Danny Boy and the Sound of Things Coming Together

This month’s Piano With Jonny challenge is the first verse of Danny Boy. The assignment itself is simple enough: play the melody with the basic chords. But because I'm both a glutton for punishment and a music theory nerd, I've made this something much larger.

The version in this video is in the original key of C. I’m in Lesson 2 of the challenge (root-position chords + one-note melody) and am pretty much playing it as I should, with a few slides added. I play slides all the time in blues, but I suspect I got the idea here from spending the past few days listening almost obsessively to Bill Evans's recording of Danny Boy. I love the spacious, reflective sound to his version, so I definitely think I'm channeling him here (minus the complex chords).

So I hope you'll hear that when you listen. What you won't hear, though, is the humming busy-ness inside my brain as I play! There's a whole lot happening behind the scenes.

Behind the Scenes

Right now several courses I’m taking seem to be converging on the same musical material. In Foundations I'm learning the Misty progression and have already learned the turnaround, plus I've known about the ii–V–I. All of that is present, to some degree, in this Danny Boy progression. And then, in the transposing course, I’ve been learning to think in scale degrees instead of note and chord names. And in the modulations course, the example tune Jonny uses is ... you guessed it. Danny Boy.

All of these separate courses and ideas have begun to merge. And things that once required a raft of working memory are starting to become automatic. It's almost a little scary.

The turnaround progression--once four different chords I consciously had to think about--has started to feel like a single motion, regardless of key, regardless of inversion. Intervals are becoming recognizable; I don't have to think so hard about what melody note to play next, whether I'm playing by memory or transposing.

At the same time, I'm not "there" yet. I'm still having to think with laser-focus. I'm still having to plan at what feels like breakneck speed, even when playing at the snail's pace of a tempo you hear in this video. Beneath that seeming simplicity, a lot of mental wheels are turning. Patterns are connecting, concepts overlapping. Pieces of the piano puzzle are sliding into place, and it's an amazing thing to experience.

It’s one of those rare moments when it suddenly feels like the whole universe is cooperating. God is smiling down upon me because I'm doing the thing He made me to do.

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