September or so. I worked with rhythms a little bit, but not exclusively. When I'd finally learned every section HT, I had lost the ability to play the earlier sections HT. I know, it would help to play it through once a day, but I didn't always have the time to devote to that (it took me a LONG time to play it through).

Then I learned it HT using rhythms. And now I'm learning it HT again, using rhythms again.

I've also had to take several breaks from the piece. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and it apparently also makes the fingers grow nimbler.

I now have the notes in my hands, though I do still need to work the last four pages in rhythms. That will take a week or more. But Deborah said I also need to think musically, now that "just getting the notes" is no longer a hit-or-miss proposition. So I'll practice the last four pages in rhythms, thinking musically, and will also run rhythms (thinking musically) of the first two pages, but focusing most on those last four. I'm getting there. It's just taking a while.

I started to play the Liszt for her, then quit after the introductory measures and said, "Wait! I can't play this today. I forgot, I changed the fingering." She didn't even look at my new fingering. She just said, "OK. Work in rhythms on the new fingering, and do not play this piece through this week. Just work in small sections, in rhythms, thinking musically."

Then I had the choice of playing the prelude for her, or doing some fugue drills (in rhythms, thinking musically). I chose the fugue drills.

I find it hard to practice when someone is listening to me--particularly when my piano teacher is listening to me. Which is kind of silly, because piano teachers should listen to their students practice occasionally, helping them to adopt better and more rewarding practice habits. But when I started doing rhythms (thinking musically), I played them timidly. She told me how I needed to play them, and I said, "I play them fine at home. I think I'm just nervous because you're listening."

"See?" she said. "You're giving your authority away to me again." I'm really trying to get away from the "Must Please Teacher" mindset. I'm much better than I was three years ago, when I first started taking from Deborah. Much better. But there's still that pleaser of a student in me, waiting (and perhaps expecting) negative criticism.

Strange because Deborah tells me that I'm unbelievably musical and have excellent musical intuitions. I just need to keep learning to trust myself.

My scales and arps sounded great, by the way!

Tonight's Practice

2006-12-10T22:06:00.000-05:00

I didn't have a very long practice tonight. I'm a little disturbed about what a challenge it's been to speeding up my scales and arpeggios. I can play them perfectly up to a certain tempo, but if I try to go past that tempo, my hands just start slapping at the keys, not even trying to hit the right notes. It's as if they're saying, "I can't do this, so I'm not even going to try. So there. Blah."

I think I have some idea of the reason for this strange problem. I know the notes. I don't think it's an issue of not knowing what notes to play. I think part of the issue relates to the fact that I've been slowly, over the last year or two, adopting a new technique of relaxed hands and using my arms more and my fingers less. My hands don't seem to understand how to unite "relaxed" mode with "playing really fast" mode. My hands almost feel lazy.

I worked on the Suzuki Beethoven some. Not much to report there.

For the fugue, I reviewed my work from the last practice and began work on another measure. I really felt tired, though, and didn't feel like I was benefitting much from the practice. So, after I completed the measure, I moved on to the prelude and simply worked on emphasizing the leading voices. So much easier said than done.

Then I moved on to Liszt. Resisted the urge to just sit down and play it through, and instead worked on the final line of the piece, trying to make it sound more "shaped" and less ... like a bunch of randomly twinkling stars. I worked in rhythms and was surprised (once again) that I didn't know the line as well as I thought I did.

That's about it for tonight. The entire practice lasted about 50 minutes.

No Practice December 8

2006-12-10T09:26:00.000-05:00

I spent the day in Charlotte for the Thunder Road Half-Marathon. Didn't get to practice piano, though I did play a bit on my birthmom's keyboard that afternoon.

Practice 12/7/06

2006-12-07T22:11:00.000-05:00

Only an hour or so of practice tonight. I've been feeling a little depressed and sluggish and wasn't in the mood for practicing.

I fell apart on scales and arps again. I ended up spending quite a bit of time on them, particularly the scales (Gb and eb). I tend to mess up in the same spot in the LH, no matter what scale I'm playing, regardless of whether I'm in major or minor. I worked through that LH spot, worked in rhythms, played it very slowly, etc., and then was able to play the scale perfectly at 88. I still feel a little "shaky" about it, though.

I played through the Suzuki Beethoven. Didn't really practice it.

Went straight to the fugue and learned four new measures. Yes, four! I saved the ~~easiest~~ least complex page for last, and it was nice to be able to learn four measures in just ten or so minutes.

I worked on tone quality and emphasizing the "leader" in the first page of the prelude. Played very slowly. I ended up picking the two "LH leader" passages apart, playing every other note, every two notes, etc. I don't feel like I have the control I need in my LH for the subtleties Bach is asking of it. So George and I worked on acquiring that control. One thing I did was to have my LH touch play a note, then touch the key (but not depress it) for the next note, then play the next note, etc. I don't want to do too much of that because I have an inkling it can cause hand injury. But the short exercises I did tonight really helped me to see what I need to do in order to rein the LH in as a whole.

I didn't have time for Liszt, so I just played it through once. He gets to be first tomorrow.

Lesson Report

2006-12-06T20:44:00.000-05:00

During practice sessions, certain questions arise regarding fingering, dynamics, etc. Sometimes I write them down on a scrap of paper. Usually I bring them up at a lesson if I remember them. But I've started to write them down in the notebook where Deborah writes all of her notes at my lesson. I used to feel like this notebook was something almost sacred, something I didn't want to sully with my dumb questions, but that's changing. I'm feeling more and more like Deborah and I are a team, rather than Wise Teacher on the Holy Mountain and Lowly, Groveling, Ignorant Student.

Anyway, I write the questions on the page she'll be writing on at the next lesson so she can't miss them and I can't forget to ask them. That's how the lesson started today. Only one question was "Liszt: IT Dynamics?" And I couldn't remember, for the life of me, what "IT" was supposed to mean.

On to my lesson report!

Inversions sounded fine. I fell apart, however, on scales and arps (F/d scales and E/c# arps). I mean, I really fell apart. The piano sounded like an old-fashioned computer, making all kinds of blips and beeps and sounding nothing like the smooth scales and arps I play at home. I actually laughed at myself. I'm not used to making such, er, interesting, sounds on a piano.

It's all psychological. I know it's all psychological. My hands know what to do. They've done these scales and arps a million times. But something in me subtly starts thinking, "OK, it's going too well. Hope you don't mess up at the bottom of the scale in the LH ..." And, like clockwork, my LH turns into a mess of confused fingers.

I have some ideas about why I'm doing this, but I'm not sure how to articulate them. So I'll just think on them and write about them in a later post.

Beethoven (Suzuki) sounded fine. The pianist on the Suzuki CD plays the grace notes different from how Deborah wants me to play them (as melodic apoggiaturas). I keep forgetting and go back to playing the way the CD does because that's what I learned the piece from. And her only real comments were to make sure I play the grace notes/appoggiaturas the new way. She asked if I would play just the Beethoven for the next group class, for the benefit of one of her students. I said "OK." Even though I'll be chomping at the bit by then (the next group class is in late January) to play Liszt and Bach for everyone again.

I played through the Liszt. It took me a few measures to ease into it, and the result was that I played, oh, about three different tempi in the first four measures. Silly me. I was laughing at myself again. I really need to imagine the melody before I dive into playing the introduction, so I know from the start what my tempo is. I normally do this ... I think I was just anxious to get started.

She had lots of nice things to say about the Liszt, though the quasi Violoncello is still the weak link in the chain. My ending also needed a little bit of work. And the big advice for the whole piece was, "Move the line forward." I think that relates again to architecture. I'm pausing too much to savor the beauty of each room, forgetting that they're all part of the same house.

I played the Prelude through, but I started too fast. The result was a not-so-great play-through. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. Her big comment was that I'm not using my musical sensibilities to play it. I'm not totally there yet, I know. I'm closer than I've ever been, but I still have a ways to go. I'm not shaping it enough. It's a tricky piece to shape, with the "leader" moving from LH to RH. The piece kind of reminds me of someone playing with the treble/bass on a car radio, making the bass prominent, then turning the bass almost off to make the treble prominent. Very cool effect, and one I'm still working on.

Fugue: No time. We'll begin the next lesson with it.

A good lesson, overall.

I Played With My Soul Tonight

2006-12-05T22:44:00.000-05:00

Hm. That title can be taken two ways: either I gambled with the devil, or I had a very soulful practice tonight. You can guess which one it is.

Can't figure it out? Read on.

Scales, Arps, Inversions, Suzuki, blah, blah, blah: Good, good, good. Everything's good.

Liszt: Ahhhh. I normally save Franzi for last (read: the last 10 minutes of a 60+ minute practice session), so I worked on "Standchen" first tonight. Went back to the quasi Violoncello and focused (again) on the dynamics and articulation. Actually I played through it, s-l-o-w-l-y, a couple of times to make sure I wasn't missing any notes (in this section, I think because there is so much hand-crossing, I sometimes fail to strike the LH notes hard enough). Then I played isolated sections of the quasi Violoncello, again very s-l-o-w-l-y, really, really concentrating on the dynamics and articulation.

Then I listened to the Horowitz version from the Horowitz at Home CD and followed along with the music, taking close note of what the master did with the dynamics and articulation. This CD is one of my favorites, and I know I've listened to it at least a couple hundred times, but I listened to "Standchen" tonight like never before. Serious con-cen-tra-tion. Throughout the piece, I could feel my heartbeat/pulse and breathing change as they ebbed and flowed with the music.

Then I played. At first, just the quasi Violoncello sections. Several times. Focusing very intently on getting the articulation right. (Funny, if I pay attention--duh!--to the markings, my pedaling problem virtually disappears. This lack of paying attention to what's written ... I think it's particularly a problem for folks like me who tend to want to play everything by ear, and our way.)

Then I played the whole piece through, at a glacial tempo, really focusing, focusing, focusing on the dynamics and articulation, exaggerating the pianissimo and fortissimo sections, and also the crescendi and dicrescendi and everything else, stopping whenever I got anything the slightest bit wrong, and correcting it.

Wow. Time ceased. I felt like I was in the music, picking my way through the staff lines the way I'd hike a forest trail, looking, listening, breathing it all in, letting it become a part of me. Letting myself become a part of the music.

After that intense play-through, I drilled a few more sections briefly, then played the piece through at tempo.

Something magical happened: something that has happened before, but not often. I played Standchen with more feeling--yet more control--than I've ever played it. I felt so in control. I felt strong. Powerful. High. Joyful. Peaceful. And my hands got all warm and tingly and felt like they could play anything.

In order to keep my hands from the pitfalls of disillusionment, I soon moved on to Bach. :)

I did the same dynamics/articulation thing with the Prelude. Of course, any dynamic markings in the Bach are those of an editor, but this is the Alfred edition, which I mostly like. The louds and softs are constantly changing in this piece, and from the RH to the LH and back. It kind of reminds me of rolling hills.

Again, I was focused. Again, I felt like I was crawling inside the music.

I didn't try to play it fast. The recommended tempo is something like 84-92, and I can play it at about 52 right now, if I don't want to make (hardly) any mistakes. Tonight I didn't play it any faster than 40. I wasn't concerned with the natural fluidity that comes with speed tonight; I was concerned with the fluidity that comes from smooth transitions from loud to soft, from RH melody to LH melody.

It was 10:00 p.m. before I got to the Fugue. No time to practice it. So I played through it at a snail's pace, so slowly that it's almost a challenge to actually miss a note. I call this "laying down tracks." If I do a slow, (almost) note-perfect play-through at the end of my practice, my fingers somehow remember it the next day. And I plan to spend a good bit of time on the fugue tomorrow before my lesson.

All in all a wonderful, transforming practice of about two hours. I really, really hope my lesson doesn't get cancelled tomorrow! And I hope I'm able to play half as soulfully tomorrow as I did tonight!

December 4 Practice

2006-12-04T22:15:00.000-05:00

Friends, I would not have practiced tonight if I hadn't promised myself to update this blog every day, whether I practice or not.

But I did practice! And I'm glad I did.

I actually practiced a total of about two hours, give or take a few minutes, today.

Scales sound good. Arps sound pretty good. D Major, of all keys, gave me trouble. Hm.

Inversions: I think I might be swinging too much. I've started leaning my weight into the keys. Not enough that it would be obvious to a non-pianist, but enough that I notice it.

Liszt: I actually practiced Liszt several times today. Worked on the "boring" quasi Violoncello part. I started paying more attention to the accent marks (pressure marks?) and slurs, and it wasn't so boring after that. It was challenging. But I have a host of questions for Deborah now.

Bach Prelude: Worked on page two. Drilled the poop out of it. Drilled the poop out of the transitions. I've been playing page two pretty well, but I get a nervous feeling whenever I get to it. I wanted to wear out that fuse, and made some progress toward that.

Bach Fugue: Added about six measures HT! Drilled and drilled and drilled. I didn't want to stop, but it's late. I now only have ONE PAGE left to learn HT. I won't have it before tomorrow's lesson, but I will by next week's--if I keep working at it the way I am!

Breakthrough

2006-12-03T22:03:00.000-05:00

Good practice tonight. Scales and arps are sounding good, even at the faster speeds. I worked on both the prelude and the fugue tonight. For the prelude, I drilled a few measures on page two, and for the fugue, I reviewed those last three measures, then went to work on a HT measure elsewhere in the piece.

For the Liszt, I did a bit of drilling here and there, and they played the piece through a few times, thinking about the architecture. I think this creative visualization thing is working. Each time I play through it, it feels "bigger" somehow.

What I really want to write about for this entry, though, is a tiny breakthrough that I've been observing lately. It's been a long time coming, and I really noticed it yesterday when I was playing at church. It has to do with hand positions, finger curve, gestures, etc.

Ever since I started taking lessons from Deborah three years ago, she has been after me to relax my hands, to use more than just my fingers and wrists when I play. My playing was VERY "fingery," and my hands got tired easily because I let them tense up so much. My thumbs and pinkies, when not striking the keys, stuck out at funny angles, just because they were so tense.

Part of that was, I'm sure, because I *was* tense--I started taking piano at a very stressful time of my life (new job, new marriage, new state, new house, etc.). Part of it was that I hadn't played piano on a regular basis in over ten years. I'm sure my current less-stressful lifestyle, along with a much-increased familiarity with the piano, has helped. Liszt and Bach deserve some of the credit, too.

What's the big breakthrough? It's this: I finally seem to have adopted the "relaxed hand" mode that Deborah's been trying to get me to understand for three years. I can tell that my arms are in the driver's seat--not my wrists and fingers. And I'm not having to consciously think about it. It feels natural.

