Picking Up the Pieces

Dear readers, After blogging about the F minor nocturne for a few weeks, I finally have the first two pages to share. My playing isn't perfect -- I miss a note (and add a beat) right after third instance of the main theme, and my grace notes and trills aren't exactly as they should be -- but those are minor issues, and I'm happy with how the recording turned out. The biggest negative is that I stop at one of the more dramatic moments of the piece, and I probably won't have the next page ready to play for another week or two, at least! I had a piano lesson yesterday with my in-person teacher, Eric. He gave me some good feedback on fingering and articulation. I had fallen into my tendency to play the treble too softly. It's a problem related to my hearing aid, which amplifies higher sounds over lower sounds, so what sounds fine to my hearing aid sounds too soft in reality, and I'll often play the LH and the RH at the same volume when I think the right hand is loud...

 It's lunchtime Tuesday, and I'm thinking about my biweekly 30-minute piano lesson that will be later this afternoon. I'll be working on two pieces: the Chopin Nocturne in F minor, and Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. Today I'm mostly thinking about the Chopin. I've learned the first three pages (mostly), up to the section I refer to as "The Transcendence," starting at measure 77. I'm a little apprehensive about the lesson--not because I don't know the music, but because of the weird transition that is required when playing an acoustic piano after practicing for two weeks on a digital . Anyway, when I first started this nocturne, I found this lecture by pianist Greg Niemczuk: In it, he tells us that in the couple of years before the F minor nocturne was written/published, Chopin was "wounded" three times. These wounds were the death of his first teacher, of whom Chopin was very fond; the death of his beloved friend, roommate, and soulm...

 I'd like to play like this: This is former longtime Disneyland pianist Johnny Hodges. I found a neat interview with him by Jonny May on the Piano With Johnny YouTube channel . I am seriously thinking about joining the PWJ site, just so I can listen to the rest of the interview. He is luring me in ... I am falling prey to PWJ's marketing ... but can you blame me? Anyway, enjoy these two videos. For the last couple of days, I've worked pretty diligently on Maple Leaf Rag and the Chopin nocturne. I'll get a good practice in tonight and tomorrow morning, but I'll be away from the piano for most of Sunday. I'm hoping to get another Instagram reel made tonight or tomorrow, which I'll share here as always.

So, almost seven years ago exactly, I posted on my old blog about "reclaiming my musical self" ... and the similarities made me think I've been on a great, big cycle and am finally coming back around to where I was then. Of course, then I was working on guitar and voice as well as piano. But on the piano, I was working to get my ragtime less sloppy, and I mentioned wanting to finally learn "Linus and Lucy." Which are two things I've blogged about here recently! So, yes, I'm living in cycles. Last night while looking for videos of people playing "Elite Syncopations" (which is what I want to learn next, after I've de-sloppified "Maple Leaf Rag," "The Entertainer," and "Solace"), I discovered a great YouTube channel by pianist Kristen Mosca . She loves ragtime and Disney songs, and many of her videos combine the two. She also has a TikTok page, but I'm not on TikTok. Anyway, enjoy her videos on YouTube! Here ...

I have always loved ragtime music. When I was a kid in the 1970s, our family had the soundtrack to "The Sting" on LP, and I remember listening to it over and over again. I remember seeing the movie in the theater, too. I don't remember a thing about the movie, but ... that music! It seems that every kid who takes piano lessons can play some version of "The Entertainer," but, oddly enough, I didn't learn it until I was an adult and taught it to myself. I can also play the last two sections of "Solace" and the first two sections of "Maple Leaf Rag." I never studied these with a teacher; I just loved Scott Joplin's ragtime music and wanted to be able to play it myself. None of it is easy, or I probably would have taught myself more over the years. With my years-long sabbatical from piano-playing, my ragtime pieces don't sound as good as they once did, so I've decided to go back to them. This weekend, I opened up "Maple Leaf ...

My goals, at least those in the classical music sphere, seem to oppose each other: (1) To refine my skills to what they were when I was studying with Deborah, and maybe even go beyond that. (2) To have fun and not take piano so seriously that I drop everything else in my life. When I was studying with Deborah, at least for the first year or two, I practiced several hours a day most days. I was working full time, but my husband was rarely home and I didn't have kids at the time, so I could do that. I can't now ... but I'm going to be tempted. I know that. Anyway, I didn't come on here today to write about my classical music goals. I want to discuss a goal that's kind of a jazz goal, but, really, it's just a general goal. I want to be able to do the kind of thing I'm doing here with "The Long and Winding Road," only in a much more sophisticated, creative way. \ I want to have a better sense of what notes will work with improvisation, and what chord ...

