Picking Up the Pieces

Once upon a time, many years ago, I was considered a Creative Person by both myself and others. I could sit down and spin out a story or an essay, with or without any kind of a writing prompt. I was always scribbling down poems or ideas for novels. I've written several novels, and I've half-written a few dozen, from first chapters to entire first drafts. I haven't published anything because I am a scared little mouse and always have been. I was musically creative, too. I've written a number of songs, though it's been a long time. I always felt a great desire to write music, but I would get stuck in the same old chord progressions and the same old arpeggiated left-hand groove . One of the greatest gifts of Piano With Jonny is that I have broken out of those stale old habits. Yet, I still struggle to reclaim my old creative self. I get angry at myself for missing notes when, really, all I'm doing is making things up. The "missed" note is a note other t

So much for my weekend of unlimited practice time . Thanks to a case of wrist pain, I only practiced for about an hour on Saturday. I felt better yesterday and practiced for a little over two hours. So, I got three hours in total. Not bad, but nothing close to the five or six hours I'd anticipated. Weekend Practice I spent a lot of time on Liszt , but I am very frustrated about this piece. I could learn it, but I can't figure out what fingering to use. I am missing Deborah, my piano teacher from Asheville. She would have me work out a fingering, but then she would adjust it as needed, actually writing it onto the music, and when I would try her fingering, it was like a miracle had happened. She helped me to become better at working out fingerings, but Liebstraume is a special case becuase there are so many tenths (which I can't reach), and so many options for which hand will play certain notes of the melody. I messaged her through Facebook to see if she might be up to an on

  It's rare that I have a weekend that offers potentially unlimited practice time ... but I just may have that this weekend. And if I do? I want to take deep dives into a few different areas. First Cadenza of Liebestraume I've already broken down the cadenza theoretically, and it makes total sense--it's just a back and forth between D-flat minor and E-flat major in various inversions. But playing it is not so simple, and I feel like I need a good, long practice session to get it comfortable and automatic under my fingers. Blues Improvisation I diligently do some blues improvisation every single day, usually for 10-15 minutes in the mornings while waiting for my daughter to get ready to go to school. But I want to take some time to (1) improvise alongside actual recordings and (2) improvise alongside the backing track provided by PWJ. All of my improvisation so far has been just me and the piano, and I'm feeling a need to add something. I don't need a long practice s

Working my way through the Oscar Peterson book , I present to you two versions of his Minuet 2. The first version uses straight rhythm while the second uses a swung rhythm. This book is turning out to be a good resource for sight-reading and technique. The pieces aren't very difficult (so far), so I'm able to learn them quickly and focus on technique. I'm not crazy about my sound at the very beginning of the first version in this video; it's a little harsh and wooden. I may record a better video later. For now, this is all I have! Click here to see his Minuet 1.

Oscar Peterson was a great jazz pianist of the 20th century. I think he's my favorite jazz pianist because so much of his jazz is so bluesy. Years ago, I purchased his Jazz Exercises, Minuets, Etudes, and Pieces for Piano ... and I don't know if I ever opened it. Last week, reader, I opened it. And it is delightful. The first section consists of finger exercises and minuets. Even though these are very simple, they are good exercises. I've decided to work my way through the book as an element of my technique work. His first minuet sounds like Bach. I suppose I could jazz it up with swung eighth notes and some slides and turns, but for now, I'm just playing it as written because it's so beautiful. Enjoy!

How have I managed to go a week without posting here? The good news is that I've been practicing. I've also been working from home for the last few days. At work, when it's time for a break, I open Notepad and work on my next blog post. At home, I practice piano (or do laundry). I've made a few tweaks to the November goals over the past week. Here are the original goals, compared to the updated ones: Below is a summary of the changes. Taking Jingle Bells Rag Out of Maintenance I had moved this one to maintenance, thinking I would just play it a few times every few days and move on. But then I found that I really wanted to work on it, and I needed to spend a lot more time on it than I'd allotted. So I pulled it back out of maintenance, made it a main piece, and gave it a 15% goal. Decreasing Other Percentage Goals To give Jingle Bells Rag that 15%, I had to decrease my percentage goals for The Entertainer, Blues, and Maintenance. The Entertainer: A 5% decrease was an

