Picking Up the Pieces

Schubert has gotten the short shrift for a couple of days. Not that I'd planned it that way, of course. It's just that I'm at a place in the Schubert that isn't lending itself to micro-practices. I need time to work through a whole section. Plus, it's kind of hard. I focused on measures 230 to 238 today. It's where the familiar scale-y E-flat theme takes an interesting turn in the chromatic section (specifically, measure 232). I was having a little trouble with the fingering in the left hand (5 or 4? 5 or 4?) and was stumbling a little on the chromatic stuff. I played with the fingering in both hands and finally figured out my 5's and 4's in the LH. It's not that different from what I did with the Bach earlier today: arranging the fingering so to allow as little effort as possible for me. I also think I have a good fingering pattern worked out in the RH. Another challenge for today was switching from the chromatics to the downward F-mino...

I usually have a wide-open morning for practicing on Saturdays, but that hasn't been the case today, mainly because I was exhausted after a long, stressful week and slept in (a rare thing for me) this morning. But I did have time for some scales and Bach. At my lesson on Thursday, Carol said that I'm going to need to play more lightly if I ever want to get this prelude up to speed. I'm "punching" the keys and playing them with more weight than I need to. I think this is partly because I'm going at such a slow speed (♪=40). It's a plodding pace, and I'm tempted to plod and "punch." So today I practiced playing it more lightly, but with equal intensity, starting at ♪=40. My goal at this point—now that I have the notes and the fingering figured out—is to play it perfectly at this tempo. Once I can play it perfectly at ♪=40 (and by that, I mean that I can do it consistently, not just once), I'll move to ♪=42. I won't move to ♪=44 unti...

I'm going to be working on the first few measures of Debussy's "La fille aux cheveux de lin." I thought I would be learning the whole piece, and maybe I will ... but for the moment, the focus is on phrasing and "softness control" (my word for it), on using weight (rather than tension) to get the sound just right. This piece (these few measures, or maybe the first couple of lines) will be more of an exercise than anything else, for now. This will definitely be one of those "deceptively easy" things. I had a lesson yesterday, and we worked some on the Bach. I needed to change a bit of the fingering, but other than that, it is definitely time to start racheting up the speed, little by little. I'm going to have several days off of work next week, and I look forward to spending a lot  of time with Bach! And Schubert. And Chopin. And Debussy. Such delightful companions! Life doesn't get much better than that.

I've written several times about how I've been playing my Chopin Nocturne mostly from memory for years, and have totally ceased to think seriously about all the little dynamic instructions that poor Frédéric so painstakingly wrote down throughout the piece. I've been focusing very hard on, you know, paying attention to them now. The result is that I'm playing the piece much more slowly than before ... but I also think I'm starting to play it better. For my own reference (and for anyone who might be learning this piece and Googling "chopin noctrne op 9 no1 help what dose poco rallent mean"), I'm writing down some definitions here, in the order in which they appear in the nocturne*: p - piano , soft espress.  - espressivo , expressive smorz. - smorzando  - dying away (both tone and speed) legatissimo - very smooth and connected; more legato than legato appassionato  - with passion cresc. - crescendo , gradually getting louder con forza  - with...

I'm a little hesitant to share this recording, for several reasons. I'll get those out of the way now: My piano is not in perfect tune. I cannot play this piece perfectly because ... The tempo is too slow throughout, but a little faster than I want in places. The polyrhythm sections are still a little wonky. I accidentally turned two pages in the middle of the piece and had to stop and turn back to the correct page. The final note of the piece wouldn't play the first two times on my 100-year-old piano, so that final note sounds like it's showing up to the party really late. The recording isn't a professional one, and (I think) the left hand sounds louder and more plodding than it does in real life. (I will let my new piano teacher be the judge of that tomorrow.) I'm sure I could think another half-dozen reasons if I gave myself two or three more minutes, but I'll stop there. Why am I posting this? Because I want to capture a moment of time as ...

I've managed to squeeze in several short practices over the past few days. None of them were "worth writing home about," but I do want to keep track of my progress here, so this will be an all-in-one update. Scales I must say, I am so happy to be focusing on scales and not arpeggios right now. We'll return to "arps" in good time, but for now I'm working diligently at getting the scales back in my fingers and my brain. I'm playing 24 scales a day: 12 majors plus 12 harmonic minors, all in parallel and contrary motion. I still doing the majors at 60 and the minors at ♪ = 50. I do all of the majors plus six minors (C, C#, D, Eb, E, and F) in the morning, and then the remaining six minors (F#, G, G#, A, Bb, and B) in the evening. And they're getting better! It really doesn't take that much time, either, particularly now that I'm becoming comfortable with the scales again. I imagine I will move up a degree on the metronome for next we...

