Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

  It's rare that I have a weekend that offers potentially unlimited practice time ... but I just may have that this weekend. And if I do? I want to take deep dives into a few different areas. First Cadenza of Liebestraume I've already broken down the cadenza theoretically, and it makes total sense--it's just a back and forth between D-flat minor and E-flat major in various inversions. But playing it is not so simple, and I feel like I need a good, long practice session to get it comfortable and automatic under my fingers. Blues Improvisation I diligently do some blues improvisation every single day, usually for 10-15 minutes in the mornings while waiting for my daughter to get ready to go to school. But I want to take some time to (1) improvise alongside actual recordings and (2) improvise alongside the backing track provided by PWJ. All of my improvisation so far has been just me and the piano, and I'm feeling a need to add something. I don't need a long practice s...

Scott Joplin's "Solace" is not a particularly hard piece to learn, but I have really struggled to memorize it. It's been much harder to memorize than Maple Leaf Rag, which is a technically more difficult piece. Still Shaky ... Especially When the Camera Is On I've now memorized "Solace," but it's still shaky. I made a video of myself playing it by memory, lapses and all, because it will help me remember where I need to work. There are the obvious spots (such as the second half of the B section, which I most recently memorized), but there are also the less-obvious spots that I can play just fine when the camera isn't on, but which rear their ugly memory-lapsing heads when I have an "audience." A mistake-riddled video and a list of mistake spots doesn't make for the most interesting blog post, but this is going to help me to know where I need to focus my next few practices of this beautiful piece. I also want to work on voicing--there...

Earlier this year, pianist and Scott Joplin expert Scott Kirby did a lecture/performance here in Augusta. (I wrote about it at the end of this blog post .) He played quite a few whole Joplin rags, as well as snippets of others. He played "Solace" in full, and I loved it. Here is a YouTube video of him playing "Solace" back in 2008. I seem to remember that he played it at a slightly slower tempo when I saw him, but I could be wrong. I just remember that he played it with great sensitivity, and the audience, including me, was very moved by the performance.

My new system is working! It's now very easy to see which pieces are furthest below their goal, so I can tell which pieces I need to work on next. I entered my time regularly all weekend, and I managed to "catch up," or come close to being caught up, in all my projects. (See my weekend goals post to compare, if you're interested.) I must admit that I didn't play any blues or "lagniappe" (Old Rugged Cross, etc.) this weekend. Instead, I focused on catching up on everything else. And I'm glad I did! I made progress I hadn't expected to make. For instance ... Solace I can now play all the way through Solace. I've memorized the "A" section, and when I played it this morning, it was (mostly) smooth and felt comfortable by memory. I can also play through the "B" section! I haven't started to memorize it yet; this morning I just worked on the fingering for the first part, as well as drilling a couple of the trickier passages...

I started working on Section A of "Solace" last night, and I worked on it a little more this morning. It's not fully memorized yet (as you can tell from the video), but I'm close. Last night I learned the first page and the first few bars of the second (which is just repetition from the first), and this morning I worked on the ending/cadence part. This has long been one of my favorite Scott Joplin pieces. It's so different from most of his other ragtime music: slow, melancholy, thoughtful. And it gives me the weirdest sense of nostalgia--not for the early 1900s, but for ... I can't even explain it. It just fills me with longing for something I can't name. Challenges This isn't a difficult piece to play. Harmonically, it's pretty simple--triads, dominant sevenths, a minor seventh, and a few diminished sevenths. The cadences are pretty basic. All of that makes it easier to memorize. There are a couple of challenges, though. The fingering, for one, is...

This weekend, I started working on "Solace" by Scott Joplin. It's subtitled "A Mexican Serenade," and it's a slow, meditative, beautiful piece of music. The section half (C and D sections) was featured in the movie "The Sting," so it's familiar to a lot of people. I learned the popular C and D sections years ago, probably at about the same time I first learned "Maple Leaf Rag." As with "Maple Leaf," I only learned part of it, and now I have the dual goal of (1) memorizing the part I've already learned and (2) learning the new-to-me A and B sections. This weekend, I managed to memorize the C section and most of the D section. I also started writing in the fingering for the A section ... though the B section looks a little harder, so I may begin with that one instead. Anyway, here is my first effort at playing the C section by memory. I kept the music up, just in case I needed it. Enjoy!