It really helped me to write yesterday's blog post . I was feeling frustrated with my lack of progress this month, despite having some good, intense practices, as well as a few days where I worked over two hours at the piano. Laying everything out and seeing how truly all-over-the-place my priorities have been, it made sense. So I felt better. Most importantly, I'm able to make changes for November. Below are my goals, broken down by project. I still think I may be a little too diversified this month. If that's the case, I will set The Entertainer aside until later. (But I hope I can keep all of these plates spinning.) Liszt, Liebesträume: 25% This is going to be a major focus for November. This is one of my dream pieces, and I think I'm ready to start working on it. It's a brand-new piece for me, and I may end up having to adjust this one's percentage to 30%. I'll know in a week or so. Blues Theory and Practice: 25% As I wrote yesterday, I've felt very

Time to do some serious thinking about my November goals. October was pretty much a wash. If I look at where I was in my October goals post from a few weeks ago ... I really haven't moved forward all that much. Granted, we had a hurricane and I lost a week of practice. But, even with many days of an hour or more at the piano, I really didn't make any significant strides. Even after I took "Liebesträume" out of the running. Why? It's the Fire Hose, Dummy It's the age-old problem: I have too many projects, and not enough time. I've been drinking out of the proverbial fire hose. Even if I average 2 hours of practice a day (currently, I'm averaging about 1.5), I can't make the kind of progress I want to make. So, I need to either (a) increase my practice time, or (b) lower my expectations. Or (c) limit my projects even more. Realistically, I can't increase my practice time all that much. I can shoot for an average of 2 hours a day, but I'll be

When I went to Facebook this morning, I saw that a pianist and singer named Gordon Mote will be performing at a local church tomorrow night. I'd never heard of him, so I went to YouTube to see if I might be interested in seeing his performance. Wow. I'm going. Not only is he a great pianist, but he's hilarious. And he's blind. How can I miss this? I may drag my teenage daughter with me because I don't want to go by myself. Here is just one of his videos. There are many more. I've watched about three so far, and will be listening to him as I work for the rest of the day.

I don't have many words to type today. This morning I decided to return to Bare Necessities, which I haven't really worked on for a couple of months. I've worked on my stride piano technique a lot with Jingle Bells, but I've purposely kept BN in the background, thinking it would be good to take a break from it. I had it to a good tempo, but not the goal tempo. So what better than to let it marinate, or maybe simmer, for a while on low while I worked on other things? So, I returned to it this morning, and it was one big practice session of frustration. Did the practice do any good? Maybe. Maybe not. Am I on the verge of a breakthrough, in the deep darkness that comes before dawn? Maybe. Probably not. I don't know where I am, or what to think, or what to do. There is very little piano-playing in this 5:39 video. It's mostly me whining and being frustrated. I'd planned to make a series of videos this morning of my progress in getting BN back up to speed ... but

I started the major blues scale course at PWJ a few weeks ago, and I (sadly) haven't given it as much time as I should. It's also been challenging. In this video, I'm playing a few different versions of the scale, all using the same I∆-vi7-ii7-V7 progression in the left hand: swung 8th notes with chord shells/Charleston rhythm in the left hand 16th notes with chord shells (I was thinking in triplets with Charleston, but the result sounded like 16ths Weird.) 16th notes with whole notes in the LH accompaniment (Note: I recorded this at 5 a.m., so I had the piano volume on low ... which is why you can hear my fingers thumping on the keys.) Why This Was Hard I: The Scale This was not easy to learn! First, there was the matter of the scale. The C major and minor scales are very automatic for me because I've been playing them for years. The C minor blues scale has also become very automatic, as I've been improvising on it every day for the better part of a year. But the

 Ah, those ambitious weekend goals ... I had some good goals for the weekend and, as expected, I did all right on some of them. I practiced for about 3.5 hours total, which is not a lot for a weekend ... but, considering I was in North Carolina most of Saturday and Sunday, I'll take what I can get. Solace My Solace goal was to be able to play it smoothly with increasing tempos. I'm getting there--which is good, considering that Solace got the most attention this weekend. It's still quite slow (about 48), and it needs to be about 65. I get kind of frustrated because I'll feel like I have it, but then I have a memory lapse in some spot where I never have memory lapses. It's like walking through a field full of gopher holes. I'm happily walking along, and then suddenly I'm on the ground with a twisted ankle. The twisted-ankle moments come mostly in Sections A, C, and D, which are the three sections I know best. Section B sounds good, but I'm struggling a li

