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January 2025: Challenges and Goals


It's New Year's Eve! Happy New Year!

I don't have any big plans for the evening, and I'm secretly hoping to spend a few hours at the piano before the year is out. To meet my percentage goals for December, I need to focus on ragtime and blues tonight. Yes!

January Challenges

Before I get into my January 2025 goals, I'll get the challenges out of the way.

1. Weekend travel. It's club volleyball season! My daughter is on a 15u club team this year, and we have two tournaments in January, three in February, and three in March! Add to that the fact that I'll be traveling to North Carolina to visit my mom once a month, and that's not a lot of weekend piano time. Oh, and there is the regular driving back and forth to practices twice a week. Can I make up for the lost time on non-travel, non-volleyball-practice days? We'll see!

(By the way, I love club volleyball season. This is my daughter's third year playing club, and I look forward to it every year. There is no greater joy than watching my kid play, and I love the camaraderie that develops, both between the girls and between us parents. So while I'll miss the piano time, I'm happy to be spending it watching my girl play volleyball!)

2. Working out. I've started working out again, and my preferred workout time is 8:00 at night because the gym isn't crowded then (though it may be more crowded starting tomorrow, thanks to all the New Year's resolutions). This has cut my piano time short in the evenings, or at least on those evenings that I work out. I've been going every other night, but I want to start going more. It will be a balance--I would prefer to practice piano, of course. But while sitting on a piano bench for two hours a night is great for my mental health, it's not so good for my physical health!

3. Too many projects. Once again, I worry that I have too many projects. It's getting harder to cover everything now that I have so many pieces in the maintenance category. I want to add more (arranging, PWJ challenges, hymns, transcribing, sight-reading, ear-training, re-learning old pieces), but there just isn't enough time. Once I finish Liebesträume, I think I may take some time to re-learn some easier classical pieces before moving on to my next advanced one (probably Chopin's Grand Valse in E-flat major). I may also work some sight-reading into my "technique" category if I find that Czerny, scales, etc., aren't taking up as much time.

Anyway, those are my main challenges for January. Now, for the goals!

January Goals

I will have four main projects (about 75% of practice time), plus maintenance (about 25% of practice time). Below I will state each project, followed by its percentage goal.

Main Project #1: Technique (15%)

I'm not sure what I'll do for technique. For now, I will continue with Czerny, but I'm also going to do scales, arpeggios, inversions, and octave exercises regularly.

Main Project #2: Liszt, Liebesträume (30%)

I made some good progress with Liszt in November and December. I kind of wish I'd allotted more time to it this month, but I'm also glad I spent the time finishing up Jingle Bells Rag for Christmas. By the end of January, I'd like to be able to play through the entire piece, note-perfect, at a slow to moderate tempo.

Main Project #3: Joplin, Pineapple Rag (25%)

I have no idea how hard this one is going to be. It's rated a "Level 7" as far as I can tell, so it shouldn't be insurmountable. But ragtime is tricky. I've allotted a quarter of my practice time to it. If I need more time, I'll probably steal 5% from technique. My goal with Pineapple Rag? To have it performance-ready, by memory, by the end of February. For January, I want to learn the entire piece and be able to play it with the music.

(I think that is my goal; with ragtime, it's hard to tell because it's often easier just to memorize as I go. So I may end up with the goal of memorizing the first two sections in January, and the second two in February.)

Main Project #4: Bible of Blues Riffs 2 (7.5%)

This is a Piano With Jonny course that I've already started. It has a smaller percentage goal because there is so much overlap with the blues foundation material that I'll be reviewing anyway (see below). I've made it a "main project" because this is new material (not maintenance). My goal is to get halfway through the course by the end of the month. This includes learning 30 of the 60 advanced riffs and memorizing a good many of them. The overlap will come as I am reviewing my older blues material and incorporating the new material into it.

Maintenance Projects

As in December, I am categorizing my maintenance projects by style and am planning to spend between 20% and 25% of my practice time on maintenance.

Ragtime Review (10%). I gave ragtime review a full 10% because I have so many pieces to maintain! In addition to Bare Necessities, Maple Leaf Rag, The Entertainer, and Solace, I now have Jingle Bells Rag. I expect to spend most of my ragtime review on Bare Necessities as I bring it back into the mix (I gave it almost no attention this fall while learning Jingle Bells Rag), but I also want to make performance videos of The Entertainer and Solace.

Blues Review (7.5%). Included in blues review is my material from the 10-Lesson Blues Challenge, Blues Endings, and the Major Blues Scale courses. It also includes the bluesy arrangement of Amazing Grace. Although I've split up my blues work for these goals, I want to spend a total of 15% of my practice time on blues (half on the Bible of Blues Riffs and half on blues review). My maintenance goals are to keep practicing all of the previous material so that it is more and more internalized.

Classical Review (5%). I only have two classical pieces (the Chopin nocturne and Rondo alla Turca), and I play them both pretty well, so I've designated only 5% to classical. My goal with those two is simply to continue to play them so that I can perform them at a moment's notice if I ever have the opportunity.

I feel so hopeful about piano in 2025. I'm still not sure what my goals for the year are; it's hard to think that far ahead. But I know what I'm doing in January!

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