I don't know when this change took place. I'm sure it's happened over time--and glacially so. But I noticed it at church tody because my brain tends to dissociate itself from my hands sometimes when I'm playing there, and I watched my hands almost like I was watching someone else's hands play. And I could see a real difference. My hands looked more like Deborah's hands. Like a professional's hands. Smooth and gliding. Not tortured and stiff.

So ... small breakthrough. Big breakthrough. Take your pick.

'Tis the Season for Christmas Songs

2006-12-03T08:49:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again. This morning for church I practiced "Oh Come All Ye Faithful,"Emmanuel," and a few others. We're supposed to do "Go Tell It On the Mountain," but I don't have the music to it ... so I went through my old music and found a book of Christmas Carols for Level Four Piano, edited by David Carr Glover. I wrote down the chords, and voila! I now have the music.

I think Christmas carols are tricky, partly because we only play them for three weeks out of the year. So it's almost like I re-learn them every December, and I never feel like I quite have them down. I've always found "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" particularly difficult to play well, since the chords change with nearly every beat.

The bad thing is that everyone knows these pieces, so the pressure's on to play them exactly right--to give them what they're used to hearing.

The good thing is that people generally sing Christmas carols so loudly and with such gusto that they either won't notice or won't care if there's a missed note here and there.

I think my favorite carols to play are "Silent Night" and "Away in a Manger." When I was in my 20s, I worked out a little conglomeration of "Away in a Manger" and the famous Brahms Lullaby. I knew nothing about counterpoint or harmony at the time, so it's not a very polished little composition. But I thought it was cool how the two shared a lot of chords and chord changes, and I had fun weaving them together.

OK. Time for a shower. Considering I have 2 hours of church, 5 hours of work and 2 hours of running today, it looks like this morning's Christmas practice is the only one I'll have today.

12/02/06 Practice Report

2006-12-02T23:11:00.000-05:00

Today's practice wasn't much of a practice. I had to work most of the day and am too tired tonight to practice. But I did sneak in about twenty minutes earlier today to play through those last three measures of the fugue. The notes are starting to feel more natural to my hands. I still have some work to do before they feel *completely* natural. The plan? Spend another 10 or 15 minutes (no more) on them, with the goal of memorizing them, and then move on to other measures.

No other practicing today. Tomorrow morning I hope to get an hour in before practicing the music for church.

12/01/06 Practice

2006-12-01T21:52:00.000-05:00

I hope I'm not overdoing it. I practiced for about 110 minutes tonight. I'm so very tired, but I want to post a quick report while everything is still fresh in my mind.

The second-to last measure of the fugue is perhaps the most ~~difficult~~ complex single measure I've ever played. Deborah said to spend "about 10 minutes" learning each measure. Um, Deborah? This one took me thirty minutes. Okay, thirty-five.

If there's any one thing I've learned as a pianist, it's HUMILITY.

I spent the bulk of tonight's practice on the Fugue. The last line (final three measures) is a ~~toughie~~ complex bit of music, but I finally managed it. Each new set of rhythms was a challenge. I felt disoriented each time I started a new rhythm. Completely disoriented. Thinking, "What is this piece? Am I in the right fugue? Is this the music I thought was so familiar, once upon a time?"

Once I got that last line, I realized something: I now only have a page and a half left of the fugue. Once I learn that page and a half, I'll be able to play the whole thing, HT! After ONLY FIVE MONTHS! And maybe I'll be able to play it at tempo in JUST FIVE MORE MONTHS!

OK. So maybe I would have learned it faster if I'd practiced more diligently, instead of the fits and starts of the last few months. But still. This piece has been ~~a bear~~ very complex. A very friendly, fuzzy-wuzzy bear. Heh. Who am I kidding?

I worked on the Prelude for maybe 20 minutes. The final few measures are sounding quite good. I played through the whole thing VERY slowly, with the metronome. Then I drilled a bit of the second page. Then I realized I have this piece in my hands. There are only a couple of spots now where I pause a bit and have to think about what I'm playing. Know what this means, folks? This means I'm going to be able to start working on tempo before long! (I think!)

I played the Liszt several times throughout the day, always thinking in terms of architecture and wholeness. It's been interesting. In a good way, I mean. This weekend, I really want to drill the quasi Violoncello section. It's technically the easiest, but it's also the least interesting section to me ... which means I don't try as hard when I play it. The result? Not only do I sound bored, but I miss notes I shouldn't miss. Lovely. I need to work on that.

I didn't do scales or aps or inversions or Suzuki. Didn't think about it. As usual, JSB hogged my practice session. So I'll start with something else tomorrow.

November 30 Practice

2006-11-30T22:14:00.000-05:00

Friends, you won't believe this. I actually practiced for about 100 minutes tonight. All because I knew I'd decided, once again, to be accountable to this blog.

I'm tired, though, so this will be a short practice report.

Scales: D major and B minor at 88. The slight increase in speed has made for a bigger adjustment than you'd expect. Here's how each scale went the first time I played them:

Phase I: 2 octaves, parallel motion: Lovely.
Phase II: 2 octaves, (outward) contrary motion: Not bad a-tall. Until maybe the last five notes of the octave.
Phase III: 2 octaves, (inward) contrary motion: The first five notes (the same five that tripped me up in Phase II) are a problem.
Phase IV: 2 octaves, parallel motion: Lovely. Except for those same five notes.

Oh, and those five notes? They're a LH issue. Though they're probably a RH issue, too, since I can play the LH alone perfectly. If I add the RH and try to focus on the LH and let the RH just play, then the RH forgets what it's supposed to do.

Maddening. So I used the increasing "trill" exercises by Mark Westcott with the D-major. It helped. I spent extra time on the five notes at the bottom. I think part of the problem might be that I get nervous because my hands are so far apart at that point, and I can't really "get behind" either of them, so I choke a little bit.

I needed to do the same drilling with B minor, but I'd already spent a half-hour on scales, and had a lot left to do!

Inversions: Good. I listened.

Arps: Good. G major and E minor.

Suzuki (Beethoven Sonatina in G): I played through it. We didn't go over it at piano yesterday, so I'll continue practicing what I've learned, and learning the rest of the piece by ear.

Bach Prelude: I drilled the poop out of the last few measures. Practiced with the new fingering, and it was a challenge. My hands have gotten so used to the previous fingering; they didn't want to change fingering again. (My hands probably get really annoyed with my brain for constantly changing fingerings on them.) But I finally got it the new way and practiced in rhythms of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 (the piece is in 6/8 time). Then I played through the entire piece at a super-slow pace, with the metronome, to train myself not to get faster and faster and faster as I play through the piece. It's one of those motoric, whirring preludes Bach is known for, and it's easy to get caught up in it and play too fast.

Bach Fugue: I worked on the last three measures. The antepenultimate measure was the one we focused on in my lesson yesterday. I went over it a few times, then moved on to the penultimate measure. It's a ~~mean and nasty~~ complex little measure. I slogged through it the way I was slogging through individual beats of individual measures when I first started learning this thing HT. I need to do some serious rhythm practice with those measures. No time tonight, though. Tonight I just focused on learning to feel at home with the HT notes.

Liszt: It was getting late, and I was getting tired, so I played through the Liszt a few times, thinking not so much about pedaling or fingering, but about architecture. Thinking about how the sections relate to each other--how they're part of the whole, and how they contribute to the whole. The word that keeps coming to mind is "texture," for some reason. I listened for texture, and how the texture of each section fit into the overall piece. I think the creative visualization helped, and I'm going to continue to do it.

My playing of the Liszt was good, too. There were times when I felt like I was pouring my whole body into the music. That has to be a good sign.

It was a good practice. Now, if I could just have about five more of those before next Wednesday. I'll do my best!

Piano Lesson Today

2006-11-29T20:03:00.001-05:00

Today's 1.5-hour lesson included a lot of talking, but in a good way. I love my piano teacher. It was a great lesson, even though it was mostly talking.

Today's theme seemed to be "Trust Yourself." See, I have very little faith in my ability to play well. Have you ever thought you looked good in a certain outfit, then, when you saw pictures of yourself in it, thought, "Oh, horrors! Why did I ever think that turquoise jumpsuit looked good on me? My butt looks like Mars!"

OK, maybe you've never had that experience. But try to imagine. I've always been very critical of myself, not just in piano. When I don't play well, I know it. When I do play something well ... I know it. I can feel it. Or I think I can. And the other week in the group piano class, I thought I played the Prelude and the Liszt well. Not perfectly, of course, but beautifully.

Then ... later ... I wondered ... "What if I just thought I sounded good? What if I really sounded like crap? What if I got too involved in the pieces and my playing was nothing but a bunch of muddy, overly rubaticized (is that a word?) cacophony of notes?

Oh, my. What if everyone could tell it was bad except for me?

This actually happened once. Sort of. I played a piece for a group class back when I was about thirteen years old. I thought I played fine. I felt good about how I played. Then, at my next private lesson, Mrs. W. said something to the effect of, "I couldn't believe how badly you played. I was embarrassed for you." Then she proceeded to get on my case (which I'm sure I deserved) for not practicing.

Well, the cut was deep. The scar is still there. To this day, whenever I think I've played well, I later think, "I wonder if I actually played so badly that people were embarrassed for me."

It's crazy, and it's silly, and it makes no sense. But I had to ask Deborah today, "Did I really sound good at the group lesson? I thought I sounded good, but I don't know. So if I sounded awful, please tell me."

So she looked at me kind of funny and said I'd played beautifully--not perfectly, but beautifully. I still didn't totally believe her, so I told her about the Mrs. W. tongue-lashing of 1983. Poor Deborah must think I'm crazy. We work though "childhood piano issues" a couple of times a year. She doesn't exactly play therapist at those times, though she does have some good advice--much of it gleaned from her own experience.

So we talked through the "Mrs. W. issue" today, and she said she's going to start giving me more responsibility for interpreting and judging my playing. (Ack! No! I like having an all-wise, all-knowing teacher!)

On to the lesson report (as if this post isn't already long enough!) ...

Scales: Good, good, good. I played Ab-major and F minor at 88. I'd been doing 84 forever, so 88 was new. I did well on the Ab, but struggled a little with the F minor (which, along with F# minor, is probably the scale that gives me the most trouble these days). She told me to trust myself (doesn't Yoda say something like that?), to accept that I know this scale and that I can play it. So I did, and even though I felt a little uncertain while playing the F minor again, I did play it evenly, and without a single missed note. So that was good.

Inversions: I've gotten a little sloppy about making sure all notes hit evenly. I'm to start listening to the inversions more attentively when I play them, hearing every note of each chord, and how the sounds differ from one inversion to the next.

Arps: Pretty good. She left the usual comments: "Soft thumbs." "Soft hands." I tend to tense up if I'm at all uncertain about hitting the right notes (which is often the case in the black-key arps--though I've developed an comfy-old-armchair feeling for the white-key arps). She said I just need to trust that my hands will fly to the right notes. I tried it. I played lots of wrong notes, and I usually don't play any wrong notes. But you know what? The world didn't come to an end. So I'm to practice the attitude of trusting my hands, and they'll know where to go.

Fugue: I wanted her to watch me practice the last couple of measures because I'm uncertain about the fingering (there's a weird jump in the left hand in the second beat of the penultimate measure, and I was wondering if I might somehow avoid the weird jump). So I went into a 10-minute mini-practice session while she watched and listened.

About six minutes into it, I asked, "Am I playing this too legato?"

She said. "What do you think?" (argh!)

I said, "I think I am. The sixteenth notes need to be just a little shorter ... like this." (And I played it.) And, "When I play them less legato, they sound more like Bach should be played (duh!) and that unavoidable jump in the LH doesn't sound out-of-place anymore."

She said, "See? You didn't need me to tell you that. You already knew."

Trust your feelings, Luke.

Prelude: Before we even started work on the prelude, I said, "OK, I need help on the last two measures of this one too. My left hand doesn't feel powerful when I play this, and it needs to." Turns out it was a matter of fingering (of course!). We changed the fingering around, and I practiced it a few times with the new fingering, and voila! my LH felt more comfortable.

Liszt: I'm still confused about pedaling. Apparently, I was pedaling it like a pro, except for a few measures. So she said I need to make sure my pedaling is good throughout, and that one measure doesn't jarringly morph into the next. Of course, Little Miss NAPS* becomes obsessive and overly sensitive about pedaling and starts pedaling very poorly (this was a couple of weeks ago). Tonight, Deborah said to play through the Liszt, and pedal it the way I felt I should, and that she'd stop me when the pedaling wasn't working.

There were just a few places where it wasn't working. And we fixed those.

My other "issue" (it's not really an issue, but ...) with the Liszt is the idea of "architecture." Right now, each section for me is a lovely little room, and I get lost in wonderment at the details of each room. I don't feel a sense of all of the rooms being connected into a single whole-is-greater-than-its-parts mansion. And that comes through in my playing. It sounds beautiful, but it sounds ... like a story that has too much detail and goes on too long. So I think I might actually write about the Liszt as if it were a house, picturing it as a single structure that contains lots of cool rooms. For some reason, I think this "creative-visualization" approach is going to help me.

But, ah ... She said the last page in particular sounded great!! Which made me happy. I actually spent a good bit of time practicing the chromatic scale toward the end--making it smooth, fluttering the pedal, slightly speeding up as I go, etc., and making the F# of that final third "ding" like a little bell.

It was a good lesson, even though it involved more talk than playing this time. And I do need to learn to trust myself more. It's not like I'm a complete ignoramus when it comes to music.

Or ... am I? ;-)

*Neurotic Adult Piano Student

Oops, Accountability

2006-11-29T08:37:00.000-05:00

I forgot to write about accountability in that last post. I'm supposed to be practicing right now, so I'll make this short.

I want to try to post here every day. If I fail to make time for piano, I'll write about it here. So, I'm going to be accountable to this blog, and to you, dear readers (all three of you!). I hate the idea of writing down something like, "I chose to watch "Law and Order" reruns rather than practice today." But if that's what happens, I'm going to write it down.

Now I'm going to go practice. Bach is a-calling!

Progress and Accountability

2006-11-28T20:32:00.000-05:00

I've been practicing in fits and starts lately. I am so mad at myself. I don't know why I do this. I love piano and I love practicing, but for some stupid reason, I fail to make it a priority, day after day after day. Why?