I have been dealing with a lot of anxiety lately. I've had issues with the depression in the past, but anxiety has never been that much of a problem for me ... until now. Some of it has to do with work stress, some has to do with money stress, and some is just plain old life stress. While the cost of piano lessons adds somewhat to the money stress, the escape of practice and the anticipation of the next lesson have helped me make it through these last few weeks. I'm finding that I tend to hit a low point on Wednesday evenings. Let's see why: On Tuesdays, I have a full day of work, including a required meeting at noon. On Tuesday evenings, I am the leader for a combined Tiger/Wolf/Bear Cub Scout Den. On Wednesdays, I have a full day of work, including a required meeting from 12:30 to 2:00. On Wednesday evenings, I volunteer to teach a pre-school class at church. On Wednesday nights, I have choir practice. So, as you might imagine, I can go two days without touching...

This evening's lesson was about 50% talking and 50% playing. We started with scales. I played six major scales at 60, and then we did a few minors at my new glacial pace of ♪ = 50. I played them through pretty well, and I think I need to stick to that pace (or slower) for a while with these contrary minors. Next, we did Hanon and worked on playing softly with both hands, then soft LH/loud RH, and vice-versa. One thing we are focusing on is "weight," as she calls it: how much core weight you use to get a certain volume out of a key--and knowing, before you press a key, exactly what volume you are going to get. So the focus is on playing softly and evenly. That's a challenge. If I play softly, some notes are a little louder than others, and some notes don't make any sound at all. So I have a bit of work to do. She suggested Debussy's "La Fille Aux Cheveux De Lin" ("The Girl with the Flaxen Hair") as a good piece for working on what I'...

I woke up late this morning. Not only did I not have time to work out, but I didn't have time for the usual 20 minutes I've been devoting to piano in the mornings before work. I still managed to squeeze in about ten minutes. I spent those ten minutes working on the F harmonic minor contrary motion scale. Playing it in eighth notes at 60 wasn't working. I was getting through the scale, but never without stumbling. And when I did  get it right, it felt more like luck than anything else. So I slowed down. Really   s-l-o-w-e-d   down. All the way down to where I was playing a single note on each beat of the metronome ... at 40! At that pace, I could anticipate where my fingers would go next. I was anticipating three and four and five notes ahead. I had time to think . I felt like I could breathe . I felt like ... I knew what I was doing. I played the scale at that pace several times, and then I inched the metronome up to just a little faster...

Oh, what a weekend. I got some good quality time with Henry on both Saturday and Sunday. We focused pretty intently on the pieces I'm learning in piano lessons, as well as on scales and finger exercises. This is going to be a nice, long recap of everything, though I love all of my pieces so much I'm tempted to devote a post to each one. Scales: I've been running through all 12 major scales , four octaves with contrary motion, a couple of times a day. I'm keeping the metronome at 60 for now, though I can play them faster than that. I really want to focus on playing evenly as I increase the tempo, so I think it's necessary to keep it slow for now. My minor scales are another story. I can play c, d, e, g, a, and b at 60 easily (same thing -- four octaves with contrary motion). But the others? Ha. I can't even play them at 40. So I have the metronome on 60, where each beat is an eighth note instead of a quarter note. At that pace, I can play each of the harmonic ...

I didn't have much time this morning, so I did a quick run-though of the scales (at 60) and Hanon before working on part of measure 17 of the Bach prelude. The tricky part is the transition to the rolled chord. For some reason, I was stalling. The measure before is nothing but scale-y fingerwork, and then suddenly ... this big rolled chord. The transition wasn't sitting right with me. So at my lesson (did I mention I had a lesson yesterday?), we talked about changing the RH fingering before the rolled chord from 3-1 to 4-2. That way my thumb is free to grab the C of the rolled chord. So that's what I practiced today, since the 4-2 stretch, while helpful, didn't feel totally natural. Playing at a glacial pace, I did the 4-2 and then the rolled chord a dozen or so times until it was smooth. I sped it up just a little, and it still sounded good. And that was my micro-practice. Those three sounds. For my next practice, I'll continue working backw...

I learned Chopin's B-flat minor Nocturne using the Schirmer edition, favorite edition of broke college students everywhere. When Deborah and I were going to work on the F-minor Nocturne (which I barely started before I had to quit), she had me get the Alfred edition. So when I decided to do a chord analysis of the whole piece (B-flat minor, I mean), I pulled out the Alfred since it wasn't covered with fingering, jotted notes, and other scribbles. When I sat down to get the piece from memory a couple of weeks ago, I went back to Schirmer. Here's measure 73, which I'm still working on getting "just right." So the Schirmer and the Alfred are both lying around. When I sat down to work on measure 73 today, I grabbed the version that was closest at hand: the Alfred. Here's measure 73 of the Alfred: I have the measure 73 polyrhythms down for the most part, but I'm not confident about them. When they come together properly, it feels like mo...

This Schubert Impromptu (Op. 90, No. 2) is tricker than I remember it being! I first encountered it at the end of my senior year of high school. I was going to work on it the summer before college, but I ended up not taking lessons that summer, or maybe my lessons were so spotty that we didn't get far in anything. For whatever reason, I abandoned the piece before I ever started it. When taking lessons from Deborah in the mid-2000s or so, I decided I wanted to finally do that impromptu. I'm not sure why; No. 3 in G-flat minor is my favorite. Maybe I was hungry for something scaly; I don't know. So I got as far as writing in some fingering ... but then I got another job, or I moved, or something. And, once again, the impromptu didn't happen. Fast forward to now, and by golly, I'm going to learn that piece before I die. Third time should be the charm, right? I started working on it in earnest this weekend--just the last dozen or so measures at the very end. And...