It's a little difficult to think about piano goals for the weekend, as I'm leaving for North Carolina tomorrow and probably won't be back until mid-afternoon Sunday. So, I won't get a lot of piano time in. At best, I'll get an hour, maybe 1.5 hours tonight, and an hour or two Sunday afternoon. I could also consider squeezing in a half-hour or so tomorrow morning before I leave. So, maybe I'll get more practice time than I thought. If I do, here are my goals for the weekend: Solace I have the entire piece memorized and am now working on just a few spots where I tend to pause when playing through slowly. I'll continue working on that and then begin increasing the speed. The suggested tempo is something like 65, and  I'm currently playing it at about 35. My weekend goal will be to (1) eliminate the habitual pauses and (2) increase the tempo to ... maybe 45 or 50. Jingle Bells Rag Lately I've been working a lot on (1) "hot-potato" practice in

Yes, this is possibly the cheesiest graphic I've ever used on this blog ... and that's saying something. I wish I had a video to share, but I had to practice on the headphones last night. So you get the cheesy graphic instead. Hitting the Speed Wall At my piano lesson Monday afternoon, I lamented my inability to play "Bare Necessities" and "Jingle Bells" at a lightning-fast tempo. I've been particularly frustrated about "Bare Necessities." I mean, I can play it pretty well at 100, but if I get any faster than that, the whole thing (meaning the "B" section, which is the ragtime section, as well as the final section/outro) falls apart. I had made some slight progress last week when I tried touching the keys more lightly; it is, of course, easier to play fast when you're not going all the way down on the keys. But I was still making sloppy errors -- missing notes, accidentally grabbing an inner note when playing an octave , etc. I wa

According to my practice log, I've spent about 10 hours on "Jingle Bells Rag." Most have that time has focused on the outro. Still, I learned it pretty quickly (for me), and memorizing it wasn't too hard (mainly because there are just a few chords, and a lot of repetition). The Challenges The biggest challenge will be with the tempo--it needs to be a lot faster than what I'm currently playing! Some sections, such as the crossed-hands section, will be easy to get up to speed (mostly). Other sections will take more work. The hardest section, by far, is the outro. It comes right after the high-register "jingle bell" section and begins with climbing arpeggios. The arpeggios aren't too bad, but there's the one little spot where the left hand is playing C7 to F (at 2:47 in the video) that has dogged me ever since I first started learning this piece! I've come a long way with it, but it's going to be a while before I can play that section as fas

Scott Joplin's "Solace" is not a particularly hard piece to learn, but I have really struggled to memorize it. It's been much harder to memorize than Maple Leaf Rag, which is a technically more difficult piece. Still Shaky ... Especially When the Camera Is On I've now memorized "Solace," but it's still shaky. I made a video of myself playing it by memory, lapses and all, because it will help me remember where I need to work. There are the obvious spots (such as the second half of the B section, which I most recently memorized), but there are also the less-obvious spots that I can play just fine when the camera isn't on, but which rear their ugly memory-lapsing heads when I have an "audience." A mistake-riddled video and a list of mistake spots doesn't make for the most interesting blog post, but this is going to help me to know where I need to focus my next few practices of this beautiful piece. I also want to work on voicing--there

Earlier this year, pianist and Scott Joplin expert Scott Kirby did a lecture/performance here in Augusta. (I wrote about it at the end of this blog post .) He played quite a few whole Joplin rags, as well as snippets of others. He played "Solace" in full, and I loved it. Here is a YouTube video of him playing "Solace" back in 2008. I seem to remember that he played it at a slightly slower tempo when I saw him, but I could be wrong. I just remember that he played it with great sensitivity, and the audience, including me, was very moved by the performance.

 I wrote "Logan's Song" years and years ago. Thirty-two years ago, to be exact. It was during the long, sweltering weeks following Hurricane Andrew in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when we had no power and no water and were all about to lose our minds. The devastation was unimaginable, and the hopelessness was palpable. It was a difficult time. On top of all that, my circle of friends and I had recently experienced unspeakable tragedy: the death of a friend, Cari Lockhart, age 28, and her 20-month-old son, Logan. It's a long story and I won't go into the grisly details here (because they are grisly), but I will say that their deaths were a shock to all of us. And then, just a few days later, around August 19 or 20, Hurricane Andrew washed away much of South Louisiana. I had just graduated college that May. I'd had a difficult year, with a couple of suicide attempts and several stays at ICUs and psychiatric hospitals. It's a miracle I was able to graduate college

Liebesträume arrived yesterday! I am so excited! Last night I sat down and sight-read the whole thing, even the cadenza(?) sections. It's going to be a challenge. Some sections are going to require more work than others. But it's definitely doable. However ... A Change of Plans, and Why I'm going to set Liebesträume aside for a few weeks. Last night as I looked at my percentage goals, I realized one of the downsides of having a lot of piano projects on my plate, and it is this: Even if I meet all of my percentage goals, each project will get so little focus that progress will be negligible. I expect to have Solace, Jingle Bells Rag, and Amazing Grace all "in the bag" by the end of the month, but that expectation simply isn't realistic, considering the amount of time I'll be able to give each of them. When I start the Liszt, I want to be able to devote a good chunk of my practice time (25% or 30%) to it. But if I do that now, my many other projects will bar

