Bare Necessities Update

Friends, I feel like I'm finally starting to make progress on Bare Necessities, now that I'm practicing it consistently. I'm still not giving it as much time as I'd like (averaging only 20-30 minutes a day), but consistency is the main goal.

Well, I wasn't super-consistent last week because I was piano-less for three days. But other than that ...

Section A: Stride

Anyway, I have two videos to share today. The first is of the stride section, which I'd gotten up to a good tempo for several days. I noticed yesterday that it was starting to sound sloppy at that tempo, which was a clear sign that I was playing it faster than I was ready for ... and so I slowed it down.

It's not perfect in this video (I miss a couple of notes and have a couple of memory lapses), but I'm very happy with my progress on this section.

Section B: Ragtime

This video is not nearly as much fun to listen to, at least not yet. In it, I'm playing the ragtime section with the metronome on 70--more than 2x slower than the goal tempo! I can play the first 2/3 of the piece at a faster tempo, but again, it gets sloppy. And the final 1/3 is what I just learned this weekend, so I'm nowhere near ready to speed it up. I found that I could play through the whole thing at 70, so that's what I've done in this video.

(At about the 1:58 mark, I discover an ant crawling on the piano. Thankfully, the pest control people are coming tomorrow.)

Again, it isn't perfect, but I think you can at least tell what song it is, and that's progress!

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The Rusty Lock and Key

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 ...

March Goals Recap/Looking Ahead to April

It's April 1, and time to revisit the goals I set for last month. I practiced a total of 50.45 hours in March, averaging 1.62 hours (or just over an hour and a half) per day. Realistically, I practice about 45 minutes to an hour a day on weekdays, and I usually get at least one longer practice (or multiple shorter practices) in on one or both days of the weekend to bring the average up. CLASSICAL GOALS Chopin, F Minor Nocturne March Goal: Have entire piece by memory and performance-ready. I have about 90% of the piece by memory, but I still have some work to do before it's performance-ready. The only two sections that I don't quite have are "The Agitation" and the "stretto" section with the seventh chords. I'll work on both this week and will have them both memorized before the weekend. April Goal: Finish memorizing, and polish, polish, polish! My focus now is really on phrasing and dynamics. I have the notes down, even in the difficult passages. Fro...

Feb. 9 Practice

My February 9 practice was short and sweet. I worked only on the Liszt, playing in rhythms. Do you know how hard it is to play a piece in rhythms when the LH is even and the RH is all over the place, with 2-against-3 and later with 4-against-9? Don't worry--I'm not trying to be impeccably exact when I'm doing rhythms. And I've discovered what a *rut* I've gotten into with the Liszt. It's so beautiful, and part of me is content just to play it through, again and again, and be done with it. But rhythms are forcing me to look at the seamy underside, at the 0's and 1's that make this piece what it is. And it's not an altogether pleasant experience. But it's waking me up. The beauty of this piece has lulled me into a sort of sleepy complacency when I play it. I think that's why Deborah said not to play the piece through a single time this week. It is so tempting to just play it through and listen to the beautiful music. But when I do that, I'm...

Picking Up the Pieces

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