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At a recent Piano With Jonny Q&A, Jonny talked about the importance of narrowing your focus if you want to make real progress. He quoted Dave Ramsey's "Momentum Theorem": focused intensity over time, multiplied by God, equals unstoppable momentum.

I can't complain about not making progress; I've made unbelievable progress in piano over the past year. But ... I also have constantly struggled with having too many projects, not being able to focus on things the way I want to, and knowing I could progress faster and more fully if I could give more focused intensity to just a few projects.

About a week ago, I made the difficult choice to set aside the PWJ stuff to focus on Liebesträume. I've worked very hard on it at times and have made progress--but that work and progress came in spurts of activity, separated by days and sometimes weeks of no focus on it at all.

I fed my goals to Grok and asked it to give me a schedule for having Liebesträume performance-ready in one month. That was eight days ago. Since then, I've followed the schedule pretty closely and have made some good progress.

Here are the first 24 measures, by memory. I don't know if it sounds all that different from the video I posted several months ago, but it is a LOT more familiar to me at this point!

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Eureka! Secondary Dominant!

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Ode to Joy Day 3: Patterns, Shapes, and Short Breaks

As I work through Rebecca Bogart's Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge , I'll be posting more extended updates here on my blog. Days 1–3 Day 1 was analysis, listening, and generally scoping out the territory of the music . The road trip to Florida last week turned out to be Day 1, even if I didn't label it that way at the time. Day 2 was fingering and the start of my first "batch": measures 0-7 (intro), 8-15 (Section A), and 16-23 (Section A'). Day 3 (today) was about recognizing patterns and continuing work on Batch 1. Batch 1: Intro, A, A' The intro isn't difficult, and it will likely be one of the two easiest sections in this piece. Still, the syncopation is a little tricky, so I took some extra time with it. I've already memorized it, as the chord progression is pretty straightforward and the melody is just a single line (no harmony notes). There is one big augmented chord at the end that required some focused work. Sections A and A' ar...

Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

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