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Weekend Piano Goals (April 19-21)

I am feeling very "TGIF" today! We've had a lot going on this week, and my piano practice time has been spotty. It's also managed to be quite productive ... more on that in another post.

I have a moderately busy weekend ahead of me. Tonight is a rec volleyball game, and then tomorrow I want to buy/plant the flowers that we never got around to planting last weekend. And then we have a volleyball practice Saturday afternoon, church Sunday, and a club volleyball end-of-season party that will take up most of Sunday afternoon.

These are all good things and I'm looking forward to all of them (except maybe the yard work ... I don't love yard work). But I will need to make a concerted effort to make time for piano.

The Goals

Here are my SMART goals for the weekend:

SCALES: Finish my week-long deep dive into A Major/F# Minor and move on to E Major/C# minor. For some reason, this week hasn't felt like a deep dive into these scales. Maybe it's because A Major is relatively easy for me, and I'd already been doing a lot of focused work on F# minor. The fourth finger of my left hand is causing some inconsistency at the faster tempos, so I've been doing Hanon for a few minutes a day to work on strengthening that part of my hand.

MINOR SEVENTHS: Add Exercise 6 (V-I progressions using inversions) to my daily minor sevenths routine. With all exercises, work on automaticity and getting them to the recommended speeds.

BLUES: Continue with Lesson 5. I covered the first 15-20 minutes last weekend, so I'd like to cover the next 20 or so minutes this weekend. (To cover 20 minutes of the video lesson takes about 45 minutes, so I'm trying to break this up into pieces.)

MAPLE LEAF RAG: I did some really good work on Maple Leaf this past week. I'm now mostly fine-turning and working to play (and keep) it at my goal tempo of about 104. My SMART goals for MLR this weekend are to (1) practice with the metronome and (2) work on incorporating my own stylistic elements.

CHOPIN: I've also done some good work on Chopin this week. I've reached the point in this piece where I'm mostly fine-tuning things. I do need to do a bit more drilling of the final page (I keep putting that off, for some reason), but mostly I want to play through the individual sections, working on further automaticity and experimenting with dynamics, tone, and rubato.

BARE NECESSITIES: Continue working on automaticity with the stride section. Even though it's just the first section, it can be a crowd-pleaser if there's a piano around, so I want to be ready for that! I can play the first two pages quite well at a moderate tempo, but I want to be able to play it at a bright, bouncy, fast tempo that will have people grinning and tapping their feet. I also want to do more work on the Ragtime A & B sections, which I can now play by memory at a slow tempo. The SMART goal for that is to practice it with the metronome and bring it up a few notches, doing whatever drilling or rhythm work I need to do. The priority, though, is getting that stride section performance-ready for that elusive day that I happen to be in the vicinity of a grand piano with a ready-made audience.

I always dream of that day. Maybe I should pray for it. I'm certainly ready for it now, with two and possibly two and a half pieces at near-performance level.

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