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Weekend Piano Goals - May 3-5, 2024

I'm posting this a day late because I had a crazy day yesterday. The good news is, the volleyball team that I coach won the last game of their season last night!

Here are my piano goals for the weekend, which should be a good weekend for practicing.

Scales & Hanon

I've started working on B and g# for this week, and the B-major scale has made is painfully obvious to me how weak the 3rd, 4th, and 5th fingers of my left hand are. So in addition to working on scales, I'm going to spend some time doing some Hanon exercises that focus on those fingers. As with the other scales, I'm working toward between 100 and 120 on contrary motion and between 120 and 130 on parallel motion. This will be a challenge this week. B major is not a hard scale, but the weakness in my left hand is preventing me from building up speed at the moment. G# minor isn't one of the easier minors, but I've worked on it a lot in the past, so I actually have it at about the same tempo (possibly faster) than I have B major.

Diminished and Half-Diminished Sevenths

I finally made it through a month of minor sevenths in the PWJ course! We have moved on to diminished and half-diminished sevenths. I am not crazy about half-diminished sevenths ... they sound too "modern-jazzy" to me. But I love diminished sevenths. Love 'em. I could just sit at the piano and play diminished sevenths all day long. My goal for this weekend is to get through Lesson 3 of the course, which is an introduction + exercises for C and F diminished and half-diminished sevenths.

Mozart, Rondo Alla Turca

I have started the Rondo! I love it so much. I'd thought about starting at the end and working backwards, but the end is nothing but octaves! I'm not against octaves, but after the Chopin, Maple Leaf Rag, and now Bare Necessities, my hands are craving something where they're not having to stretch constantly! So I'm going to take a break from all the octaves by starting at the beginning of Rondo Alla Turca. My goal for the weekend is to learn the A and B sections and be able to play them, slowly, by memory, by the end of the weekend.

Bare Necessities

I am so looking forward to moving forward on this piece! It's languished for almost two months now, and but it will languish no more. My goal is to continue working toward automaticity with the stride section and to learn the entire Ragtime B section by memory, and be able to play through Ragtime A and B slowly.

Blues

My goal for the weekend is to get through Lesson 6 (Turns). Over the next couple of weeks, I'll practice these for 15-20 minutes a day, with and without the backing track.

Maple Leaf and Chopin

Funny how I always call them "Maple Leaf and Chopin." Not "Joplin and Chopin." Not "Maple Leaf and the Nocturne." It's always "Maple Leaf and Chopin." Anyway, my goal, now that I've graduated from these, is to keep them and continue polishing and improving and making the pieces (along with the articulation, dynamics, etc.) more and more automatic. This will be a happy task. I love both these pieces and hope to live with them both for the rest of my piano-playing life.

And that's it! Those are my goals for the weekend. It should be a good couple days.

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