Skip to main content

My Latest Lesson

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'll call "softness control." Would I want to learn that one? Sure. I actually played that for a class recital in high school (10th grade, maybe?), so it's somewhat familiar to me. Of course, I haven't played it since (I didn't particularly like it then; it wasn't "show-offy" enough for my taste at the time), so it will feel like a new piece.

After that, I played part of the Chopin, but she stopped me at the end of the first page. It is going to be a while before I can rid myself of old habits from years of playing this piece from mostly memory and not paying attention to the music or truly listening to myself. I am making the simple error of totally ignoring the crescendo and decrescendo markings:


It's dumb, and I should totally know better, but there it is. I liken it to having sung the wrong words of a song for years. Even though you're aware of the right words, you sing the wrong ones anyway because that's where your brain keeps going if you don't think about it.

We're also going to be working on some theory. We're not quite going to start at the very beginning. The first chapter of the book we're using (an older edition of Spencer's The Practice of Harmony) is on identifying note names. She asked if I thought I needed that, and I said, "Well ... reading notes is kind of like reading English for me." So we're skipping that. Instead, we're moving to the identification of scales (major, natural minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor). This will be pretty simple as well, but I think I could use the review.

Next lesson isn't until a week from Thursday, so I hope to get lots of practices in (even if they're just micro-practices) between now and then! I have a busy few days ahead (including a possible road trip and a full weekend), we'll see how much piano time I'm able to wrangle.

I should also get my Debussy in the mail in a couple of days!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rethinking Bare Necessities

Today's breakthrough moment (there are actually two of them) focuses on "Bare Necessities." As you'll remember, I discovered Jonny May's arrangement back in early March and immediately decided to learn it. I printed out the music, started the course, and proceeded to learn the stride section, posting a few videos of my progress. Ha. I bet those videos make it look like I was making progress. I guess I was ... but not really. And I realized something this weekend that I hadn't before: Because I was thinking of "Bare Necessities" as a "fun" piece, I wasn't practicing it seriously or diligently. I wasn't treating it as something I wanted to master. This mindset might work with an easier piece, but this arrangement isn't easy. The result: despite a little progress at the outset, I wasn't moving forward. I was stalled. Breakthrough #1 The first breakthrough was realizing that if I truly want to learn this piece and play it well,...
Post a Comment
Read more

March Goals Recap/Looking Ahead to April

It's April 1, and time to revisit the goals I set for last month. I practiced a total of 50.45 hours in March, averaging 1.62 hours (or just over an hour and a half) per day. Realistically, I practice about 45 minutes to an hour a day on weekdays, and I usually get at least one longer practice (or multiple shorter practices) in on one or both days of the weekend to bring the average up. CLASSICAL GOALS Chopin, F Minor Nocturne March Goal: Have entire piece by memory and performance-ready. I have about 90% of the piece by memory, but I still have some work to do before it's performance-ready. The only two sections that I don't quite have are "The Agitation" and the "stretto" section with the seventh chords. I'll work on both this week and will have them both memorized before the weekend. April Goal: Finish memorizing, and polish, polish, polish! My focus now is really on phrasing and dynamics. I have the notes down, even in the difficult passages. Fro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Maple Leaf Rag Breakthrough

Oh, Maple Leaf. Where to begin? At the Beginning I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I learned the A and B sections of Maple Leaf Rag back in the 1990s. I can’t tell you if it was early, mid- or late 90s, but it was during those 10 years after I’d graduated college, when I was playing a good bit of piano but not taking regular lessons from anyone. I don’t remember teaching it to myself at all. I just know that, at some point, the first half of Maple Leaf Rag was part of my two- or three-song repertoire of pieces I’d be able to play by memory over the next 25 years. It was always sloppy and I knew it, but people loved it, and so I played it if there was ever a piano around. Back in January, I decided to properly re-learn those two sections, and to finally learn the C and D sections of this wonderful piece. I worked on these over the next month or two, learning (and-relearning) the notes pretty quickly ... but it took time to memorize, and also to get everything to tempo surpassing a...
Post a Comment
Read more