I think part of it has to do with where I am in each piece. I'm slogging through every last one of them. I have all the notes, and learning them was no small task. But now it's time to work on the hard stuff: tone, dynamics, articulation, articulation, articulation, and gestures, gestures, gestures. Those last ones are the big challenges for me. Oh, and pedaling in the Liszt.

So, I've come a long way from the starting point, and I've thought I've seen glimpses of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. (I know. It's all light. It's the journey not the destination. But geez.) At this point, I just feel like I'm slogging. Trying to make my way through a swamp of notes and rests and pedaling and dynamics. Progress comes, but it's slow to come.

Here's what's really frustrating: progress would come a lot faster if I were to make piano more of a priority. Just tonight I sat down for 20 minutes and perfected two measures of the fugue by playing rhythms in 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, and 6s. And it only took 20 minutes. Then I spent 20 more minutes on two more measures. Forty minutes total, and I can play those four measures, holding all the right notes, staccato-ing all the right notes, doing everything the way I'm supposed to.

(Have you noticed ... even when you play Bach in weird rhythms with weird timings ... that the music still sounds miraculous?)

I think I need to do some soul-searching here. Or something like that. Most of my time lately has gone to writing, running, freelance jobs, "homemaking," and Hubster. To tell the truth, Hubster has been my biggest priority, and "homemaking" is part of that.

OK, I feel a sudden need to defend myself.

I put "homemaking" in quotes because I'm not much of a homemaker. "Homemaking," though, refers to home-care, everything from washing clothes to changing sheets to scrubbing toilets to vacuuming to cleaning out the litter box to raking leaves to grocery-shopping to making dinner to doing the dishes. Of course the Hubster helps, but he also has a very demanding job, and I don't. So this is the way things are for now, and it's something we've both agreed on, and it's something we're both happy with. So there.

But I will rue the day when scrubbin' becomes more important than Scriabin. Or, to apply it more to my repertoire, when baking becomes more important than Bach-ing.

I'm trying a new approach to things. Sometimes I can just practice "when I feel like it" and manage to get in an hour or two of practice time a day ... because I really feel like practicing that much. Other times, like now, when I'm slogging through the middle of a piece, practicing "when I feel like it" means not practicing all that much. This has got to change. It's time to impose a new schedule on my life.

I'm going to try this one:

5:45-6:45 a.m. -- Run
6:45-7:45 a.m. -- Clean some house, then shower
8:00-9:45 a.m. -- Practice piano
10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. -- Work on the novel (this is when I do my best writing)
1:00-4:00 p.m. -- Freelance work
4:00-6:00 p.m. -- Errands, including groceries
6:00-8:00 p.m. -- Make dinner, do dishes, clean kitchen
8:00-9:30 p.m. -- Hubster time!
9:30-10:15 p.m. -- Read, go to sleep

We'll see how this works. I know I don't have any eating time in there. It's there. I just didn't inlcude it. But this gives me an hour and forty-five minutes for practice. Wish me luck!

Yes, I've Been Practicing

2006-10-31T07:58:00.000-05:00

Yes, I've been practicing. I just haven't been posting. So here's a quick post, then I need to get to work on my novel critiques for class.

Lately I've been focusing on the Bach Prelude in C#-major. This is the "deceptively easy" piece. This is the piece that is "ridiculously easy" compared to its companion, the C#-major fugue.

Thing is, a lot of things are "ridiculously easy" compared to the C#-major fugue.

The Prelude is tricky. It's complex in places. It's miraculous. It's moving. It's Bach. 'Nuff said.

I can play it through, at a relatively slow tempo. I know this piece very well--I've marveled at the simplicity of the chords and progressions, I've memorized the fingering as well as I've ever memorized anything, and I've played individual measures and sections a million times.

If it were simply a matter of playing the notes, I would be 80% there, with "tempo" as my primary remaining goal.

Ah, but like the fugue, this piece requires ambidexterity (is that a word?). The hands keep switching roles, and they volley their louds and softs back and forth like two musicians trading solos in a jazz performance.

How hard can it be to switch dynamics from hand to hand? Not that hard ... if you're playing scales or something else that you've done so many times that it comes naturally.

So that's what I need to do with this piece. Keep playing it, emphasizing the dynamics, emphasizing the melody line, emphasizing what needs to be emphasized, so many times that the movements are natural. They have to be so natural that I don't have to think about them when playing the prelude at tempo, because there won't be time to think.

I've set a goal for myself to be able to play this piece (probably not at tempo, but with all of the dynamics in place) for the group piano class the Friday before Thanksgiving. So, if I can manage to start posting diligently to this blog again, I'll be doing quite a few updates on the prelude.

Other matters ... Arpeggios have started to sound good. I no longer feel like Luck is the reason I play them well. I'm starting to feel a sense of mastery. (Of course, that sense, as always, will vanish as soon as I move the metronome up a notch!)

Scales are sounding good, too. I'm enjoying them so much. I've been working really hard on using my arms, keeping my hands close to the keys, and not making my fingers do all the work.

The fugue is going well, I guess. I've spent the past week getting it back "up to snuff"--I can play the entire first 2/3 of the piece at a decent pace, but it doesn't sound polished. So I'm working on polishing (just a bit) before I take on the final third.

Liszt is sounding great. I love Liszt. This week I'm listening to recordings and thinking about how the pros manage to play it without sounding bored at the quasi Violoncello section.

Shostakovich and Haydn are on deck. They'll be there a while longer, but that's OK. I'm having too much fun with Bach and Liszt anyway.

Two Hours at the Center for Art and Music

2006-10-17T16:28:00.000-04:00

The Center for Art and Music is a huge music store in Wintersville, Ohio (the Hubster's hometown, and my location for the next few days). On the main floor are an art studio, musical instruments for sale, gobs of sheet music and instructional materials, cheesy music-themed gifts that piano teachers get showered with every Christmas, and several "studio rooms" with baby grand piano, where lessons are taught in the afternoon.

On the bottom floor is the "Piano Showcase," a room with six or eight clavinovas, a dozen or so consoles and/or studios, and about eight baby grands. Yesterday the Hubster and I stopped by to ask if I could possibly "borrow" one of their pianos for practicing.

The woman seemed a little ~~uncertain~~ ~~discouraging~~ bemused at our request and said "Maybe, but you need to talk to our piano guy." Okay. So Piano Guy came out and was very nice and said, "Of course you can practice here. No one uses our teaching studios in the morning, so come early and you can play for as long as you want."

Yay!

So I went to the Center today and practiced my little heart out on a Baldwin grand for two and a quarter hours.

Bach: The fugue sounded good, particularly considering I haven't worked seriously on it for weeks. But I honestly think this was a fallow period. Why? Because I've only sat down to practice it a few times in the last few weeks, and I play it (almost) perfectly every time. With no practicing, I can still play those sections that I've learned HT. So I moved on to two more measures, worked on them, and ... all I can say is this: HT doesn't seem nearly as difficult as it did a month ago. It's coming along a lot more quickly. Instead of having to play a fourth of a measure twenty-five times before I get it, I'm only having to play a full measure a few times before I get it (by "get it," I mean being able to play it through without mistakes ... this step comes before the incessant drilling of passages).

I played through the Prelude, very slowly. I can play it note-perfect if I play it slowly. I think my future practices, as least for the next week or so, will include just one or two slow play-throughs of this piece. I think it'll be kind of like watering already-planted seeds in my brain.

Liszt: Oh, baby. Liszt is sounding good. I have all the notes, and now I'm working on movement and expression. It didn't sound so good on the Baldwin grand today because the bass was too muddy. For tomorrow's practice, I'll use another piano.

Shostakovich: Haven't started it yet. Maybe in a couple more weeks, now that Liszt is in the "polishing" phase.

More later ... I'm hoping to have time to write another practice update tomorrow.

I Will Practice. I Will Practice. I Will Practice.

2006-10-03T14:20:00.000-04:00

I'm going to go practice right now. I really am. After I eat some lunch and before I go running.

Piano. Priority. Piano. Priority. Practice. Practice. Practice.

My Shostakovich is Here!!

2006-09-12T23:01:00.000-04:00

It arrived via UPS today! It's published by Sikorski Musikverlage in Hamburg, Germany, so everything is in German. Good thing music is a universal language!

Known as "Dance of the Dolls," "Dances of the Dolls," or "Seven Dolls' Dances," this suite is taken from orchestral arrangements of Shostakovich orchestral works. I don't know which works ... but I will know soon. Just give me some time to research them!

This is definitely an easier collection than anything I've played in a long time, and I am thrilled about that. I sight-read all 22 pages tonight (total of seven miniatures), and nothing in it seems too technically difficult. Ah ... but the interpretation is going to be the fun part! And I do mean fun.

You can hear excerpts from a few of the selections here.

Practiced about two hours yesterday and about three hours today (not including the leisurely Shostakovich sight-read). I'm really working on the relaxation techniques in Piano Practice, so my practices have been slow but, I think, ultimately, importantly, valuable.

Piano lesson tomorrow. Can't wait!

Blog Sabbatical Over

2006-09-07T22:16:00.000-04:00

I say that my blog sabbatical is over, but the truth is, I'm going to be computer-less and piano-less all weekend. I'm posting tonight and I hope to post tomorrow, but I won't be able to practice or post again until Monday. So I'll write a really long post now ... to make up for my dismal lack of posts recently, and to give my huge audience (ha) something to chew on for the next few days. :)

Enough of that. On to the combined lesson/practice report.

My lesson was yesterday. Deborah played me a Ginastera piece she is working on. She's exhilarated at how everything has unfolded regarding her upcoming concert in Asheville. The local NPR station is now sponsoring it as a benefit, and they're going to take care of a lot of the marketing. She's playing an all-Spanish program (composers from the Americas and Spain), with an emphasis on tango. Just a couple of days ago, the Asheville Citizen-Times ran an article on the growing popularity of tango ... so the local NPR station is excited about a tango piano concert/benefit. Anyway, she played a piece she's working on. It really helps me to watch her play every now and then. She's so graceful and relaxed ... a state and style that I would love to obtain and maintain effortlessly.

We had a "practice lesson" since I hadn't practiced in several days. I spent most of it re-familiarizing myself with the Liszt. It wasn't the greatest lesson in the world, but it was good. Why was it good? Because we're going to change directions (slightly) with the Suzuki/basic-skills aspect of my learning.

I told her that I don't have any problem playing by ear, and I get bored with Suzuki because it's basically a learn-by-ear CD. Once I learn it, she'll add articulation notes, and I'll learn to play it the way she says to. Like a third grader. I practice it for maybe ten minutes the day before piano, and play it at my lesson and it sounds fine. Then I go to the next piece. Boring.

My challenge, rather than the by-ear playing, is in playing and interpreting the symbols written on the page. For years I forgot to notice rests. For years my sight-reading was awful because I never learned to read time signatures. For years I learned a piece best when I could find a recording from it and learn from that, using the written music as a sort of supplement.

So we're going to work on improving my reading and interpretation skills. My sight-reading is pretty good, particularly if I'm sight-reading something for church--something that allows me to improvise and skip over the sticky parts. And I can sight-read simple classical pieces. But I don't know a lot about interpreting pieces according to their time period--where you might add a mordent in a Bach piece, or where it's OK to "play" with the tempo in a Mozart. So I'm going to get a facsimile autograph of the Anna Magdalena notebook, study Baroque style (to start with), and increase my knowledge and skills (and confidence) for interpreting music. I think that will be much more helpful to me than the Suzuki.

OK, on to my practice ...

I hadn't practiced for much of the week, thanks to a Labor-Day vacation and a sliced-up right hand (compliments of my cat). I was able to practice tonight, but I had to put a new Band-aid on my pinky halfway through the practice. It probably won't be completely healed until early next week. It's a pretty deep cut, and on the outside of my right pinky, just where it hits the keys.

I spent a total of 120 minutes on the piano tonight. They were some of the most focused 120 minutes I've ever spent at the piano, though a lot of it was "quiet time." I'm reading Passionate Practice by Margret Elson and am really focusing on getting into an "A/R" (alert/relaxed) state before I play, and maintaining it while I'm playing. Easier said than done. I worked on a simple Bach minuet, as directed in Passionate Practice. It amazes me how tense I get when my fingers come into contact with the keys. Almost like a sudden electric current buzzes through me. I used to think this was a positive thing--intensity!!--but now I'm seeing that, while anticipation and passion are important, the "tension of intensity" is not what I want to strive for.

I was more relaxed tonight when I played the Bach minuet. (I started working on it and A/R state several days ago). I managed to play it through without generating a billion butterflies in my stomach, and without tensing up my shoulders. I'm still not "there," but I'm getting closer. Next I followed Robert's suggestion and tried playing measures of a very familiar piece--the Bach sinfonia in g-minor--while maintaining an A/R state. I went one measure at a time, then two measures at a time ... again, I'm not "there" yet, but I can tell that my body is learning to relax while playing.

One observation: when I play using the music, my eyes get really dry and my contacts get scratchy. Very annoying and distracting when one is trying to play Bach. I end up rolling my eyes, grimacing, and periodically squint-blinking. A lovely image, I'm sure. But the reason my eyes get dry is because I don't blink. Or I forget to. The other night, I also noticed that I'm not breathing regularly when I play. Sometimes I quit breathing altogether.

Not blinking + not breathing does not equal an ideal physical state for playing piano. So I really focused on breathing, being relaxed, and blinking while playing tonight. Hard to do. Kind of like rubbing your belly, patting your head, and humming Stravinsky at the same time.

Anyway, I went through my scales and arps and they sounded fine. Skipped over Suzuki (yawn) and went straight to the Bach prelude. Focused very intently on staying in A/R while practicing. I just worked on the first 15 measures or so, but I drilled the heck out of them, particularly the transitions between RH and LH. This piece definitely seems easier than it really is. But after my monster drill session, I had the measures sounding clean ... and I was staying (mostly) relaxed. I kept having to stop whenever I felt my body tense up, then take a minute or two to settle myself back into A/R.

By the time I finished working on the prelude, it was after 10:00. I'm tired. Tomorrow, I'll focus on the fugue and Liszt. I really wish I had three or four hours a day for practicing!

Monday, August 21

2006-08-21T21:59:00.000-04:00

I'm really tired tonight, so I'm just going to write a quick log for today's practice.

I only got to spend about 45 minutes at the piano tonight. I mostly worked on adding another couple of measures of the fugue. I did a lot of drilling, but it didn't seem like my mind was registering it. I was just really tired, possibly because I did a longer-than-usual run today (5 miles).

I'm rearranging my schedule tomorrow so that I practice the Liszt first, and during the day rather than at night after dinner. I hope to devote the after-dinner practice to JSB, and then have another practice on Wednesday before my afternoon lesson.