I am trying a couple of things related to the piano. One is semi-regular piano lessons with a local teacher. The other is online jazz piano/theory lessons with a jazz pianist and teacher. Yesterday evening was the first of my lessons with the local teacher. I mainly want someone to oversee my progress as I learn the classical/romantic/baroque/etc. pieces I want to learn, starting with Chopin's Nocturne in F minor (Op. 55, No. 1). Trouble in Paradise ... Already From the moment I played my first note at yesterday's lesson, I knew something was wrong. The piano felt wrong. The sound was wrong--almost out of tune. Everything was wrong. But I went through the lesson and cringed my way through the nocturne I've been working on. There was no evenness, and often there would be no sound at all, even though I was pressing down on the keys. I made it through, and after that, I asked if I could play some of the other pianos at the piano store. Sure, they said. So I went to a Ste...

In Mark Levine's Jazz Piano Book , one of the first exercises is to learn a ii-V-I pattern, with the ii a minor seventh (-7), the V a dominant seventh (7), and the I a major seventh (Δ). In this exercise, you play the root in the bass and the third and the seventh in the treble. (The fifth isn't necessary because it's the third and seventh that determine the quality of the chord.) He says to practice these, going around the circle of fifths, and in both inversions (fifth on top, third on top), until it's all second nature. So when I was about 28, shortly after I bought the book, I started working on these. They weren't easy. I wasn't very good at music theory (or even reading music) at the time, so it was a real strain on my mind. This was about the time I signed up for jazz piano lessons with a musician in Baton Rouge. At the first lesson, I showed him the little progress I'd made on the progressions, and he suggested that, instead of going around the circl...

I'm in a room. There's a door in front of me. On the other side of that door is a whole world of adventure and imagination and joy and delight, but for the moment, I'm locked in this gray little room. The door itself has a lock that is all rusted. I've tried to open it in the past, but I've never gotten very far. Sometimes I try to scrape the rust off the lock. I also have a rusty old key that I occasionally try to polish. Each time, after I've made a little progress, I'll put it into the keyhole in hopes of opening the door. It turns a half a millimeter or so, but the brief excitement at my progress dies quickly when I realize, once again, it's not going to open the lock. I set the old key aside, and from there I can forget about the door, the lock, and the world outside, for months—years, even. But then something happens—I hear birdsong, or I catch a glimpse of color—and I pick up the key and start picking away at the stubborn rust. That dark little ro...

 I'm going to write a little more about "my usual patterns" (or "my signature sound") soon. For now, I want to put this up here. It's an improvisation of "Over the Rainbow" that I came up with one night. It's such a beautiful song that it's hard to play an ugly arrangement, even with the few missed notes and overly long pauses I have here. Enjoy!

(Written yesterday) I recently ordered a book titled Playing Solo Jazz Piano by Jeremy Siskind . And then last night, I watched his video on playing solo jazz piano ... and I learned some things that I can do with my left hand! Better yet, none of the information, even in the "Advanced" section, was over my head! The rusty old key is starting to turn. I didn't have much of a chance to play after finishing the video, but I'm looking forward to playing some tonight. I should be getting the book in the mail soon, too, so ... I'm kind of excited! (Written today) I couldn't help myself. I had to do it. I had to sit down at the piano and see if I could put some of these ideas into action. I picked a song at random -- Jerome Kern's "All the Things You Are" and proceeded to try playing just the root in the bass and embellish the melody as much as I wanted to. Of course, I ended up falling into a few patterns: 1) Adding chords to the melody 2) Playing s...

  Last night as I practiced Chopin and jazz chord progressions using the headphones, I thought about how that scene—me making music, my whole world opening up the way it does when I play, but where that lovely, magical world is inaudible and invisible to everyone else—kind of represents of my whole musical life. So much of my experience of music, whether playing, listening, studying, composing, has happened in private, often without even the partnership of a teacher. It’s a lonely life. Here's something I wrote on this blog years ago that applies just as much now: As I pick up these old pieces of my life, I have this sense of nostalgia that is both delicious and a little sad. There was a path for me, the path of a professional musician, a path I could have taken but chose not to take. And the price is that I'm now a middle-aged tech writer with occasional but intense yearnings for a musical life, and with hopes that that musical life is somehow still attainable. It can be a l...