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Old Piece, New Eyes

I had Friday off from work, which meant three glorious days with Tall Nick (my piano). Or at least three days featuring several hours of practice.

My goals? Continue my work with After You've Gone, dive a little deeper into Lead Sheets Lesson 7, explore a couple of possible tunes for a new arranging project, and take whatever courses were next in the Analysis 1 track on Piano With Jonny.

The Wonder of Analysis

It's so funny that I love analysis so much now, because I hated it most of my years as a piano student. Mention "theory" and I would run screaming in the other direction. Now I can't seem to get enough of it.

The first analysis course of my three-day piano-fest was Passing Chords and Reharmonization 1. I actually started this course a couple of years ago when learning Jonny's bluesy Amazing Grace, but the material was just a little too challenging then and I set it aside. This time? It mostly felt like review. The secondary dominants lesson, which had been a little hard for me to wrap my brain around before, was simple. And Lesson 3, Lower Neighbor Diminished 7 Passing Chords, actually made sense to me this time—so much that I noodled around on the piano for quite a while, playing diminished 7ths and then resolving to the target chord.

I got through that course pretty quickly and realized I'd completed the Jazz Analysis portion of the learning track! Yay! Next in line was Classical Analysis.

What? Classical analysis on Piano With Jonny?

Yeah, I didn't know that was a thing either. But it is. And the first piece to analyze was Bach's Prelude in C Major.

Ah, memories. I learned this with Mrs. Wood when I was in fourth grade (I think). I hated it. I remember it seemed interminable, and I would play it through so slowly, missing notes left and right because ... well, I thought it was boring and never practiced. I suppose I finished it at some point, though I don't remember if I ever played it for a recital.

Anyway, my attitude toward this piece is very different now. I love it and was excited about the analysis. Most of it is pretty easy, but I'd never seriously explored the measures with the accidentals, so I was looking forward to understanding those.

Reader, Bach uses lower-neighbor diminished-7th passing chords. And I recognized them immediately! He also uses secondary dominants, and I knew exactly what he was doing.

Since the piece is so simple, I decided to re-learn it. So I did ... and shocked myself by memorizing it almost immediately. This wasn't memory from when I was a kid; this was memory of the chord progressions and scale degrees.

I also decided to try it in different keys. Working four measures at a time, I played it in G, Eb, Bb, Ab, F, and more. Playing in the different keys made the chord functions feel more and more inevitable, and it got easier and easier to play. Whenever I returned to C major, it felt like the piece was a part of me.

Here is a video of C major only. I'll share more videos as I get better at transposing. I will also, as part of the course, come up with my own patterns and maybe even my own melody (in the spirit of Bach/Gounod's Ave Maria) over the chord changes.

I have the feeling I'll be living with this piece for a while ... and I can't think of anything I'd rather do.

(It occurs to me that fourth-grade me, dutifully plodding through this piece and hating every note, would be completely baffled by the person who spent three days voluntarily analyzing it, transposing it, and asking for more. I'm glad I finally grew up!)

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