Time to get some sleep!

Friday, August 18

2006-08-18T11:52:00.000-04:00

Practiced for about 80 minutes. The usual warm-ups, plus some of the fugue and a lot of the Liszt with no pedal and much exactitude.

It was a good practice. Went longer than I'd planned, which was nice because I won't be able to practice again until Monday at the earliest.

August 17: Piano Lesson

2006-08-18T08:31:00.000-04:00

Good lesson today. Deborah and I usually chat up a storm before we get around to music, but that didn't happen today. We just dove right into the lesson.

Scales and arpeggios were fine. When we got to Suzuki, I told her I didn't want to do Suzuki anymore, that I felt that the time required wasn't equal to the benefit it was giving me. I knew she wouldn't be happy to hear that. But it's true--I hate taking valuable practice time to work on something that I believe is, honestly, not challenging enough. Particularly when I have a Liszt transcription and a fugue to work on.

She compromised. She said, "OK, maybe some of these pieces are too easy for you, but I want you to try the Beethoven sonatina at the end of the book." At two pages and with two movements, it's the longest piece in Suzuki Book II. So I guess I'll get started listening to that.

I played my twelve and a half measures of the Bach and she basically said to keep on doing what I'm doing, that it sounded very precise, intelligent, and musical, and that I seem to be doing a wonderful job practicing it. That was it. I must admit that I did play it pretty well.

I played through the Liszt, not very well, which shouldn't be a surprise since I slacked on it all week. After I played through it, I told her that I'd slacked on it, and that it just paled so much in comparison to the Bach. I felt really bad, saying that I was getting bored by a piece, particularly something as beautiful as the Liszt.

But she seemed to understand! She said that the Liszt bores me because the Bach is such an intellectual piece and the Liszt isn't a very intellectual piece at all. The Liszt is beautiful, of course, but it's not as interesting as the Bach on a theoretical level. In addition, it's not as difficult as the Bach.

"I just wish I could motivate myself to practice the Liszt with as much focus and tenacity as I give the Bach," I said.

"So do that," she replied.

"But ... I don't know how!"

"Practice it like the Bach," she said. "No pedal. Play everything very distinctly. Don't let yourself be lazy about the notes or the timing. Don't play it rubato. Pretend it's Bach."

Basically, I am to strip the Liszt down of all of its exterior beauty and look at the inner workings. I think that will help. I find that the rubato and pedal tend to make me lazy when I practice.

It was a good lesson. It was the most "piano-focused" lesson we've had in a while.

Wednesday, August 16

2006-08-17T09:36:00.000-04:00

I only managed about 30 minutes at the piano today, but I did work on the Liszt. I'm posting this on Thursday morning and my piano lesson is this afternoon, so I'll write more about my progress after my lesson.

Tuesday, August 15, Part II

2006-08-15T21:23:00.000-04:00

I was able to squeeze in 30 minutes of practice-time tonight, but I'm afraid I didn't make very efficient use of my time. Normally I'm Little Miss Efficiency when it comes to practicing, since I normally have so little time as it is.

I planned to work on the Liszt tonight. So, naturally, I walked into the Inner Sanctum, plopped the Bach fugue onto the piano, and began practicing.

There's something wrong with this picture, isn't there.

Folks, I am a fugue-aholic. The fugue is like a big, juicy zit, and I can't stop picking at it. OK, maybe that's not the best simile for it. Zits are gross, infected, pus-filled things. The fugue is transcendent. Divine. A work of genius.

Yep, the fugue went and got transcendent on me again tonight. I worked on the two "end pieces" of the section I've been working on HT for the last ~~hundred years~~ few weeks. Measures 14 and 15 were still good, but the measures at the end needed work. So I worked. Got the kinks out (again), then played it through, mm 14-26. It sounded good, but I did the panic-and-pause thing a couple of times in the last couple of measures.

Slow down, Waterfall. The fugue ain't goin' anywhere.

So I slowed down. Way down. Turned on the metronome so that each click was a sixteenth note. (40 being a quarter note was too fast for the pace I wanted.)

Ahh. There is something about playing a passage perfectly, even if it is at 30% tempo.

I turned off the metronome and played through the passage again, just as slowly. Ahh. That's when it got transcendent. Starting with measure 16 (Episode 2), the soprano sings the most delightful little melody, jumping up a sixth and holding the note while the alto and bass do their thing underneath. That little held high note ... ahh. Sweet. The next high held note is a little lower, and the next a little lower. It's this wonderful descending line that stands out from everything else. The notes are like little bells dinging. It's divine.

After practicing that, do you think I was capable of moving on to the Liszt?

Of course I was. But not very. I played through it once, thinking, "If I just put some time into this, I could have it. I would be ready to pronounce it 'good enough' and get to the 'maintenance' stage of the piece and start learning something new."

Yes, I'm that close. Yet my motivation to move forward is surprisingly low. Why? Do I love this piece so much that I don't want to get to the "maintenance" stage? I don't know. All I know is that, if I practice the Bach first, I will never get around to practicing the Liszt.

Tomorrow. Liszt. If there's time afterward, then Bach. But tomorrow's practice will be devoted to poor, neglected Franzi.

Tuesday, August 15

2006-08-15T15:38:00.000-04:00

Spent 80 minutes practicing so far today, and I'm hoping I'll be able to grab another hour at the piano this evening.

Scales sound good. OK, so g# gave me some trouble, but I did a little bit of 9-8 and did a little bit of playing in rhythms, and voila! it sounded fine after that.

Arpeggios sound pretty good, too. I've always been better at scales than arpeggios ... maybe that's just the way it's supposed to be. As always, they sound good but not great to my ears.

Inversions are becoming much smoother. Triad inversions (plus the 4-note dominant seventh) are easy enough to play, but I've started playing the triads in octaves (4 notes). That makes it a little harder. The familiar focus has to shift. Sometimes the results aren't so great.

I can now play twelve and a half measures of the fugue! It doesn't sound like much, but it's a nice little chunk of music. I started with mm 25-26, then went back and worked on mm 14-15 (the two measures before the big section I've been working on for so long). Measures 25 and 26 were stubborn, but mm 14-15 didn't take long at all.

Measures 25-26: OK, here's what's going on. The RH is playing soprano and alto together. The soprano voice is bouncing along, jumping up sixths in a staccato. The alto is legato and is descending as the sixths descend. Meanwhile the LH bass is pattering out the counter-subject, which is very similar to but not exactly like something it plays a few measures earlier ... so there was the issue of remembering to play it the "new" way and not the "old" way.

Measures 14-15: Bach has mercy. Measures 14 and 15 came pretty easily. Here, the RH is doing the pattering while the LH plays a version of the subject. The alto is quiet for most of these measures, which, I'm sure, is part of why it wasn't too hard to get in my hands.

I practiced the Liszt for about 15 minutes but got tired of sitting (how's that for an excuse?). I did get to work on the first page and a half, which I have by memory. It sounds good; at this point, I'm just trying to play it smoothly and by memory. I'm sure Deborah will have many things to point out when I play it for her on Thursday. But to my ears, for now, my progress is sounding good.

Sunday, August 13

2006-08-13T21:11:00.000-04:00

First of all, my lack of posts doesn't necessarily indicate a lack of practice, though my summer-glut of monster practice-sessions seems to have tapered off a bit.

Thursday night, I went to a cocktail party and met Russian pianist Konstantin Soukhovetski. Friday around 1:00, my parents came over. My dad went off to play golf with the Hubster while my mom and I visited and made a cobbler. That evening, we all had dinner and dessert to celebrate my dad's birthday. (Though I later got a message from Konstantin's host asking if I wanted to hear Konstantin practice Friday afternoon ... argh! Too late!) I did get to practice for about an hour on Friday night, but most of it was devoted to the music I would be playing on Sunday morning at church (though I also did the usual scales, arps, and inversions, plus a couple of play-throughs of the Liszt).

Saturday wasn't a day for practicing. I made chocolate truffles for part of the day in preparation for the "Classics and Chocolate" concert that night. I also did some much-needed house-cleaning. I'd rather practice than clean house, and it shows ... I am MUCH better at piano than I am at housework!

After the Konstantin concert, I came home and played through my old sonata, the Mozart A minor (K. 310), which I hadn't touched since my freshman year of college. Konstantin played it as part of his concert, and I was chomping at the bit to get home and play! Alas, my unpracticed version didn't sound quite as good as his ... but he got me thinking about doing a Mozart sonata next instead of a Haydn.

OK, enough babbling. On to my practice session.

I practiced for about 75 minutes tonight. Did scales (E and c#), inversions, and arps (Ab and f#). Skipped Suzuki and went straight to Bach. Since I hadn't had an intense practice in several days, I reviewed what I'd already learned (mm 16-24.75), and boy was it sloppy! I played through those measures several times, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, paying close attention to my hands, the fingering, the chords, and playing it ... perfectly. (Funny how "perfection" isn't so hard when you play at 10 or 20% of the speed you normally use.)

Once I was satisfied, I forged ahead to new territory: the last beat of measure 24, plus the first three beats of measure 25.

Whew. The challenges never end. I worked on the final beat of measure 24, which, for some reason, gave me trouble. When I finally managed to coordinate my hands, I played it twenty times through (twenty being the magic number), and then the entire measure twenty times, and it sounded good. Then it was on to measure 25.

OK. This measure made me feel like my head was going to explode.

All three voices take part in most of this snippet. Probably the most challenging part for me was the second beat of measure 25. All three voices are playing: the soprano (RH) is restating the subject using sixteenth and eighth notes, the alto (RH) is harmonizing with descending half-notes and held quarter notes, and the bass (LH) is playing the counter-subject, which is made of sixteenth notes and has a "pattering" sound.

Well, at one point, the alto plays the B# above middle C (i.e., an octave above middle C), the soprano plays a B# an octave higher, and the bass plays a G# below middle C. Not that confusing. Only ...

The soprano note is a staccato eighth note. The alto note is a half note (i.e., it needs to be "held" for a couple of beats). The bass note, meanwhile, should be played as a kind of detached legato. Basically, this means I play three notes, each of varying lengths, simultaneously.

It's harder than it sounds, but it also, surprisingly, didn't take me as long to master as I thought it would.

Twenty is the magic number. I played the first three beats of measure 25 twenty times. Then mm 24 and 25 twenty times. Then the section from mm 19 to 25 a few times (not twenty). Then mm 16 through 25.

Woo hoo! Sixteen million hours of practice, and I can now play ten, count 'em, TEN measures HT! Moving right along, I am!

Tomorrow I'm going to review what I did tonight, but I'm also going to work more on the Liszt, since poor Franzi was neglected ... again.

Fugin' is Fun

2006-08-09T21:55:00.000-04:00

I practiced for about 60 minutes tonight. I'd had a glass of wine with my husband at dinner to celebrate the bonu$ he got today, so I was feeling a little woozy when I sat down tonight to practice. I didn't expect a very good practice because I wasn't feeling quite alert enough for a good practice.

Went through scales, arps, and inversions with my eyes closed. Literally. Just resting my eyes, I was. And the inversions sounded a lot better than usual. Usually, I'm scurrying to get the four fingers in the right place each inversion, and tonight I just played through them with a Zen-like calm. Weird. Wonderful, but weird.

I played through Suzuki a couple of times, then moved on to the fugue.

What a great practice. It started off rather slow, but it ended up ... transforming.

My goal for the night was the tail end of measure 24. This is shortly after the bass voice has rejoined the soprano and alto. It's tricky, with the bass holding a note while the alto plays, and then the alto immediately holding a note while the bass plays. Meanwhile the soprano plays a steady Bach-style legato. For the last two notes, the alto rests, and it's harder than you would think, to remember to pick up that alto finger and let the bass and soprano play the last two notes alone.

I had to play through that single beat about twenty times before the passage, with all its holding and resting, started to feel natural.

Of course, I had to REWRITE THE FINGERING in several places ... but I realized something important: the fingering-changes are an adjustment I've made for my hand size. Rather than struggle through an awkward fingering, somehow thinking I'm doing something "advanced" because it "feels difficult," I'm coming up with "easier" fingerings that work best for me. The challenge, then, isn't to hold my hand in weird positions and look strained; it's to hold or rest a note, to play it staccato or legato, using the fingering that feels most natural to my hand.

Duh. Why did it take me so long to figure that one out? No clue.

After playing the final beat of measure 24 twenty or so times, I played the entire measure twenty times. Then I played measures 23 and 24 together twenty times. Then the "section," starting with the second beat of measure 19--you guessed it, twenty times. Then I played through measures 17 through 24 a few times (not twenty--I was starting to get tired!). As with the Liszt, I finally feel like I'm starting to make music with this piece--even though I still have a long way to go.

Something else wonderful happened tonight, though.

OK. I know this piece very well. I can probably hum the soprano, alto, and bass voices each for you (but please, don't ask me to do that!). I have analyzed it, listened to it, played it on my iPod as I've fallen asleep at night. I've learned it voices separately and hands separately, and now I'm learning it hands together. This piece has become a part of me.

So it was strange and refreshing when I played the first beat of measure 23 tonight and was suddenly struck by the most profound-feeling sense of longing. The pathos of those few notes took me by surprise, and I can't begin to explain the yearning that welled up in me. Yearning for what, I don't know. But whenever I played those four notes, I felt ... homesick? nostalgic? sad? romantic? All of those things.

But I wasn't tempted to play it "romantically," with pedal or rubato or anything like that. It's perfect without all of that added stuff. But the longing ... it was something greater than the longing that Romantic pieces sometimes pull up.

Then, while I was playing mm 17-24, I got to the last beat of measure 17, and again ... the yearning. It was so ... delicious, yet so ... piercing. I played it again.

I know. It sounds like I could be writing about sex. Maybe it's akin to sex. Whatever it was, it was powerful.

What was it about these combinations of notes that stirred up such emotions in me? When I first learned these sections, I thought things like, "Oh, that's pretty," or "Hm, that's clever." But now they seemed ... miraculous. And I was struck by the most profound sense of honor, of privilege for having the opportunity, the skill, and the tenacity to be able to participate in the miraculous. To be a part of something that the genius Bach started over 300 years ago.

I know. I'm getting wordy and purple-prosey. I don't care. I'm not above being moved emotionally by music (if I were, I doubt that I'd have much use for music at all!), but I have been approaching the fugue as a series of tasks and challenges. If I could just be driven and dedicated enough, I would get it. I wasn't thinking about emotional impact ... if it came, it would certainly come later, after I had learned the entire piece as an organic whole.