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote down some general thoughts about my October piano plans . October did not start off the way I thought it would, thanks to Hurricane Helene ! September also didn't end the way I thought it would. Yes, I went from Sept. 27 all the way to Oct. 6 with zero piano time! So I'm having to do some recalibrating and readjusting. Here are my percentage goals for October: I'll break these up into categories and write a bit on each.  New Pieces (35%) Technically, I only have one new piece, Liszt's Liebestraume No. 3 (25%). I haven't started it yet -- not only did I just get piano access back last night, but my music shipment has been delayed. I could print it out, I suppose, but I wanted the Alfred edition. It should be here today or tomorrow. Another new-ish piece is The Old Rugged Cross (10%), which is actually an arrangement I'm working on. I started on it at the beginning of September , but I set it aside for the rest of the month (mainly

Well. Life got seriously interrupted last week. Hurricane Helene devastated our little part of the world, and then it went on to devastate my old home (Asheville, NC, and surrounding areas) even more. We were without power for 10 days. There were a few bright spots in those 10 long days: I got to read a few books, clean the house, and stay home from work. But mostly I was a melancholic mess. The word "shellshocked" kept coming to mind. That's how it felt. I just felt lost and overwhelmed and sad. And I didn't have a piano to play since my current piano is a digital. Fortunately, our family is safe, and our trees that fell did not hit our (or anyone else's) home. Many of our neighbors can't say the same, so I'm grateful that we were spared. The top of one of our pines snapped, landing on our neighbor's trampoline. (The trampoline was fine!) Our Eastern Redcedar tree. I liked that tree and was sad to lose it. We drove to my mom's house in Brevard, NC

Here is the Music With Ben pianist (I'm guessing his name is Ben) playing the Jingle Bells ragtime piece I am learning. He does a nice job of it! I particularly like the flourish when he stomps on that low "C" in the crossed-hands part. Enjoy!

I don't know who Katie Kamara is, but a friend of mine recently tagged me in a comment to this post by her. I think there is a lot of truth in these words. I feel like the answer, instead of music, should be prayer or Jesus ... but honestly? Right now, today, this week, this whole past month, it's been music that has kept me sane. Not that I've been sane. I've been a trainwreck. A hot mess. A ticking time bomb. But music has given me a focus. Or at least it has temporarily taken my focus off of thoughts such as "I hate my life," "I want to die," "I hate I hate I hate I hate I hate," etc. Yes, I've been praying. And I know people are praying for me. And maybe their prayers are drawing me to the music. I don't know. Here's what I do know: I can't do words. I try to write in my journal, and the words don't come. Or, when the words do come, they're about music. I don't want to write about my depression or my despair

I've been doing some of the octave drills from Hanon, but I've also come up with a new octave drill on my own. It involves jumping various intervals repeatedly. I keep my hands two octaves apart, which I think will address at least three challenges: Getting a feel for the distances between intervals Playing ragtime , which often has the oom-pah in the deep bass (at least the "oom" part) while the right hand dances in the higher octaves Training my eyes to have a "center-of-the-piano" focus so that I can focus (peripherally, at least) on both the right hand and the left hand. I've been doing this exercise every day for the past few days, and I can already tell that I'm playing the octaves faster and more accurately, even when I get to the big jumps. I also think my octaves in songs like Bare Necessities and Maple Leaf Rag are sounding a little more solid. ( Here is a recent post on my sloppy octaves in Maple Leaf. This was part of my incentive to wo

I have learned all of the notes to Jingle Bells Rag. Now for the real challenge: coordinating everything and getting it up to speed. It is a challenge I don't want to underestimate, or I will end up feeling discouraged. Comparison of Sections The crossed-hands section is by far the easiest. I learned it yesterday and played it through several times this morning, and it's pretty smooth. I'll need to drill the part where I go down to the low C, but it's otherwise good. The final section is by far the most challenging. I posted on it a few days ago , and I must admit, I'm still slowing down when I get to part where the right hand jumps around. (It's at 4:05 in the video below.) But it's a lot smoother than it was last week, so that's progress. The rest of the piece is similar to the first part of the final section (starting at 3:00 in the video below), only an octave down. There is a short ragtimey section that is similar to Section B of Bare Necessities, a

