Piano practice blog focused on stride, ragtime, blues, and more, with daily notes on technique, repertoire, and the process of learning music more deeply.
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Goals (Again), and Some Music
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.
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I want to have a better sense of what notes will work with improvisation, and what chord substitutions will be most successful. I know that a lot of improvisation is simple exploration, and I'm good with that. But I need some degree of structure to explore--like a hiker needs trails and blazes, or a poet needs a working knowledge of meter, rhyme, and metaphor.
I want to be able to sit down with a piece of music in front of me and think not in terms of the written notes (as we do with classical music) but in terms of chords. No, not even chords. I want to be able to think in terms of intervals and progressions so that I can look at that music and play the song in my own way, in whatever key I want, maybe even playing with the meter. And I don't want to be married to the meditative, broken-chord, new-age-piano sound that I keep falling into.
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 ...
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, the lock isn't opening. 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 room is my ...
As I work through Rebecca Bogart's Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge , I'll be posting more extended updates here on my blog. Days 1–3 Day 1 was analysis, listening, and generally scoping out the territory of the music . The road trip to Florida last week turned out to be Day 1, even if I didn't label it that way at the time. Day 2 was fingering and the start of my first "batch": measures 0-7 (intro), 8-15 (Section A), and 16-23 (Section A'). Day 3 (today) was about recognizing patterns and continuing work on Batch 1. Batch 1: Intro, A, A' The intro isn't difficult, and it will likely be one of the two easiest sections in this piece. Still, the syncopation is a little tricky, so I took some extra time with it. I've already memorized it, as the chord progression is pretty straightforward and the melody is just a single line (no harmony notes). There is one big augmented chord at the end that required some focused work. Sections A and A' ar...
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