Skip to main content

Learning Solace, Section A

I started working on Section A of "Solace" last night, and I worked on it a little more this morning. It's not fully memorized yet (as you can tell from the video), but I'm close. Last night I learned the first page and the first few bars of the second (which is just repetition from the first), and this morning I worked on the ending/cadence part.

This has long been one of my favorite Scott Joplin pieces. It's so different from most of his other ragtime music: slow, melancholy, thoughtful. And it gives me the weirdest sense of nostalgia--not for the early 1900s, but for ... I can't even explain it. It just fills me with longing for something I can't name.

Challenges

This isn't a difficult piece to play. Harmonically, it's pretty simple--triads, dominant sevenths, a minor seventh, and a few diminished sevenths. The cadences are pretty basic. All of that makes it easier to memorize.

There are a couple of challenges, though. The fingering, for one, is a little tricky; a good part of my practice session last night was spent figuring that out. My biggest challenges (I think) will be with the phrasing; some of these lilting phrases include jumps in the left hand that could cause a break in the sound. The pedal helps here.

The rhythms are another challenge, but I'm finding that if I just write the rhythms in (1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a), they're not hard at all.

And Now, Without Further Ado ...

Here is my first real attempt at playing through the A section, roughly 30 minutes into learning it. It's not perfect, but I do improve the second time around!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Well.

It looks like "A Sort of Notebook" is an ex-blog. I'm not going to post a link to it because it's been taken over by spammers. It's Saturday night and I love merlot. No, I'm not drunkly. I went to a 50th birthday party tonight and had two lovely glasses of merlot. Then we went to a toy store. (I should never go to a toy store after two glasses of merlot, and after running eight miles. I bought some yellow teeth, a remote-control fart machine, two crazy pencils, and a present for my future niece who has yet to be conceived.) We went to an art gallery earlier that happens to have a grand piano and I played the Bach Prelude. Oh my, but it's sounding nice! Deborah (my piano teacher) has a grand (I can't remember the manufacturer. Forgive me.) that she wants to sell me for $8,800, or $100 a key. Hubster thinks that's too much. I told him it's a steal--we get the pedals, and the wood, and the wheels, and the bench for free! Lightning struck last nigh...
6 comments
Read more