September 2025 Recap, and Looking Ahead to October

September had a slow start, but I still logged 37.1 hours of practice, averaging about 1.2 hours a day! My top projects were Liszt (7.1 hours), Bare Necessities (6 hours), technique (6 hours), America the Beautiful Rag (3.1 hours), and the PWJ Lead Sheets course (3 hours). I also kicked off Honky Tonk Women and worked on St. Louis Blues/G blues improv.

September Highlights

In the past month, I managed to:

Prepare Liszt for my upcoming Piano With Rebecca performance this Saturday.
Master Jonny’s St. Louis Blues Challenge.
Keep my maintenance pieces performance-ready.
Start reviving Jingle Bells Rag for the holidays.
Be seriously inspired by Chuck Leavell’s live performance!
Realize I want to shift focus away from "playing by the dots" and more toward improvising, arranging, composing, and playing by ear.
Revive Bare Necessities to near-performance level—check out this video of the first section! (Apologies for the weird angle!)

I also hit my percentage goals and made solid progress despite a busy month. Whew!

October Piano Goals: A Packed Playlist!

My October spreadsheet is a glorious mess!! I'm not too worried about it, though, as I've found I progress faster if I practice mostly in snippets of 10-20 minutes per piece/project, and if I don't do the same music every single day. This requires a bit of a "spinning plates" approach that I don't love, but it's necessary for now ... and it works!

Let's look at my October plans, breaking it down by percentage goals for the month.

Technique/Foundations (10%): Scales, arpeggios, and ear training (for days I'm traveling and can't practice), plus PWJ Lead Sheets course for improv practice.

Ragtime (32.5%): Polishing (and speeding up) Bare Necessities and Jingle Bells Rag, plus writing my Pianeaux Rag arrangements. I'll also work on my Scott Joplin rags on Maintenance days.

Blues/Improv (32.5%): Honky Tonk Women (with left-hand groove and right-hand riff exercises), G and C blues improv, and maintaining Amazing Grace and St. Louis Blues. I'll also be setting up a private IROCKU lesson for Honky Tonk Women.

Classical (20%): Prepping Liszt's Liebestraume No. 3 for the October 4 performance, learning and memorizing Chopin's Waltz in A Minor, and maintaining Mozart's Rondo alla Turca.

Songs (5%): Jazz standards like Misty, my arrangement of What a Wonderful World, and a new Christmas project.

I may shift 5% from Classical to Songs if the Christmas project grows. We'll see. For now, I'm excited to dive into October's musical chaos and start those plates spinning!

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 ...

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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