Fewer Goals, Fewer Projects

I've really been struggling with priorities in my piano life. I currently have about eight things going on:

Bare Necessities
Blues Learning Track
Rondo alla Turca
The Lead Sheets Course
Ear Training (mostly for when I'm on road trips, which seems to be often these days)
Scales, octaves, and other technique work
Maintenance Pieces (Maple Leaf Rag, Chopin)
Composition/Arranging

Of all of those items, Bare Necessities and Blues have definitely gotten the brunt of my attention for the past couple of months. Rondo alla Turca, not so much. And everything else? Not much at all.

Something's gotta give.

About the Lead Sheets Course

A week or two ago, I wrote about my struggle with the lead sheets course. I can see the value, but it doesn't feel relevant to what I want to focus on right now: learning, arranging, and composing in the blues/gospel/ragtime styles, with a bit of stride and boogie-woogie styles thrown in. And the songs I want to arrange are primarily hymns, not jazz standards.

(I used to have a giant fake book of hymns, but I gave it away during a suicidal depression a while back. Oh, how I wish I'd kept it ...)

Anyway, I have decided to set the lead sheets course aside for now.

Looking Ahead

I'm also going to consider myself "graduated" from Rondo alla Turca by the time we leave for Europe. It will go into my maintenance bag of pieces that I pull out a couple of times a week.

Come August, I'm going to have fewer short-term goals, and fewer projects. They'll primarily be finishing up Bare Necessities, continuing with the blues, getting the F minor nocturne back up to speed for a September masterclass, and taking time to work on improvisation and arranging. And that's it.

It will feel good to have a less crowded plate. It feels good now. Just deciding to drop the lead sheets course has already helped me to feel less overwhelmed.

Comments

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,

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

Maple Leaf Rag Breakthrough

Oh, Maple Leaf. Where to begin? At the Beginning I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I learned the A and B sections of Maple Leaf Rag back in the 1990s. I can’t tell you if it was early, mid- or late 90s, but it was during those 10 years after I’d graduated college, when I was playing a good bit of piano but not taking regular lessons from anyone. I don’t remember teaching it to myself at all. I just know that, at some point, the first half of Maple Leaf Rag was part of my two- or three-song repertoire of pieces I’d be able to play by memory over the next 25 years. It was always sloppy and I knew it, but people loved it, and so I played it if there was ever a piano around. Back in January, I decided to properly re-learn those two sections, and to finally learn the C and D sections of this wonderful piece. I worked on these over the next month or two, learning (and-relearning) the notes pretty quickly ... but it took time to memorize, and also to get everything to tempo surpassing a

Picking Up the Pieces

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