Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

Good news! I'm ready to start playing through the Liebesträume No. 3 occasionally. I'm hoping to perform it at a student recital in July or August. Here's my first attempt at playing it from memory on video. It has a few memory lapses, some more obvious than others, but I'm posting this to track my progress and see how far I've come by recital time. Question for Readers (if I have any):  Have you ever struggled with memorizing a piece or performing under pressure? Share your experiences in the comments—I’d love to hear your stories and tips!

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...

Apologies for the very rambling post yesterday. I'm a writer, and you'd my blog posts would be neat, self-contained nuggets of clear writing, but ... well, they aren't even close to that. This blog is where I tend to let it all hang loose, and by "it," I mean entire paragraphs, as well as redundant phrases, misplaced modifiers, overly long sentences, and all the rest. Today's post is different. I've been working on the "10 Lesson Blues Challenge" over at Piano With Jonny . I've been in Lesson 3 for a couple of weeks, not making great progress. But now that I'm in North Carolina for a few days with nothing but a 61-key keyboard, I've set Chopin, Maple Leaf, and even Bare Necessities aside to focus on blues. Lesson 3 begins by teaching the blues scale, which was review for me because I've known the blues scale for literally decades. I never really new what to do with it, but it seems like I've always known the notes. As with mo...

I got very frustrated Monday night. I have been trying for about a month to make a decent video of myself playing the Chopin Nocturne in F minor. I'm not striving for perfection; really, if I could make one that just had a dozen or so unremarkable errors here and there, I would be thrilled. But no. When I play for an audience--whether a real-life one or the imagined one behind the "Record" button on my phone--my mind freezes up and I forget how to play the piano. I become unable to read music. I can literally look at a middle C written in front of me and have no idea what it means. Friends, I have been reading music since 1976. I know middle C. I guess it's fight or flight, and my brain obviously chooses "flight." How do I stop it from doing that? I don't know, but I would desperately love to find out. I can play the nocturne pretty well by memory when I'm not recording. I've been very happy with my progress. But when I'm recording? I get som...

This weekend, I decided to (finally) figure out the tempo at which I can play Maple Leaf Rag (MLR) without missing notes in the octaves. It looks like 72 is the magic number. I can play parts of MLR at a faster tempo, but Section C, along with the final line of Section D, keeps me stuck at 72. Now that I have all the notes and the piece is memorized, today begins the journey of picking up speed, just a few metronome notches every few days. As I'm doing this, I'll work more on articulation and working a few ornaments into the repeats. Here is MLR at 72. The goal? Technically 100, but I'm going to push it a little higher (120?) so that (1) 100 is easy, and (2) I'm prepared to play a fast "show off" rendition for an audience if I so desire. It will be a long journey even to 100, but I'm on my way!

As mentioned in a couple of previous posts, I'm planning to spend one week per page learning Jonny May's arrangement of the Disney classic song "Bare Necessities." I started Week 3/Page 3 today(the ragtime section) and realized I'd never posted a video for page 2. So, friends, here is page 2. I'm playing slowly, still working on muscle memory and getting the notes right.

 The Chopin nocturne I am working on has a section that I refer to as "The Mad Chase." This nocturne is a mix of relatively easy passages (i.e., the first sections) and several different, more challenging passages. "The Mad Chase" is one of the harder ones, mainly due to hand stretches (and chord changes) in the left hand, and, to a lesser degree, the brief counterpoint in the right hand. It took me several weeks to start feeling confident that I even had the notes worked out. I experimented with the fingering, trying one for a few days before trying another, and then another. I'm still not confident that I've worked out the best fingering. Here is where I am as of this past weekend--I still have some work to do, but this section has come along a lot in the past few days. Yes, there are a few missed notes, and yes, I started the big climactic section of The Mad Chase and decided not to go through with it, but ... a big milestone is that this section has sta...

 Maple Leaf Rag is coming together for me. It's been coming together for a while. I'm ready to graduate from "it's coming together" to "it's performance-ready." But I'm not there yet. I still have a few areas to attend to: The D section (I have this section down pretty well, but I'm still stumbling a little at the very end.) Sloppy left hand , particularly in the B and C sections. Weakness in the 4th and 5th fingers in my right hand in one small part of Section A. Transitions (I'm really close with these, but I'm not quite there yet.) Consistent speed . (The C and D sections are new to me, so I tend to slow down when I get to them. I've also noticed that I'm speeding up in the B section without meaning to.) Consistent tone . (Listening to this recording, I can hear that I don't press some of the keys down far enough, which results in a kind of spottiness of tone.) For my most recent practice session (shown in the video b...

I'm planning to give regular updates on Bare Necessities . This version is a real showpiece, and it will be a challenge to learn it, memorize it, and get it to a good performance tempo. Translation: I'm going to be living with this one for a long time. How long? I have no idea. I'm guessing anywhere between 3 and 6 months, though it could be a year. I started learning the piece on Monday, and I've been encouraged by how (relatively) quickly I've picked up the first page. I can now play it through, hands together, at a slow pace. I'm going to stick with this for a couple of days, playing it over and over again until it feels completely natural under my hands. Throughout this process I'll be working on memorizing as well. I won't have access to a piano for most of the weekend, so I'm thinking I won't start the B section until late Sunday, or early Monday morning. In fact, I'm wondering if I can learn this at a rate of one page a week. The piece...