I managed to get about 60-70 minutes of practice in today. Gotta love weekends. Only thing is, those 60-70 minutes were broken into short intervals throughout the day. Six or seven short intervals. One thing I became good at as an adult student years ago was micro-practicing . I don't know if that's a real term, but it's the one I use. Basically, it's the ability to take the 10 minutes you have available for practice, and make the best of every millisecond in those 10 minutes. After a half-dozen micro-practice sessions, I feel almost as if I'd gotten an intense hour in. Of course, that's just a feeling. But experience has shown that the practice sessions are worthwhile, and that the improvement happens anyway. The key is in focus and planning . Plan to focus on a very, very small bite during those ten minute: a half a measure, the transition from one chord to another, a scale run. Today's micro-practices focused on several things: 1. The Eb-minor con...

I had my first piano lesson! Followed by my first "real" practice, where I'm actually working on something that an older, wiser pianist (my new piano teacher, Carol) told me to work on! I have been under the weather for several days and wasn't sure if I should keep the lesson appointment, but I did, and I'm glad I did. I now have "assignments" to keep me nice and busy until next time. At today's practice, I focused on several things: Scales Scales! My beloved scales! I focused on the majors today, seeing which ones of those I really could play at 60. Everything sounded fine, except for Eb, Gb, and Ab. Of course, the black keys. So I spent a bit more time on those and worked them up to 60 pretty quickly. They were all in my brain at some point. There was a time that I could play all of them at much faster than 60. Still, I was surprised that just a few minutes' focus on some trouble spots rendered nice, smooth scales at 60. I will focu...

Despite waking up later than usual, I managed to stick to my piano schedule this morning. I had maybe 15-20 minutes, so I dove right in to the scales for the day: F# through B, majors and minors. As you might expect, there were a few easy ones and a few that were, well, not so easy. Easy: F# major, G major, G minor, A-flat major, A major, A minor, B-flat major, B-flat minor, B major Not so much: F# minor, G# minor, B minor Oh, those minors! I'm actually doing the harmonic minors for each one, and I think that's part of what makes them tricky. I'm also going to be doing Hanon each morning. I pulled out my old Hanon book when I first started playing again a few weeks ago. Before that, I hadn't played Hanon in years. I had one teacher, back in the early 80s, who assigned Hanon exercises ... and that's about it. Most of my teachers never assigned Hanon, and a few of them downright disliked Hanon. My opinion? I kind of love Hanon. I like not hav...

When I spoke with my new piano teacher, we talked a bit about scales. What scales did I know? How did I practice them, back in the days when I used to practice? I demonstrated my usual routine using C major: With the metronome, one octave in parallel motion, with one note per beat. Then two octaves in contrary motion with two notes per beat. Then three octaves in parallel, three notes per beat. And finally four octaves in contrary with four notes per beat. And then rinse and repeat with the relative minor. So she said, "All twelve each day might be a little much, so let's make it six per day." Gulp. With Deborah, I did one per week: one major scale, with the relative minor. And then the inversions and arpeggios. Six scales per day? And with the relative minors, that's twelve! Soooo ... I have some work to do. I've been under the weather for a few days and haven't played much, but I managed to play scales in six keys tonight (actually twelve, incl...

So I finished labeling chords today as I worked to memorize the last couple of pages of the B-flat minor nocturne. At some point I realized that I've been playing a couple of notes all wrong for ... who knows how long? I thought maybe I'd been playing them wrong from the very beginning, but I could see that Deborah had circled the correct notes in my Schirmer edition. So it's possible that I wanted to play the wrong notes but she was trying to get me to play the right ones. These are near the end of the piece. As in the beginning, we go from B-minor to F7 ... or do we? This is what you have in the beginning: That second set of notes is an F7 chord over the B-flat bass note: F, E-flat, A, F, and F. An F7 chord consists of F, A, (C,) and E-flat. Those notes in the red boxes? All F's. So that's what I was playing at the end. But look at what's actually written at the end: Over the B-flat bass note, we have G-flat, E-flat, and A. Those notes in...

I have had the hardest time memorizing songs for my voice lessons. I work at it and I practice, but the practice sessions aren't as focused as I'd like them to be, and it seems that the weekly voice lessons come and go, and the words still aren't there. Piano is another story. At least when I took from Deborah, memorizing wasn't too much of a stretch because I practiced so intently. At the same time, she didn't require memorization, so I never quite jumped out of the nest with any of my pieces. So did I ever memorize them? Kind of? Maybe? I'll never know. So in my rediscovery of the B-flat minor nocturne, I've decided that I want to do two things I'd never seriously focused on before: analysis and memory. The two go hand-in-hand, so it seemed a worthy way to spend some time this afternoon while Anne played with the neighbor kids outside. My Schirmer edition of the nocturne is the one I learned with, so it's all marked up with fingerin...