Tonight, all of that work paid off, even if in just a small way, in just two short sections. For a couple of moments, the fugue ceased to be a series of mini-projects and became something transcendent. And I got to be a part of it. Me and George.

It was a good practice.

Tiny Practice

2006-08-09T10:41:00.000-04:00

I sneaked into the Inner Sanctum for about twenty minutes this morning to play through Standchen a couple of times. Ahhh ... it is sounding good. If a person who knew nothing about piano were to listen to me, they would be impressed. It still needs a lot of work, but I've definitely moved up a rung with this piece in the last week or so.

No time for Bach ... I'm hoping to make time tonight.

I Need Two Practice Sessions a Day

2006-08-08T22:09:00.000-04:00

Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't it be nice if I had a million dollars, too? :)

I practiced for 120 minutes tonight. The time flew by. I started at 8:00, took a break from the Liszt at what I thought was 9:00, and realized that it was already 10:00. You know what they say about when you're having fun ...

Actually, it was a frustrating but ultimately productive practice. Scales and arps sound great. OK, the scales sound great and the arps sound pretty darn good but not great. I need to spend more time doing them in rhythms and focusing on what I'm doing. At a certain speed, it just seems like my fingers are landing where they may, and if I hit the right note it's because I'm lucky. I usually hit the right notes, but I don't feel confident about them. Hm.

Then it was on to the Liszt. Yes, friends, I resisted fugal temptation. I didn't even look at my WTC 1 book. I went straight to Ständchen. Tonight's focus was measures 5 through 26, and more specifically, measures 5 through 16.

Do you remember that scene in Amadeus when the kapellmeister rips out several pages of The Marriage of Figaro while Mozart stands helplessly by, looking shocked? Well, that's how I felt tonight. I erased and re-wrote so much of my previous work; my hands were the businesslike kapellmeister, my mind the hapless Wolfie.

I had to change the fingering again. And again. And again. Every time I found a better fingering, one that didn't stretch my left hand into weird positions, I would play it ... and discover an even better fingering. I'm working really hard to keep my hand soft and to arrange the fingering in a way that allows me to do that. I do not want to induce tingling!

I erased, and erased, and erased, and erased. I wore out my eraser. Really. I had to use a new pencil when it the eraser started to make that bone-chilling squeak of metal rubbing against paper. Yikes!

I re-wrote so much fingering that the paper now feels thin enough to tear. It didn't tear. I hope I won't have to change the fingering anymore. But if I do ... so be it. But I think I've come up with the best fingering for me for measures 5 through 16. I'll focus more on measures 17 through 26 the next time I practice Ständchen. If I had two practice sessions a day, that would be tomorrow, but a more realistic prediction is Thursday night or possibly even Friday. :(

Once I finally figured out the frustrating fingering, I practiced measures 5 through 10 and ended up playing that section ten times each. Then I did the same thing with measures 11 through 16. The good thing about all this repetition is that it helps me to memorize.

After practicing each mini-section, I played measures 1 through 16 through about fifteen more times. The notes were feeling very comfortable in my hands (all that fingering-frustration had a purpose after all!), and I was actually able to focus on dynamics, on making the melody sing out above all the other "stuff" that's going on. That was deeply satisfying. I really felt like I was making music.

I played through measures 17 through 26 once before my 10:00 "break." I forsee a few more fingering changes, but I think I did the brunt of necessary erasing and re-writing tonight. Oh, yeah ... I got so sick of erasing little numbers that I eventually erased my penciled-in scribblings for entire measures, inadvertently erasing my musical analysis notes. Pooh.

I'm too tired now to work on the fugue. I'll get to it tomorrow night. If I have time, I'll work on the prelude, too. It needs more attention than I've been giving it.

All in all, it was a good practice. It had its unpleasant moments, but I finished it up playing the first sixteen measures at level I'm happy with for now.

Monday, August 7

2006-08-07T21:37:00.000-04:00

Yes, it has been a very long time since my last practice.

I worked for about 70 minutes tonight. Did the usual warmups--my, but those scales and arps sounded good! I flew through two sets of each, worked on Suzuki for about two minutes, and moved on to the fugue.

I kid you not. I played my six and a half measures from memory, perfectly, five times in a row. After five times I started to make little mistakes here and there ... but five times! I think I kept replaying it because I didn't believe my ears.

I worked on two and a half more measures tonight. I now have nine measures of the fugue. The material I worked on tonight wasn't quite as difficult because one of the voices steps out for a short while, and I'm only working with two voices instead of three. But even when the third voice comes back in, it's not too bad.

I played those nine measures through about fifteen times. They sounded OK the first time, pretty good by the tenth time, and great by the fifteenth time.

Then, since my husband is home for the first time since early June, I asked if he'd like to hear the Liszt. (That's code for, "Hey you. Listen to this. Now.") I played it through. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't any worse than what I'd played for Deborah last Wednesday. I was thrilled that I didn't seem to have "lost" anything in the days I haven't practiced. I'll spend more time actually practicing the Liszt tomorrow.

Why haven't I practiced? I had piano on Thursday afternoon, then left Friday morning for a (piano-less) retreat and didn't get home until Sunday evening. Then the Hubster came home shortly after that, and I wasn't about to practice piano when I had a Hubster at home for the first time in months. That was yesterday. So tonight's my first practice since Thursday.

It was a good practice, not very long, but productive and ego-boosting.

Tuesday, August 1

2006-08-01T19:53:00.000-04:00

I have no idea how long I practiced today. I had a rare leisurely day and managed to practice on and off all day ... I probably got about 150 minutes in, give or take a few minutes.

I didn't do Scales O' Day today. I just went through all of 'em, major and minor, four octaves, parallel and contrary motion--kind of like I used to do in college every day, minus the contrary motion. For arpeggios, I did a G major and Eb-minor. The arps sound great as long as I keep the metronome at 60. When I go above 60, the quarter-note contrary-motion arpeggios don't sound so good. I have to "warm them up" at 60 before I can play them well at 63.

This morning, I worked on the C#-major prelude for about a half-hour. I need to quit telling myself that piece is easy. It's not that easy. It's just easy when compared to the fugue.

I devoted the bulk of my today's practice time to Liszt (finally!). I can now play through the whole piece. I also spent quite a bit of time writing in the English translation of the song lyrics (Liszt's "Standchen" is a transcription of a Schubert song by the same title, and it means "Serenade" in English). Then I practiced, thinking about the lyrics while I played. Very interesting. I want to write more about that, but I don't have time at the moment.

I spent about a half hour on the fugue. My arms felt fine for the entire practice, but my right arm started to tingle again after working on the fugue for about 20 minutes. I switched to LH practice after that. This tingling-arm thing is really concerning me. I'm supposed to go to the doctor next week anyway, so I'll ask about it. I'll also ask my piano teacher about it at my lesson tomorrow. And maybe I should lay off of the fugue for a while.

Gotta run ... I'll write more on the Liszt later on!

Monday, July 31

2006-07-31T21:50:00.000-04:00

I grabbed about 10 minutes early this afternoon to play through mm 20-22 of the fugue. It didn't sound great, but it didn't sound bad, either. That's good news.

This evening, I sat down for my real practice, which lasted about 80 minutes. The scales o' day were Gb-major and Eb-minor. I love Gb-major. I think it's my second-favorite scale, after Db-major. Eb-minor has given me problems in the past; that 3-1 crossover in the LH always gets me. I did 9-8 and used the C-major fingering and did rhythms. It sounded pretty good after all that, but truth is, I really didn't want to spend that much time on scales tonight. Oh well. I'm obsessive. What else can I say?

I know, I know, I know I was supposed to start with Liszt, but I yielded to temptation and started with Bach. The next few measures after measure 22 are a little easier because one of the voices drops out for a bit. I worked on those measures, and while I won't say they were easy, they were much more accessible HT from the start.

I moved on to the Liszt. I worked on learning the first half of the piece, from measures 1 to about measure 38. I already know the rest of it, and the first half is much easier than the second half. It's still tricky, but I'll have it before too much longer.

I did spend some time working on the voicing in several measures of the Liszt. There are quite a few spots where I'm playing thirds in my RH and the higher notes need to be louder than the lower notes. So I worked on making the higher notes sing while playing softer lower notes.

It wasn't a bad practice session, but I did finish it feeling a little deflated. Both of these pieces are "stretching" me, to use Deborah's word. Honestly, I really think the fugue is too hard for me. I told her that, and she basically said I shouldn't have such a negative attitude. I wonder if I'm really being negative, though. I don't feel negative about the piece, or my progress. I love it, and I love working on it. I just think it's a big step from where I was before, and I feel a little (a lot) overwhelmed by it. Sure, I can learn it, and I will, and I love it, but it's costing me blood, sweat, and tears (metaphorically speaking, mostly) to learn every single four-note beat. It's not like I want to be able to play it perfectly the first (or even the hundredth) time I look at it, but it's taken two weeks of hard practice just to get six measures. Granted, I can play those six measures quite well (and by memory) now, but I still feel like an ant trying to climb Kilimanjaro.

And the Liszt ... I felt bored with the Liszt tonight. Maybe I was just tired. But it seems like I've worked on it for such a long time and have gotten almost nowhere.

On top of that, my right forearm aches after Bach practice and my left forearm aches after Liszt practice. NOT good. I posted about this on the Piano World Piano Forums, and people are saying to see a doctor about carpal tunnel syndrome. I really hope it's not that.

My lesson last week was good, but one thing frustrated me: my piano teacher and I probably spent 25 minutes of the 60-minute lesson chatting. Granted, we're both going through some things and are friends as well as teacher and student, but we never really got to "dive in" to either of the pieces. A lot of the lesson time we did use for piano went to scales, inversions, arpeggios, and Suzuki. We probably had 15 or 20 minutes total for both the Bach and the Liszt.

I think both of us would have preferred to do more piano and less chatting, but it just didn't happen. I think we both need to agree to keep the chat time to a minimum in the future so we can make more time for piano.

I have two more practice sessions between now and Wednesday's lesson. My goals are to learn to play a few more measures of the fugue smoothly, and to play the Liszt in its entirety. I'll also work on the prelude, which has been on the back burner for the past couple of weeks. It's not exactly easy, but it's certainly easier than the fugue. Maybe I should work on it more; I feel like I need something a bit more manageable these days.

More Bach Tonight

2006-07-30T21:54:00.000-04:00

I put in another 60 minutes or so tonight. Started with the usual scales and arps. I know I don't need to start every single practice session with them, but I choose to do so. It gets me "in the mood," so to speak. Yep. Think of scales and arps as the appetizer, or a pre-dinner glass of wine.

I was supposed to practice Liszt tonight. The Bach was still open on the piano, though, so ... I decided to play measures 16-22 through once, just once, before moving on to the Liszt.

Well, what do you know? Did I practice earlier today? Didn't I? I thought I did. But you wouldn't have known it by listening to me. It was like I'd never even learned measures 20-22!

Back to the drawing board.

After all that drilling of measure 20 using the former fingering, my LH was confused about the new fingering. So I had to re-drill it all, as if I were drilling for the first time. I put my nose to the grindstone and my fingers to the keys. I was a woman on a mission. I was going to get measure 20, and play it smoothly and well, even if it meant spending an hour or more on it tonight.

It's still not perfect, but it's much better. It's just a very tricky section. The RH is playing a unison F-double-sharp (I think) that's supposed to be a staccato in the soprano and held note in the alto ... all at once! Also adding to the confusion is (again) the smallness of my hands. At one point, I have to play three notes of the alto melody by alternating my thumbs. All of this while, of course, the other parts of the hands are playing entirely different things.

Such is the joy of the fugue.

I spent all of that time (yes, all of that time) working on those danged measures 20-22. Oh, wait. I did play through the Liszt once at the end of practice. It's beautiful, but it pales in comparison to the fugue. (Now, if I were to practice the Liszt first and really get into it, then I'd probably say the fugue pales in comparison to the Liszt.)

Guess I'll start with Liszt tomorrow!

Playing Catch-up

2006-07-30T16:00:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm pathetic. I had a lesson last Wednesday, and it went quite well, but then I didn't practice piano again until today, Sunday, many days after my lesson.

I did practice some gospel stuff for church. Playing big chords and octave-scales as accompaniment can be lots of fun, and that's what I did at church this morning. This afternoon, it was back to Bach.

I practiced for about 90 minutes. Played scales and arpeggios for the first time since last Wednesday and ended up having to do the 9-8 for F major. F major, always the weird one among the white keys. Not much of a problem, though. I'm doing 9-8 whether I feel like I really need it or not because it really helps.

Then I moved on to Bach. Played mm 16-19 a few times to reacquaint myself with the fugue, then moved on to mm 20-22. Whew. Measure 20 is a butt-kicker. I drilled it many times (too many to count), and I still wasn't comfortable with the fingering, so I changed it. I hate having to change fingering after working so hard to establish a different one, but my hands' discomfort with the original fingering (after trying it in dozens of drills) was a message that I had the wrong fingering for me. So I changed it, drilled the new fingering about five times, and had no problem.

It's still a tricky measure, so I'll need to work on it some more later.

Measures 21 and 22 were easier to play HT than they were HS. These are the first two measures I've found in this fugue that are actually easier when played HT.

At my lesson on Wednesday, by the way, Deborah said that my snippet of the fugue sounded really good. I expressed some mock-frustration at how long this is going to take me to learn it (mock-frustration because I'm not really frustrated; just amusedly overwhelmed, if one can be that). She said not to worry about it, and that the way I'm learning it (memorizing while making sure the fingering is correct every time, as well as the holds, staccatos, etc) will necessarily take longer than just learning to play the notes.

I've saved tonight's practice for Liszt. It'll be tempting to go back to the Bach, though! The time flies right by when I'm working on that fugue.

Suzuki

2006-07-25T07:54:00.000-04:00

My piano teacher is a Suzuki piano teacher. The Suzuki Piano Method was developed at Shinichi Suzuki's Talent Education Institute and is an extension of the Suzuki Method for violin. It's basically a pedagogical approach, generally for small children, in which the child learns to play music by ear before he or she ever learns to read a single note.

Now, I would probably have loved Suzuki, if I had found such a teacher at the age of four, when I already had a handful of learned-by-ear tunes in my "repertoire." And now, although I read music quite well, I still depend on my ear a great deal. I like to hear pieces before I ever learn them. I don't have to hear them, but I prefer to. Once it's in my head, it's easier for me to play. Makes sense, doesn't it?

