After You've Gone: Deadline Week

A few days ago, I set a hard deadline for After You’ve Gone. My plan is to make the graduation video this weekend and be done with it.

After a few months of working on it, that feels like the right call. I’ve learned so much—stride tenths, coordination, some improvisation vocabulary—and I even used some of the ideas in YAMS. By any reasonable standard, the Piano With Jonny "After You've Gone" course has done its job.

There's still a part of me that really wants to be able to perform it, and that's where my struggle has been for the past few weeks. And I feel like I'm not even close.

I Think This Is What Happens When a Piece Is Too Hard

This piece has never quite settled for me. The arrangement section still feels slippery. I can play the rolling tenths, but it feels like my fingers are wearing roller skates—nothing is fully grounded. (Maybe it's my smaller-than-average hands.) And even though I switch to the easier four-on-the-floor for the solo/improv section, it’s still unpredictable. I never know when my brain will blank out. Some days it feels like things are starting to make sense, and other days I wonder why I even try. (It doesn't help that there's a voice in my head that keeps saying this shouldn't be that hard.)

So, once again, I had to pause and think: why am I still doing this?

The Elusive Clean Run

If the goal was to learn, I’ve done that. If the goal was to gain skills I could apply elsewhere, I've done that too. But part of me is still hanging on because I want one clean run. Just once. Something I can point to and say, “Yes, I can play this.” (Having it on video would be icing on the cake.)

I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason to keep going, but I’m also not sure I’m ready to let it go without at least trying (again).

So here I am, a couple of days from my self-imposed deadline, second-guessing the whole thing.

We’ll see what happens this weekend.

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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 ...

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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 ...

Picking Up the Pieces

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