Ode to Joy, Day 7: Deliberate Listening, Deliberate Practice

It's Day 7 of the Learn New Repertoire Faster Challenge in the Piano with Rebecca B community! I'm working on Jonny May's stride arrangement of Ode to Joy.

Day 7 Assignments

Our assignments for today included:

Revisit Batch 1 to see how it's doing
Listen to other recordings and note what works (and what doesn't) for me
Review deliberate practice concepts and apply them to Batch 2

Revisiting Batch 1

Batch 1 is holding up! I played through it a couple of times with no real issues. Some measures are more solid than others, and I can feel the urge to speed up creeping in. Tomorrow I'll return to it (along with starting Batch 3) and will start using the metronome to avoid the speed-up-where-it's-easy, slow-down-where-it's-hard pattern.

Listening to Other Recordings

I found three YouTube performances (besides Jonny's). More detailed thoughts are in the video, but here are my key takeaways:

If I don't deliberately bring out the melody in the A section, it will just sound like a bunch of notes.
If melody is king, tempo is queen. There is no real room for rubato in this piece. I need to work from the start at keeping a solid, steady tempo.
I don't need to match Jonny's tempo. If it's a little slower, that won't be a bad thing; in fact, it might even be a good thing.

Practicing Deliberately

The "red" section A solo has turned out to be less challenging than the "yellow" B section. I spent 15 minutes on A and 30 on B this morning.

I started by playing each section, noting where things slowed down or where my mind went blank. Then I worked on small chunks—two to four eighth notes at a time—using a technique I call "fanning."

I learned this years ago from an oboist I connected with through blogging. You start in the middle of the problem spot, repeat just those few notes until they feel secure, then gradually add one note before and one after. You expand outward until the entire passage connects smoothly.

By the end, the once-problematic spot is often the most reliable part of the phrase.

I did this with several sections of both A and B today. There were lots of "sounds-okay-but-not-truly-solid" half-measures, so I laser-focused on each of those.

This video shows the process:

Where I Am Now

Batch 2 is noticeably stronger than it was a few days ago, and I'm happy with my slow, focused work on them today. I may try to play through them at $100 tempo a little later today, as tomorrow I both return to Batch 1 and start Batch 3, giving Batch 2 a two-day break. I feel the need to cement things in Batch 2 just a little more before I take the time off.

I also nearly have both sections from memory. We'll see what sticks after the break, but I won't be surprised if I retain a lot of it.

Comments

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 ...

The Amazing Practice Tracker 2.0: Leveling Up My Piano Game

(Apologies for the cheesy clip art. I needed to come up with something, or the Blogger template would show a fuzzy, overly-enlarged snippet of the first chart below.) When I showed my husband my piano practice tracker, he said I should market and sell it. Ha. It’s not for sale, but I’m excited to share how this tool has transformed my practice—and why it might inspire all three of my readers. Since my last post about the Amazing Practice Tracker, I’ve made it even better. Here’s a peek at how it works, using my June data. All The Pretty Colors, All the Pretty Winners My tracker now sparkles with color: darker shades for active pieces, lighter ones for maintenance, technique, and sight-reading. Each day, the piece I practice most gets a bright yellow highlight—a little “gold medal,” if you will. (Click image for a slightly larger view.) A leaderboard automatically shows the day’s top piece and time. And if that isn't enough, I keep track of the month's leaders--specifically, ho...

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

Search This Blog