In fact, and this is a little embarrassing, I was horrible at reading time signatures until about two years ago. I was fine if something was in 4/4, but 3/4, 6/8, 5/8, etc., just confused me. I couldn't sight-read very well because I had never really learned to read note values. In the past, whenever I needed to learn a piece, I would have the teacher play it or, when I began more advanced repertoire, find a recording of it. Any confusing problems with reading music ceased to be a problem once I could hear how it should be played. (Is that cheating?)

When I took up piano again, I also started playing some for church. The "praise team" (mostly guitarists who don't read music) handed me some music and said, "We don't know this one. Can you play through it so we can hear what it should sound like?" It was in 6/8 time. All I could do was shrug and say, "I can play the notes, but I can't play the timing."

Embarrassing, indeed. How I managed to make it through sixteen years of piano lessons and two semesters of music theory in college and never truly learn note values is beyond me. I think part of it was that I hated math and anything else that had to do with numbers. Timing, counting, values ... it reeked of mathematics.

After that incident, I found myself a music theory teacher and started at the beginning. Once he was clear that, yes, I sight-read beautifully as long as I didn't worry about note values, we went into the note values themselves.

It turned out that it was all very easy. I couldn't believe it. I had spent my life avoiding the "math" aspect of music, and it was hardly math at all.

All of this leads up to Suzuki. It really does.

When I started taking from my current piano teacher, she assigned a couple of Bach inventions and the Chopin Bb-minor nocturne (Op. 9, No. 1). A few weeks later, she asked if I would be willing to work through the Suzuki method. She wanted to see how it might help my technique, which was certainly rusty from years of not playing or having a teacher.

I gamely said, "Sure," and proceeded to Book One. Book One is actually a CD. I would listen to the simple little tunes and learn them by ear. It took me between 3 and 5 minutes for the RH-only pieces, maybe 10 minutes when both RH and LH were involved. Part of the difficulty is that the pianist on the CD plays the LH very softly, and my hearing isn't the greatest for very high and very soft sounds. (I'm deaf in one ear and part-deaf in the other and have trouble with certain volumes and frequencies.)

Still, I moved through Book One pretty quickly and started Book Two. These pieces are a little more complicated, but still not difficult--Bach minuets, Schumann's "The Happy Farmer," etc. I learn them quickly when I try, but I've dragged through this book because I have zero motivation to work on these pieces. I just find it very boring. Once I have the piece by ear, I'm allowed to use the book and work on dynamics. That part can actually be rather helpful. It's not a bad thing to work on technique using pieces that pose virtually no challenge in the way of difficulty.

Still, I'd rather work on technique using the prelude, the fugue, or the Liszt. Or, if I were to work on a lower-level piece, I'd pick one of the easier Chopin preludes or Bach inventions. Or, if I'm going to practice playing by ear, I'd rather get a jazz fake book, listen to Erroll Garner and Bud Powell and Thelonius Monk recordings, and learn to play what they're playing. I did quite a bit of that when I was in my twenties.

I just hate having to spend the time to learn these things by ear. I probably need sight-reading training more than I need ear-training. When working on Suzuki, I get the RH melody immediately. The LH takes longer because, again, it's so soft that I have trouble hearing it at all. I use my knowledge of theory more than my ear to figure it out. All in all, it takes me about 15 minutes to get the entire piece by ear, then another 15 minutes (the next day) to play through it so that it's smoothly memorized.

I shouldn't complain about it. After all, it's only 30 minutes a week. But still, I'd rather spend those thirty minutes doing something I enjoy more--either playing intermediate-level classical pieces, or imitating, by ear, the great jazz pianists. I've told my piano teacher this, but she believes that Suzuki has helped my technique immeasurably. True, my technique has improved, but I don't think Suzuki is the main reason. I think Bach inventions, scales, arpeggios, and practice have had more to do with it.

I suppose I could refuse to do the Suzuki anymore--after all, I am paying for the lessons and I'm not a child--but then I think, "What if she's right? What if Suzuki really is helping me?"

It's a dilemma.

Monday, July 24

2006-07-24T22:16:00.000-04:00

I worked all day, and poor piano couldn't be the priority. George only got 60 minutes today.

First, I worked on Suzuki. I do not like Suzuki. I find it boring and not very helpful. My piano teacher, on the other hand, loves Suzuki and swears that it's improving my technique. So I'm doing Suzuki ... even though it bores me to tears. It's like bad medicine that I have to take a couple of times each week before my next piano lesson. It only takes about fifteen minutes each time, but those are the longest fifteen minutes of my entire practice session.

After an interminable fifteen minutes, I moved on to scales. First, I played last night's challenge: B harmonic minor in contrary motion, four octaves at 80 on the metronome. Perfect! Just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, I played it through a few more times. Perfect!

Tonight's official scales were E-flat major and C minor. Both normally pose little problem for me, but just for fun I did the 9-8 thing for both. I hit snags and fixed them. When I finally did the play-through with the metronome, they were ... perfect!

Arpeggios were G major and E minor. No prob.

I spent tonight's practice session on the deceptively easy Measures 38 through 49 of the Liszt. I went ahead and memorized them with the correct fingering. With all of that handwiching, it's tempting to throw the fingering out the window and just grab at what you can. Not a good idea, so I drilled the fingering into my brain for a good half hour or more.

Only one measure proved a challenge for me: Measure 46, playing on the C dominant 7th chord. The handwiching gets really hairy in that section, and I kept changing my mind about the ideal fingering. One fingering made more sense but strained my LH a bit. The other one required the LH to jump more, but didn't strain it. Jumping isn't too much of a problem, since I'm both pedaling and playing the LH chords as a slight staccato. But jumping is risky business when you're in the midst of a handwich. I'll have to ask Deborah at my piano lesson what fingering she recommends.

Too tired to tackle Bach tonight. Disheartening. I have to stop this alternating thing, where I work on one piece one day and the other piece the next. I retain everything better if I meet with it all once a day. I played through the fugue (the sections I've worked on HT) once and then called it a night.

Sunday, July 23

2006-07-23T22:09:00.000-04:00

I was only able to practice for about 50 minutes this evening. I'd planned to spend two or three hours at the piano, but ... well, you know how those things go.

Regardless, I had a very good practice session. The Scales o' Day were D major and B minor. D major is easy, so very easy. I played it through a few times, then moved on.

B minor is annoying, so very annoying. From the very moment I learned "B" and "B-flat" as a child, I have confused the two. This doesn't make sense. I never confuse "A" with "A-flat." I never confuse "F" with "F-sharp." Heck, I'm playing the C#-major fugue and have yet to confuse "G" with "F-double-sharp."

It is not a good habit to confuse "B" with "B-flat." Particularly when you're trying to play contrary-motion harmonic-minor scales.

The first run-through of the contrary-motion scale sounded fine. Had I played it at my lesson, my teacher would have written, "Very nice!" in my assignment book. But I knew better. That perfect scale had been the result of luck. So I played it again.

I hit a snag, and then another, and then I got very confused because I was (again) confusing "B" with "B-flat." Frustrating! (Not really, but relatively so.)

So I did the up-nine, down-eight exercise that Robert suggested. All the way through the scale. By the time I made it back to the "starting point," I'd quit hitting snags, and the B-to-Bb thing wasn't bothering me anymore. I turned on my metronome and played the 4-octave contrary-motion exercise five times in a row, without a single missed note.

That up-nine, down-eight thing is my new favorite scale exercise.

Next, I moved on to the fugue. Played through measures 16 through 19.5 a few times (OK, about ten times), just to make sure I remembered it, and then took on the next challenge: the rest of measure 19.

This is a little embarrassing. I spent 40 whole minutes (1) learning the second half of measure 19, and (2) integrating it into measures 16 through 19.5. Granted, I've become religious about playing new things a minimum of fifteen times before I move on. Ten doesn't do the trick for me. It has to be fifteen. And that takes time.

Measures 16 through 19 now sound lovely and smooth. I am, however, feeling a little overwhelmed at the huge mountain of this fugue that lies ahead of me. I'm going to be climbing this sucker for a long, long time. That's not a bad thing, but I do plan to take on a, er, less challenging piece once I'm finished with the Liszt (which I will most certainly finish learning before the fugue).

Speaking of Liszt, I replayed my work from yesterday and then called it a night. I'm tired. Tomorrow's practice shall (mostly) belong to Liszt.

Saturday, July 22

2006-07-23T22:00:00.000-04:00

I wasn't home yesterday, but I did manage to snag about 40 minutes with a piano where I was. Did the usual warm-up with scales, arps, and inversions, then went straight to Liszt. I'm at a point right now where I really need to start learning a new section. But first, I played through the part I've already learned. There was one section in which I've missed some big notes every time I've played it through ... so I went to those measures first. Spent about 20 minutes working out the kinks and then drilling it a million times. Then I moved on to the "new" stuff (Sections 6, 7, and 8).

Sections 6, 7, and 8 are not hard. They're a little tricky because of the handwiching, but they're not hard. I can play them almost perfectly when I sight-read. This can only mean one thing:

Deceptively. Easy.

I drilled Section 6 probably more than I needed to. But I really want to "cement" it in my brain, you know? And, as I drilled, little kinks came out here and there: I tended to miss a certain note, or my LH and RH got tangled in a certain spot. So it was a good use of my limited practice time.

I didn't get to move on to the Section 7 and Section 8 drills. Next time.

Friday, July 21

2006-07-21T12:49:00.000-04:00

I usually work during the day and practice during the evening. Since I'm going to be at Brevard Music Center tonight to see Chu-Fang Huang perform Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2, I decided to work only a couple of hours this morning and spend the late morning/early afternoon at the piano.

Good decision. I practiced/played for about 80 minutes.

Scales sounded good. Today was Ab-major and F-minor. Of all the scales, I think F-minor and F#-minor give me the most trouble. They shouldn't, but they do. They sound pretty good now, but it took a lot of work to get there.

F-minor acted up a bit, so I tried some of Robert's suggestions (see comments for this post). It helped to do them in groups of nine. The back-and-forth effort of suggestion #4 was actually easier than I thought it would be. "Easy" is a relative term. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't quite the impossible challenge that I imagined it would be.

Next, I went straight to Bach, my beloved Bach. This week's goal for the C#-major fugue has been a seemingly small one: to learn Episode II (measures 16-19) hands-together.

Well, guess what. I DID IT!! And it's only Friday! (My "piano week" runs from Wednesday to Wednesday, since that's when I have my lesson.) Only two days of practicing, and I have all of Episode II hands-together! And Episode II is, in my opinion, the hairiest, scariest section of the entire fugue!

I think the fugue may be within my reach after all. My piano teacher never doubted it but, being a chronic self-doubter, I wasn't so sure. "Just take it as it comes," I thought. "Plug away, and see where it takes you." And look where I am now! All of Episode II, hands-together, in the bag! :)

The next goal is to learn, HT of course, the rest of Measure 19, plus Measures 20-22. Measure 20 has a hairy LH section. That'll be my next big (fun) challenge.

I reviewed last night's work on the Liszt for about 10 minutes. It sounded good. Very good. I've always been better at playing the Romantics than anything else, and I really feel good about how the Liszt is shaping up (the second half of it, at least. That's right. I still need to learn the first half).

Then I did a very dumb thing. I took out Chopin's Bb-minor nocturne (Op. 9, No. 1), just to play it for fun. I love this piece. The reason I started playing piano again was so I could learn this piece. I play it every now and then, but hadn't played it in a couple of weeks.

Why was this a dumb thing to do?

Well, as much as I've played the nocturne, I've never memorized it. (I know. I need to do that.) So I was playing with the music.

Do you know how weird it is to play something in Bb-minor (five flats) when your brain has been spending most of its time in C#-major (seven sharps)?

Do not try this at home, folks.

It was rather amusing, actually. I've never missed so many notes in the nocturne as I missed today. Live and learn. If I ever do a recital, I won't have two such different key signatures next to each other in the program.

Time to run! No practice tonight, probably, but hopefully I'll squeeze in an hour or so tomorrow.

July 20, Part 2

2006-07-20T21:59:00.000-04:00

As promised, here is the second installment of my July 20 practice log!

I practiced for about an hour tonight. I didn't spend much time at all on scales, arps, and inversions. I was ready to get re-acquainted with the Liszt. So, after a few minutes of a "warm up," I went straight to Liszt.

The 9-against-4 is coming. Still not there yet, not completely, but it's coming. It's a LOT easier if I focus on the timing of the RH and not the timing of the LH. Much easier. Only thing is, it's not easy for my mind to focus on the RH. I don't know why this is. I consciously have to force my mind to think, "Triplets. Slow. Slower than if you were fitting them evenly into the LH notes."

I played through the rest of the piece, just to see where I was weak and what needed the most work. Narrowing it down to "Section 11" (measures 79-90), I practiced it the way I've been practicing the fugue: drilling, drilling, and more drilling.

This piece is very different from the fugue, but it does have one thing in common with it: multiple voices singing multiple melodies. In the Liszt, the RH (mostly) plays two voices: the main melody and its echo a third of a beat later. If that's not tricky enough, there are dynamics to think about. My RH will be playing two notes at once, but the bottom note is part of the primary melody and needs to be, say, mezzo forte, whereas the top note is part of the echo and needs to be piano. And both are in a crescendo, but a crescendo appropriate to their respective volumes. Argh.

Measures 81, 83, and 87 include grace notes. The fingering for these has been really tricky for me. Do I use 4-5-4? 3-5-4? It would be nice to use the same fingering for the melody and the echo, but that would be really awkward. Typically, the note that follows the grace note is the top part of a chord, so my 1, 2, 3, and 4 fingers need to be ready to play the chord, so that makes things even trickier.

I think I've found fingerings that I'm happy with. For tonight. They are as follows (lower melody is in bold; echo isn't.)

Measure 81: 3-5-3, 4-5-4
Measure 83: 3-5-4, 3-5-4
Measure 87: 3-4-3, 3-5-4

The 3-5-4 works beautifully on Measure 83, but it needs some work in Measure 87. The the grace note is B-C# to B, so even though 4-5-4 would be more within reach (and allow me to hold the note in the lower melody), it's very awkward for the grace note. 3-5-4 isn't much better, but it worked the best for me.

If anyone has suggestions for alternate fingerings, I'll be happy to hear them. I practiced these fingerings tonight and they sound pretty good (though the lost "hold" on the main-melody note in Measure 87 irks me).

OK. Boring technical discussion over. I love this piece. When I play it, I hear a million things I need to work on, but the tape-recording I made tonight sounded impressive. This is a big deal; rarely do I sound impressive to myself when I tape my playing. But I listened to myself playing Measures 62 to the end, and ... well, it sounded quite good. Put a big grin on my face, it did.

