Skip to main content

I'm Still Alive

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing Practice Tracker 2.0: Leveling Up My Piano Game

(Apologies for the cheesy clip art. I needed to come up with something, or the Blogger template would show a fuzzy, overly-enlarged snippet of the first chart below.) When I showed my husband my piano practice tracker, he said I should market and sell it. Ha. It’s not for sale, but I’m excited to share how this tool has transformed my practice—and why it might inspire all three of my readers. Since my last post about the Amazing Practice Tracker, I’ve made it even better. Here’s a peek at how it works, using my June data. All The Pretty Colors, All the Pretty Winners My tracker now sparkles with color: darker shades for active pieces, lighter ones for maintenance, technique, and sight-reading. Each day, the piece I practice most gets a bright yellow highlight—a little “gold medal,” if you will. (Click image for a slightly larger view.) A leaderboard automatically shows the day’s top piece and time. And if that isn't enough, I keep track of the month's leaders--specifically, ho...

Eureka! Secondary Dominant!

I am such a nerd, and I love being a nerd! Today I was working on Section 5 of You Are My Sunshine, specifically on getting this section up to performance level. In other words, I was practicing being a performer , not an arranger . But then, of course, I came up with another idea. I had just played the delicate sixths and descending rag rolls of "when skies are gray" (I chord) and then moved to the parallel octaves of "you never know, dear" (leading to  IV). The shift sounded abrupt to me. Harsh. It needed something. It needed musical WD-40. Something to ease the hinge between textures. And then I stumbled upon it! Right before moving to IV, I can slip in a V7/IV — a secondary dominant! So I tried it, and it sounded so good that I actually yelled "Secondary dominant!" out loud in my house like I was Archimedes discovering water displacement in the bathtub. It's such a small thing. One little chord. But it smooths that transition, leaning the harmony ...

The Tyranny of the Dots

In the Billy Joel documentary And So It Goes , Billy talks about "reading the dots." He didn't want—or need—to "read the dots," meaning the music notes on the page. He had developed his own rock 'n' roll piano style and, after a few years of classical training, he left the dots behind. I didn't want to read the dots, either, once upon a time. As a little kid, I had a good ear and could quickly figure out just about any tune on the piano. But in first grade, I finally started piano lessons, thus beginning my life with the dots. The Wall of Dots Between Me and Music I hated the dots! I wanted to learn them, sure, but it was so hard. If my teacher played what was written, I could play it right back for him. But if he asked me to play it from the dots, I felt like I would pop a blood vessel in my brain. It was so frustrating for my six-year-old self to have the code to a simple tune sitting silently before my eyes and not be able to crack it and bring th...