Wednesday Blues: More Frustrations

I'm feeling really down today. I don't know if it's related to piano, but it sure did come out as piano frustration this morning.

I do think my melancholia has other sources. I'm frustrated about a lot of things that are going on in my life right now. I have a lot of anger, and a lot of bitterness. It's no secret that life hasn't turned out anything like I wanted it to, and it's all my own fault for making dumb decisions 10 and 20 and 30 years ago. It's hard for me to resist the temptation of asking "what if" and imagining that I could go back and do my life over again.

Again, this is not piano-related, though of course I would have done piano differently. I wouldn't have worried so much about what other people think, and I wouldn't have put so much pressure on myself to be the biggest, most talented fish in my various musical puddles.

Am I putting pressure on myself now? So much of this morning's frustration is related to my slow progress in playing blues. I've kept up with regular practice, but my progress seems to have stalled.

I'm not going to write a book this morning. Instead, I will leave you with two videos. One is a compilation of several short videos of me trying to play "Cold-Hearted Calico Blues" and forgetting, yet again, where I am in the left hand. And the other is of me whining about how depressed I am that I'm not playing decent blues by now. Enjoy. (Ha.)

Starts and Stops: A Compilation

Nina Plays Some Blues and Whines about Her Lack of Progress

Comments

Eureka! Secondary Dominant!

I am such a nerd, and I love being a nerd! Today I was working on Section 5 of You Are My Sunshine, specifically on getting this section up to performance level. In other words, I was practicing being a performer , not an arranger . But then, of course, I came up with another idea. I had just played the delicate sixths and descending rag rolls of "when skies are gray" (I chord) and then moved to the parallel octaves of "you never know, dear" (leading to IV). The shift sounded abrupt to me. Harsh. It needed something. It needed musical WD-40. Something to ease the hinge between textures. And then I stumbled upon it! Right before moving to IV, I can slip in a V7/IV — a secondary dominant! So I tried it, and it sounded so good that I actually yelled "Secondary dominant!" out loud in my house like I was Archimedes discovering water displacement in the bathtub. It's such a small thing. One little chord. But it smooths that transition, leaning the harmony ...

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 ...

The Tyranny of the Dots

In the Billy Joel documentary And So It Goes , Billy talks about "reading the dots." He didn't want—or need—to "read the dots," meaning the music notes on the page. He had developed his own rock 'n' roll piano style and, after a few years of classical training, he left the dots behind. I didn't want to read the dots, either, once upon a time. As a little kid, I had a good ear and could quickly figure out just about any tune on the piano. But in first grade, I finally started piano lessons, thus beginning my life with the dots. The Wall of Dots Between Me and Music I hated the dots! I wanted to learn them, sure, but it was so hard. If my teacher played what was written, I could play it right back for him. But if he asked me to play it from the dots, I felt like I would pop a blood vessel in my brain. It was so frustrating for my six-year-old self to have the code to a simple tune sitting silently before my eyes and not be able to crack it and bring th...

Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

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