I was tempted to work on the Bach, but it's after 10:00 and I'm trying to overcome an insomnia problem. The fugue would probably not be conducive to sleeping.

Good night!

July 20 Practice, Part 1

2006-07-20T12:15:00.000-04:00

I'm calling this "Part 1" because I'm planning a second practice session this evening.

Spent about 50 minutes on the piano. About 15 minutes were devoted to scales, arps, and inversions. The Bb-minor scale was giving me some trouble, for some reason. I do not want to devote a huge percentage of my practice time to scales, but last week's 20-minutes-per-scale work was surprisingly helpful. So I spent some extra time drilling Bb-minor.

I took about five minutes to play through the C#-major prelude, and then the rest of the session was spent on the fugue. (This morning, when my alarm went off, my first thought was, "I'm tired. I don't want to get out of bed yet." Then I thought, "But I get to practice the fugue today!" And I got right up.) I now, ladies and gentlemen, have not one and a half, but TWO and a half measures in the bag. Measures 17 and 18, with half of 19 (the end of Episode I) are sounding nice. I'm also learning the measures by memory as I go. It's making them easier to learn, since I'm forced to focus on how the notes look in my hands, what intervals are being played, etc.

My brain is turning cartwheels. I love this stuff. I wish I could spend all day working on it. But I'm not thinking, "Oh, why didn't I start learning HT sooner?" I think I started it right when I needed to.

Tonight I'm going to revisit Liszt. It's been awhile since I've worked on it, so tonight's practice will probably be more of a "re-acquainting" session than anything else. Oh, and the 9-against-4 section is on the agenda, as always!

Today's Practice

2006-07-19T22:40:00.000-04:00

No official practice report for today, but I did write about the joy of learning a fugue on A Sort of Notebook.

Now the Fun(?) Begins!

2006-07-16T18:42:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in my last post, my piano teacher (Deborah) said it's time for me to start putting my hands together on the fugue.

Sigh. I was afraid of that. And it sounded so nice hands-separately.

But first ... she said to pick out the section I considered the most difficult, and to start by tackling it.

OK. Not an unusual approach to learning something.

So I picked out measures 17-19. It's physically impossible for me to maintain every complete held note in this section, and it will continue to be until I get my hand-stretching machine from eBay (heh). It's a scary, scary section for me; the paper is nearly rubbed through from repeated eraser marks as I changed the fingering and changed it back again (and again, and again ...). I hadn't done the hands-separately mega-drill session on this section yet, so that's what I did today.

Best to ease up to that hands-together thing., don't you think?

I had about an hour available for practicing. I flew through the scales, inversions, and arps (man, are they sounding good!) and went straight to the fugue.

I drilled. And I drilled. And I drilled. (I think I'm starting to sound like a dentist here ...)

The LH isn't bad in this section because it's only playing the bass voice. The RH, on the other hand (no pun intended), is playing alto and soprano, and the soprano is doing all of these wonderful musical arabesques from high held notes to lower notes over an octave down and than back up a sixth, and then up an octave to a high-above held note again. It's really very lovely.

The alto, meanwhile, is not exactly repeating the soprano, but shadowing it. Jumping up a fourth instead of a sixth or an octave. And it's a quarter-beat behind.

Argh. Just thinking about it makes my brain long for something easier to think about--like quantum physics, maybe, or advanced calculus.

Anyway, the RH sounds good. The LH sounds great. Put 'em together, and ...

Oh, my.

I think this is where the fun is supposed to begin.

Stay tuned. I'll be sure and report the moment, which may be a very long time from now, when I can actually play a single measure of this fugue hands-together.

I finished up the too-brief practice session with a run-through of the Liszt. I hate that I haven't been near a piano since my lesson last Thursday, but as they say, poop happens. And a lot of poop has been happening lately.

Stay tuned ... I've slated tomorrow and Tuesday for monster practice sessions (unless more poop happens), to make up for the missed days this weekend.

Today's total practice time: about 60 minutes.

Thursday, July 13

2006-07-13T20:07:00.000-04:00

I worked in a short practice today. Had piano this afternoon.

The short practice involved the usual scales and arps, and a run-through of my pieces. It wasn't so much a practice as a review.

Piano was good. She said that the Bach sounded very musical. I asked what I should do next, practice-wise--continue drilling and memorizing HS, or start HT? She said that I "shouldn't hold off any longer" on playing HT, and to keep drilling HS if I want but to begin working HT on whatever I find to be the most difficult passage of the fugue. That's easy. I don't have the music in front of me, but in the Alfred edition, it's the bottom of page two.

I played the Liszt pretty well, if a bit timidly. I'm playing it with emotion and paying attention to all of the dynamics and all of that, but I'm still also trying to make sure I get the notes right in several sections. She had all kinds of nice things to say about the Liszt. The 9-against-4 is sounding much better (though it's not there yet), and she was really happy with how I played the last page. I really feel like I'm turning a corner with the Liszt. It's stopped seeming "hard." It's still challenging, but I feel like I've "got it." I have yet to learn Sections 1-5, but those will be easy, at least compared to the second half of the piece. (I never like to use the word "easy" for anything piano-related.)

No practice after piano today, as my sister is visiting.

Wednesday, July 12

2006-07-13T01:06:00.000-04:00

Today was a crazy schedule. I was supposed to have piano, but my piano teacher had to cancel at the last minute. Then a nine-hour editing job came up, so I was busiliy working most of the day. No practice. :(

Tuesday, July 11

2006-07-12T23:01:00.000-04:00

I didn't get to practice today because I was tied up in a job all day long. I did, however, get to see William Preucil, Eric Kim, and Arthur Rowe perform Mendelssohn's D minor piano trio last night--wonderful! Also on the program were Beethoven's D major violin sonata and Brahms' F major cello sonata.

Just as watching really good tennis players improves my tennis game, watching pianists improves my piano playing. Weird how that happens.

Monday, July 10

2006-07-10T23:46:00.000-04:00

I've been going through the dark night of the soul and suffering the tortures of the damned for the past few days. (Maybe that's a little extreme, but things have been pretty bad.) Piano is the one constant I can keep going back to. I'm finding so much solace in it these days. I can't do too much of anything else, but at least I can play scales and drill single measures and repeat small groups of measures over and over again.

Today I had two practice sessions. For Session 1, I worked on scales, arpeggios, inversions, and Liszt. Even though I've only just started spending more time on scales, I can already see the difference. I continue to play with rhythms. This time I played funky jazz-sounding rhythms, with lots of syncopation and odd assortments of fast and slow notes. I repeated notes and "riffs" here and there (always the scales in similar and contrary motion) ... and it was fun--A whole lot more fun than just playing up and down the keyboard with the metronome. And when I did go back to the more traditional way of playing the scale, it sounded so much better.

Folks, I think I have a fun new way to practice scales.

The latent composer in me is screaming, "Write an etude! Write an etude!" But I'm ignoring it for now. Right now I want to focus on learning those scales as well as possible. If a mini-etude gets written in the process, then so be it.

Arpeggios, too, are benefitting from the added attention. They are starting to sound really good. Even the ever-pesky Gb major and Eb minor arps didn't sound too shabby today.

For my morning Liszt practice, I worked (again) on the 9-against-4s. Sigh. So frustrating. But it's coming. It's just a matter of time. I made some headway today--learned that if I focus more on the triplets in the RH rather than the eighth notes in the LH, I don't get so confused.

I also focused on a very small section that includes the "echoing notes." I can play it, but it's not 100% comfortable. So I drilled and drilled and drilled. Worked really hard on making the main theme come out and having the "echo" play softly, almost as background. It gets a little tricky at times.

Here's a tangent: I love watching David Effron conduct at the Brevard Music Center. He is a true showman. He's very animated up there, and he looks like he's having so much fun that he makes me wish I'd become a conductor myself. When he wants the strings to quiet down, he'll but his index finger to his lips like he's whispering, "Shhhh." It's great. He whispers "shhh," and the strings die right down. Just like that.

So when I was practicing the Liszt today, whenever I got to an "echo," I had this image of David Effron whispering "shhh" to the orchestra. And it helped me to remember to "shush" the echo. As I continued to practice, I imagined having a conductor in my head, motioning to increase the volume, speed up a little, "shhhh," etc., depending on what the music said to do. It was so much fun. Kind of like being my own little orchestra with my own conductor. I think I'm going to do more of that.

Tonight's practice focused on Bach. I did more scales and arpeggios first because they're immensely therapeutic, then I went on to the fugue.

I feel almost like I'm taking a step backward with the fugue, but I think it's a necessary step. I wrote about it in a previous post, so I won't go into details here. The sections that I've learned by memory (and have drilled a million times) are sounding very, very good. I'm so happy with how they sound and how my hands are molding into the their roles. I haven't covered a lot of ground in the fugue this week because I've been working so hard on such small parts. But I've gone deep rather than wide, and that's important, too.

And you know what? I'm in no hurry to master this. No hurry at all. It'll happen when it happens.

Time for sleep.

Today's total practice time: About 130 minutes.

Arpeggio Lesson Online

2006-07-10T10:15:00.000-04:00

Here's a short video on arpeggios. I must admit that, when I first started taking lessons again a few years ago, the first thing my piano teacher did was to dispel the myth that one needs to be all wrist-twisty when playing arpeggios. My previous piano teachers had taught me to play them legato, which required a bit of awkward twisting of the wrist whenever the thumb goes under. For the past couple of years, I've been doing something like the small "leap" discussed in this video. The instructor here says that there will be a small pause during the leap, but I've found that practice makes the pause barely noticeable. Also, if I don't try to play them super-legato, the pause isn't noticeable at all.

All of the practicing has contributed to a legato sound in all of my arpeggios. It's not something I worked toward, but I've noticed that they're sounding much smoother and not as "jumpy."

Small goals. Little victories.

Sunday, July 9

2006-07-09T23:27:00.000-04:00

What a long day I had today. Didn't get to sit down at the piano until 10:15 tonight.

I practiced for about 70 minutes tonight. About 20 minutes were spent on scales and arpeggios: Eb major and C minor for scales, and C major and A minor for arpeggios.

Eb major and C minor are two of the easiest scales to play in contrary motion because they're "mirrors" of each other. I had no problem with the initial playing of either tonight, so I quickly went on to "scale variations" of all kinds. Tonight I worked on staccato/legato, plus a fun loud/soft exercise: The RH starts out soft, and the LH starts out loud (or vice-versa). As I move up the keyboard, the RH does a crescendo and the LH a decrescendo. As I move back down, they go back to the original.

I'm able to do this. I have to focus on the crescendo/decrescendo to the point that I forget to focus on the notes. And I still played them correctly! The muscle memory is finally kicking in! Yay! The scales are sounding smooth and polished, too. I'm playing them at 80 now (can't remember if I mentioned that before.

Oh, and I also tried playing them two octaves apart (rather than one octave). Would you believe, I find them easier when I play them that way? Go figure.

You would think that C major and A minor would be among the easiest of arpeggios, since they consist of white keys only. Nope. I find the black-white-black arps, like Eb major and Ab major the easiest. Bb and B are pretty easy, too. The all-white and all-black keys are more challenging.

Still, C major and A minor sounded fine tonight. I did some similar games with dynamics and rhythms. I played them with a swing rhythm, then made up a few other rhythms, and at some point I realized I was having fun, I mean, really enjoying myself. Go figure. :)

Then it was onward to the Bach Fugue in C#-major. I approached it the same way I did in yesterday's practice: chose a handful of measures and drilled the hell out of them.

In the past, either because I didn't have enough time or because I didn't know any better, I would drill something--a measure or a handful of measures--five or six, maybe ten times before moving on to the next few measures. I never really counted. Now, however, I'm drilling small sections a minimum of twenty times each, with the metronome, by memory. I speed the metronome up a bit--not nearly to the prescribed tempo, of course. I got up to 60 tonight, working HS on measures one through eleven.

Why drill it so many times when I actually feel like I've "gotten it" after five or six?

For one thing, only five or six repetitions do not constitute "getting it," even if it feels that way at the time.

But here's the main thing: around repetition number fifteen, something happens. My hand falls into its own rhythm and suddenly seems to acquire a gracefulness--the kind of gracefulness and ease of movement I usually see in the hands of concert pianists. It is pure delight to watch my hand dancing so easily across the "stage" of the keyboard, and to hear each note executed with clarity and conciseness and charm. No, I'm not bragging about my playing. Just trying to explain the joy of working really hard at a fugue and experiencing the tiny victories that come with setting small goals and reaching them.

As I mentioned earlier, I've decided to start trying to memorize it now, even though I'm still in HS stage. (I should have started learning it HT this week, but we never got around to the fugue at my last lesson.) See, I can play the whole thing, relatively smoothly, hands separately. Because it sounds only relatively smooth (relative to how it sounded the first time I tried to play it!), I decided that wasn't good enough, and that I wanted to use this "extra" week to really learn it.

While learning HS the first time around, I would think to myself, "This is going to be a bear to memorize. How will I ever memorize this?" I usually like to memorize a piece as I learn it, thus saving myself the hassle of having to memorize it later. I think I shied away from trying to commit the fugue to memory because ... well, because it's a big, convoluted piece with seven sharps. It's possibly the most difficult piece I've ever played. It's big and mean and scary.

But it's not mean in a bad way. I love this piece. I listened to all of the Book I preludes and fugues, and I loved this one the most, and that's why I'm learning it now. I was a little anxious about the seven sharps, but I've found that I actually like playing in seven sharps. But the thought of trying to memorize this lovely fugue was ... intimidating, to say the least.

I bit the bullet and started working on the HS by memory. And I now have measures one through eleven seared, seared in my memory. I'll have the first two pages in the old noggin by the time I go to bed tomorrow night. At least that's the plan.

I didn't get around to poor, neglected Liszt tonight (it's very late). I'll just have to make up for the lost time tomorrow. :)

Saturday, July 8

2006-07-08T19:01:00.000-04:00

No time to write at the moment, but I wanted to put this down before I forgot.

One hour of practice today. About 20 minutes on scales, arpeggios, and inversions. More time than I'm "supposed" to spend on them, but I find them therapeutic.

About 40 minutes on the fugue. Lots of drilling on small sections. I played one small section probably 40 or 50 times. It sounded much better after all of that.

I like this drilling ad infinitum thing. Like the scales, they're therapeutic, and that's what I need right now.

