Weekend Piano Plans

It's Friday! And I have three delicious hours for piano work this evening! I may not use all three hours for piano--I mean, I do need to take breaks to pet the cats and pour another glass of wine--but I love just knowing that I have three uninterrupted hours ahead of me.

I should also be able to get some good practice in on Saturday and Sunday. My only other planned activities are to work out, go to volleyball practice (I'm coaching a rec team), and do some weeding. And that's it!

Another reason I'm excited is that two of my pieces (the Chopin Nocturne and Maple Leaf Rag) are ready for the next level. It's time to get these fully memorized so I can stop depending on the score and really begin to interiorize them both.

Maple Leaf is almost there. I could probably write the score from memory (not that I would want to), but there are just a couple of spots where I still get a little lost: one near the end of Section C, and the other near the end of Section D. So I'll work on those, but mostly I'll just play the heck out of (1) the individual sections and (2) the whole piece, over and over and over again, at tempos where I can play it well (mostly likely in the 70-80 range for now).

Chopin needs a little more work. It's such a different piece from Maple Leaf, but I'm at a similar place in my journey with it. If I were to try to play it from memory right now, I might be able to do it ... but I don't know for sure. It's definitely not as locked in as Maple Leaf is. So I'm going to be doing a lot of memory work and, as with Maple Leaf, a lot of playing individual sections and the whole piece over and over and over again.

With Bare Necessities, I've adjusted my approach. Originally, I was going to learn a page a week. That wasn't a bad plan, but I'm realizing I need to memorize this as I go. It's just too hard to play stride when I'm constantly having to look back up at the music. (This is part of why I memorized Maple Leaf so early.) So, instead of moving on to page 3 (which is the start of the ragtime section), I'm going to focus on memorizing (with lots of repetitions) the stride section on pages 1 and 2.

For my warm up work, I'll continue with major and minor scales and my dominant seventh exercises. I'm also working on blues scale exercises, so those will likely be part of my warmup/technique/skill work as well.

I'm thinking on Friday and Saturday morning, I'll focus on memorizing individual sections. And then on Saturday afternoon, or Sunday afternoon at the latest, I will transition to playing through the whole pieces (or, in the case of Bare Necessities, the first two pages).

It's going to be a great weekend!

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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,...

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Picking Up the Pieces

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