October will be here before I know it, and it will be time for me to move the F minor nocturne back to maintenance mode and begin a new classical (or romantic, or baroque, etc.) piece. General Plans for October Before I write more about that, I want to list the items that I'll also be working on in October, along with my percentage goals: Technique (Scales, Arps, etc.) (5%) Blues (25%) Theory, Scales, Riffs, General Improv, etc. (10%) Amazing Grace (5%) Lagniappe/The Old Rugged Cross (10%) Jingle Bells Rag (20%) Solace (20%) Mystery Classical Piece (20%) Maintenance (Maple Leaf Rag, Bare Necessities, Rondo alla Turca, F minor nocturne) (10%) The Mystery Classical Piece So, what will this mystery classical piece be? I want something that I can learn in three months. So, something that isn't ridiculously long, and that is manageably challenging. Here are a few new-to-me pieces that I'm considering: Liszt, Liebestraum No. 3 ( link to Khatia Buniatishvili performance ) Schubert

I am loving my new system of tracking my practice-time percentages. As of this weekend, I am within my goal range on everything except Lagniappe, which is still over by a few percentage points. As you can see, I'm still in the negative on half my pieces, but not by much. My favorite thing about this system is that it tells me (in bold red text) what my three lowest-percentage pieces are, which means it tells me what I should focus on next. Of course, I will continue devoting at least a half-hour of practice time to Chopin every day between now and the masterclass, which is this Saturday. But I also want to strive to bring those negative percentages up into the positive. It's hard because each time I spend more time on one piece, the percentages of all the other pieces tumble. But it's kind of fun, too!

In preparation for the masterclass , I've been working really hard on those parts of the nocturne that I don't always play perfectly. One of those parts is the section I call "The Transcendence." It is, in my opinion, the most difficult section of the entire nocturne. It was, at least, the most difficult for me to learn. I blogged on it quite a bit last spring; here is one of my early posts . As I explain in the video (I do a lot of talking in the video!), I can play it pretty well about 65% or 70% of the time, but there are a few areas where I slip up pretty consistently.  It's not the same spot every time--usually it will just be one spot or another. So I recognized that I needed to give this whole section more attention. In this video, I talk about how I'm tackling the problem areas.

Maple Leaf Rag has now been a maintenance piece for several months. I've played it in public a few times, and it's gone well. So why am I still struggling with it? It's sloppy. Not enough to detract from its being a crowd-pleaser, but it's sloppy. Specifically, my octaves are sloppy. My hands are small, and it's not unusual for me to accidentally clip the edge of an inner note with the side of my thumb, particularly when I'm playing fast. In this video, I exaggerate the problem. More realistically, my fingers tend to be a little farther away from the black keys, and the edge of my thumb grabs just the corner of the note to the right of the one I'm supposed to be playing. I've worked to counteract this by moving my hands even farther from the black keys and letting them flatten a little, which allows for a greater stretch. This sometimes helps, but the downside is that I often either (a) still catch the neighboring note because of the flattened hand, or (

The masterclass is in 11 days. I have put some time into the Chopin every day for the past week or so, and the plan is to continue to do that until the 28th. In addition to simply practicing the notes, I'm trying to prepare to play in front of an audience. I don't have a ready-made audience, so I'm having my husband help me here. I'll play it through, but he'll say "STOP" every 20-30 seconds, and I have to stop, remove my hands from the keyboard, wait a few seconds, and then pick up where I left off. Or I'll play it and try to have a conversation with him while I'm playing. Last night, I had him make a video of me playing. The video camera gives me the same kind of nervousness that an audience does. Also, video can help me to see if I'm sitting awkwardly, making ugly faces, or generally giving an impression I don't want to give. I'm planning to post a few "Masterclass Prep" videos between now and the 28th. The angle is a litt

Thanks to my new practice-tracking system , I put more time into Jingle Bells Rag last weekend than I otherwise would have. I'm glad I did, because the arpeggio section I focused on is a little tricky. When I first watched/listened to Jonny May's video of this piece , I though, "Wow, that arpeggio section sounds really hard. I should practice it first." When I started learning it, I thought, "Wow, this section isn't nearly as hard as it sounds." But then I put the hands together, and, while it's not what I would call "hard," it definitely took some time to get it right. "Tricky" is the word I use for this kind of thing. I still haven't mastered it yet. I can play it, but it's smooth only if I play it very slowly. This video isn't perfect, as I have a few pauses that I shouldn't have, but I wanted to post something on this piece. Until this weekend, I was still in "dabbling mode" with Jingle Bells Rag. I