Friday, July 7: Piano Notes

2006-07-08T00:36:00.000-04:00

I wrote about yesterday's disastrous lesson here. I have this bipolar thing going on, and I've been allergic to the 2,381 meds they've tried, so I'm currently unmedicated. That can make for some awkward situations, and yesterday's would-be piano lesson was one of them. Luckily, I have an understanding piano teacher.

Today, after a full day of editing and spending some time with my parents (who were in town for a few hours), I finally had a few free hours for piano.

I'm up to 80 for my scales and 63 for my arpeggios. For scales, I did G major, E minor, Ab major, and F minor. For arps, I did B major, G# minor, F major, and D minor.

Here's what I do for both scales and arpeggios:

One octave, similar motion, one note per beat
Two octaves, contrary motion, two notes per beat
Three octaves, similar motion, three notes per beat
Four octaves, contrary motion, four notes per beat

Scales sounded quite good. I'm only "supposed" to do a major with its relative minor each day, but I'm flying through them so fast that I added a second set today. I played each scale through five or six times, giving myself a new challenge each time: legato/staccato, loud/soft, dotted notes, etc. Finally, after at least a year of doing this, those contrary motions scales are getting to a point where I can play them without having to give each individual note 100% of my attention. So it's good news that I was able to add the dynamics and rhythm variations and still play them.

My arpeggios are ... hm. They're not bad at all. But they're not ... good. Mr. Opinionated Arpeggist, perhaps you can give me some advice here. I want smooth-sounding arpeggios. They sound great until I get to four notes per beat. They still sound OK--I'm hitting the right notes, and my timing is good--but they're ... wimpy. The timing is even, but the volume isn't. One note will be louder than the other, then the next one will be too soft. Or I'll completely miss it. I won't hit the wrong note; I just won't hit the right one hard enough to make any sound.

It sounds OK at 60 and at lower tempos, but it still doesn't have the smooth, consistent sound that I'd like. What's your advice? To slow down again? Aaarrrggghhh ... I did work in rhythms tonight, and consciously made myself play with more force. That helped, I think. It didn't sound very pretty, but at least I was pressing all the notes down with equal force.

Next was Liszt. I thought I had the 9-against-4 thing, but I didn't. I tried just "winging" it, but that doesn't work, either (would that it did!). My brain wants to make it 12-against-4, timing wise, would would be oh-so-easy. So my right hand starts at the tempo it would need in order to play twelve notes ... and it's, of course, too fast. So, when I consciously try to play the RH more slowly, guess what ... the LH slows down, too. I guess this is just something I'll have to keep practicing until I get it right. It's just very, very frustrating. I'm not used to not being able to do something after a couple of tries. Here I've tried it at least 100 times, and I still don't seem to be able to wrap my brain around it.

After practicing the 9-against-4 measures ad nauseam, I went on to the next section: the one with the echoes. I'm being wishy-washy about the fingering. Here's why: it's physically impossible for me to hold all the notes that need to be held while playing the other notes that need to be played. The truth hurts, but there it is. I'm 5'2" and very petite. I have Mozart-sized hands. Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Brahms ... those guys weren't thinking of me when they were composing, no sirree. I can comfortably reach a ninth on the white keys. And I can reach up a ninth to the next black key (say, from middle C to the Db one octave up). But that's about it.

Well, I'd worked out some rather awkward fingerings that worked (they involved weird things like playing 2-against-3 with a single hand), but were awkward. My piano teacher said I should do the less-awkward fingerings and compensate for my hand-smallness by using dynamics and pedal. I'm not sure if I agree with her on that, but she's the one with the D.Mus. from Indiana University. I'll try her method, and if I just can't get used to it, I'll try mine again.

So I went through and changed some of the fingerings tonight. I spent a long time playing and replaying a section of about eight measures with the new fingering. A long time, for me. Maybe an hour or more. On just those few measures. I could have moved on to something else (say, Bach or someone), but dammit, I'm sick of having this piece not feel like an easy chair. If I have to play those eight measures 1,000 times for them to feel comfortable, then that's just what I have to do.

By the time I finished the practice session, those eight measures were sounding pretty good. And something else happened: I noticed that my fingers are starting to look graceful and relaxed as I play ... not like they're struggling to reach the notes and hit the right ones. That was a good feeling. That's what they're supposed to look like.

Only eight measures. I have a long way to go. This is so much work. Mind you, I'm not complaining about the work. I love the work. I don't love the fact that my time for the work is limited, but I do love the work itself.

And it is so much work. My admiration for professional classical pianists is increasing astronomically these days.

Monday, July 3

2006-07-03T22:26:00.000-04:00

Tonight's practice was abominable. It lasted all of 10 minutes.

I was on the road all day yesterday and most of today. It was a very long road trip. On the way from Louisiana to North Carolina, we started out on I-10 and decided to go to Gulfport (Mississippi) and Hwy. 90 to see the damage from Katrina. I have many happy memories of weekends and holidays at the summer home of a friend's family and wanted to see what, if anything, remained of it.

Well, nothing was there. A few boards of the bingo hall on the corner were still there, but only the cement foundation remains of the house. That's all that remains of anything, actually. It was a sad drive.

I got back home this evening and, after a short run, decided to try practicing.

Mistake.

I'm too exhausted to play even a half-decent scale, much less anything by Liszt or Bach. I muddled through a couple of scales and arps before I quit. Tomorrow's a new day. I'll try and start over my practice session then.

Until then, it's sleepytime for me. I've lost two days of practice, but I worked on piano so much last week that I don't feel too bad about the missed time (other than that I've missed being with my favorite musical instrument in the whole world!).

Good night!

An Hour in the Icebox

2006-07-02T00:17:00.000-04:00

The LSU practice rooms are freezing cold. I guess they need to counteract the 103-degree heat and 90% humidity outside. I practiced for an hour this evening ... if I'd practiced any more, I think I would need to be treated for frostbite.

Seriously, it wasn't that cold, but I did stop practicing when I could no longer feel my fingertips touching the keys. I pity the LSU School of Music students.

I worked on Bach (again). Poor, neglected Liszt. As much as I adore the great Romantic virtuoso, my ever-bewigged Bach just has that je ne sais quoi (or would that be an Ich weiß nicht?). Yesterday, I played through the fugue a few times, hands separately, and noted the measures that didn't feel entirely natural to my hands after playing them a million times. For today's practice, I dug into those "trouble spots." I think it was a productive practice.

I'll be on the road tomorrow and Monday, so I may not be posting again for a while. I apologize for the spottiness of my posts lately. I promise, things will get better once I have access to my own computer at home!

Nighttime Practice

2006-07-01T10:30:00.000-04:00

The great thing about being on vacation is that I've practiced not once but twice a day for several days. Yesterday's early practice was a two-hour all-Bach extravaganza!!. Actually an all-fugue extravaganza. Then, last night, I worked on the fugue for another 45 minutes. I played through the prelude a couple of times, very slowly, laying down the tracks in my brain. That took about 15 minutes. Then I worked on Sections 6-8 of the Liszt (the part where the melody is supposed to sound like a cello). Those three sections are probably the easiest of the entire piece. A little tricky with the handwiching, but I found good handwich combinations in just a few mintues of practicing. I worked on that for only about 20 minutes before I had to leave.

So. My hot date with Liszt didn't happen. He was usurped by my Beloved, Bewigged, and Bejowled One.

It's Saturday, and I'll spend most of the day editing a book. However, I do hope to grab a couple of hours of practice this afternoon. I won't be able to practice at all tomorrow, and I feel like I need to "cement" some of the things I worked on in the fugue yesterday.

My life (and my detailed practice updates) will return to normal on Tuesday.

P.S. I'm not sure how many hours I practiced this week, but I'm estimating it's been about twelve. If I'm able to practice again this afternoon, it'll be more.

Sigh. I love music.

Date with Bach

2006-06-30T14:23:00.000-04:00

This morning I worked on the fugue for two hours. Got the last two pages of it smooth as silk (well, maybe not THAT smooth, but they sounded much better at the end of the practice session than at the beginning). I'm still playing it hands-separately, of course, but I can tell I'm nearing the point at which I can take the next step and actually start playing it hands-together.

No time for details, as usual. But it was good to have a date with Bach. Liszt wasn't even allowed.

I'm hoping for a second practice session this evening. A hot Friday night date with Franz Liszt. Sounds ideal to me. Too bad he's dead.

No Time for Details

2006-06-28T11:55:00.000-04:00

Practice for three hours (so far) today.

Just a few minutes on scales, inversions, and arps. I'm playing them faster, so I'm actually able to play more per day and not feel like I'm spending all my time on technical exercises.

About 30 minutes on the Bach Prelude. As I've mentioned before, I'm not really "supposed" to be starting on it. However, the Fugue and Standchen are both so hairy ... it's nice to have an easy ("easy" being a relative term) piece to warm up on. I've also been reviving some of the 2- and 3-part inventions that I've learned in the past as ways of warming up my hands and mind before diving into the harder stuff.

About 30 minutes on the Fugue. I've spend a lot of time lately on Liszt, so I'm planning a nice, long date with the Fugue later this week, probably tomorrow or Friday. I have the entire thing hand-separately, but it's not very polished sounding. I'm going to keep working hands-separately until my next lesson, which is a week from today.

Almost two lovely hours on Liszt. I now have the section with the 9-against-4 triplets all the way through the end. I'm not to tempo yet, but I'm gotten beyond my usual creeping pace, and it's really sounding lovely (if I may say so myself--but it's Liszt, not me (not I?), who makes it sound that way).

Tomorrow I'll start learning Sections 6 through 8, which is where the melody is played in the bass. The pulsing, accompanying chords are played in the bass, too, which means lots of handwiching. (A handwich is where the hands are practically on top of each other, both playing different things.)

No time to write more. Frustrating because I have so very much to write!

Dance of the Digits

2006-06-27T19:44:00.000-04:00

Note: I've expanded significantly on this post over at my other blog, A Sort of Notebook.

I am loving Liszt. I love the way my hands have to "share" the melody. I have so much to write on that, but I'm borrowing a computer and don't have enough time to do it justice. Suffice it to say that I've practiced three and a half wonderful hours today, and about two hours on Liszt alone.

What I find wonderful about Liszt is that it pushes one hand hard, but not too hard. Then the other hand gets a turn to be pushed. But it's never both at the same time, and never one hand for too long. It's hard to explain. When I have more time to write, I'll word things rather more eloquently, I'm sure.

All I can say now is that my fingers feel like they're dancing a wonderful, graceful dance. I've been trying to "play with my body," as my piano teacher says to do, so all of me is dancing.

And Standchen, though it still need a lot of work (like, um, learning Sections 1 through 8), is sounding really nice.

I'm so eager for tomorrow to get here so I can practice some more!

Lots of Practice, Little Blogging

2006-06-26T18:56:00.000-04:00

I'm on a trip to my home state of Louisiana and will have intermittent internet access all week. So, I won't be posting much on this blog or my other one. However, I will be practicing for hours upon hours on the piano at a local church. I'll post a great big practice log after I get back home to North Carolina.

Practice Log for Wednesday, June 21

2006-06-21T21:27:00.000-04:00

Today was lesson day. I'd planned to practice this evening, but I had a nasty bout with insomnia last night and am too tired to do much of anything tonight. So I just played through everything once (including Gb and eb scales at 76 and Db and bb arps at 60) and called it a night.

If I have another insomnia night, I'll spend it answering e-mails and responding to comments on both this blog and my other one. But I hope to sleep well tonight. It's been a while since I've slept.

So good night!

Piano Lesson

2006-06-21T20:53:00.000-04:00

I had my lesson today. It went pretty well, despite the fact that Deborah (my teacher) and I both went into it feeling frustrated (due to non-piano matters).

Scales sounded beautiful at 76. I played B-major and G#-minor for her. (I play one major and one minor at each lesson--whichever she happens to ask for. Keeps me guessing.) Played 'em without a hitch, I did. With the chord inversions, she wants me to use my arms more. I'm being all spidery-fingered, but she said to play them more as a motion of the body and not a technical feat of the hands only (my words, not hers). She's very graceful as a pianist--imagine a ballet dancer, only using all of her gracefulness at the piano--and I can tell that her use of the "whole body" movement in playing contributes to her gracefulness.

So I'm really going to focus on the motion that I use to play the inversions this week--and not just getting the notes right. I'm past the point of trying to figure out the notes anyway.

My arpeggios rocked. Yeah, baby.

We didn't spend a lot of time on the fugue. I had a couple of fingering-related questions in Section 2, which she addressed, and we decided on an alternative fingering with a little less worry about trying to hold a note with my pinky while playing another note twelve notes down with my thumb (can't be done!). For next lesson, I'm just going to continue working through the sections (I've divided it into eight) hands separately.

As for the prelude, it's not a high priority at this point. I'll continue focusing on it a little bit several times a week, but I won't really dive into it until the fugue is much further along.

Most of the time was spent on the Liszt. Deborah made a very good suggestion that I record myself playing the 9-against-4. I'd thought about doing that but was frankly too lazy to go downstairs and get my tape recorder, find a blank tape, etc.

For Section 10, I need to remember that I'm playing two voices, or "characters"--the lower voice and the higher echo. It's one of those things that I know but forget because I'm too busy trying to make sure I have the notes and the timing down. She said I'm playing it beautifully, by the way, which was a nice boost to the old ego. :)

She also had nice things to say about Sections 12 and 13 (the last page and a half of the piece). I have the notes down, though they could be much more "down." I do need to make sure I focus on dynamic contrasts. At this point, as with Section 10, I'm still not completely confident that I have all the notes (except at super-slow tempos), so that's affecting other things. More drilling is in store for this week! I'm getting the notes, but I'm not quite there yet.

Speaking of confidence, I sometimes get major confidence problems with piano--thinking "I'm not good enough" or "This piece is out of my league." Part of me is scared Deborah will say, "You know, this piece is really too hard for you. I think you might be better off playing [insert easy piece of choice here]." I voiced my self-doubts today, and (after telling me that I was being ridiculous) she told me that she'd had a piano teacher in grad school who told her that a piece was too difficult for her. Deborah basically said, "Screw you, Prof--I love this piece, I want to play it, and I'm learning it whether you approve or not." So she learned to play it beautifully and her prof actually apologized for underestimating Deborah's abilities.

So basically, she was telling me, "If you love this piece and really want to play it, you can." (She also added that, knowing my practice habits, motivation, and natural ability, she knew I was capable. She wasn't just saying that wishing it were so would make it so.)

I love the piece and really want to play it. So I guess I'm on my way!