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A week in review

I probably should be asleep but instead I am here with the end of the Christmas chocolate and a mug of tea. This week, since Tuesday (I was travelling on Monday), I have averaged about 90 minutes a day practising the piano. The bulk of my effort has gone to Bach and Mendelssohn but I have a policy of “touching” the other two pieces at least once a day. Why I am I focusing on the first two? Because certain elements of them are tantalising close to a positive point of no return.

The Mendelssohn piece – one of the Songs without Words known as a Gondola song, 19b in G Minor (it’s mentioned all over the place and as I type I’m listening to Igor Levit’s rendition) – is the reason I did the Grade 6. I had toyed with skipping – after all, I just wanted the grade 8 so I could do the diplomas later if I wanted. I want very much to do them. Now that I am listening to Levit’s version, I realise I probably too often play it too fast. This is something I can fix relatively easily. I do slow practice anyway.

Anyway, I want to polish it but first, I would like for the fingering to be securely accurate. For me, this means playing it correctly more often than not. There isn’t a bar in the piece I can’t play accurately so the problems are lying in the glueing all of the pieces together. I love the voicing in it. I loathe the pieces I consider dragons, the pieces I struggle or struggled to play correctly. I’m incredibly close to it. So, so close. So I keep playing with a huge degree of focus and I’m so close to getting it right.

The other is the Bach dragon. There is a particular rhythm which turns up occasionally in the E major two part invention which I am I’m struggling to render correctly when one rhythm pattern is played on the left hand rather than the right. One example of it is in bar 7. I’ve written about it elsewhere but here’s the offending piece of music:

Bach777_FirstPart
Inventio number 6 in E Major, by that nice Mr JS Bach

I’m really, really close to getting it right. REALLY close.

but not quite there. The net outcome is currently Vladimir Rebikov’s afflicted autumn leaves and Elissa Milne’s Indigo Moon are not getting adequate love and attention.

I have averaged 94 minutes practising since Monday. About 90% of that went to Bach and Mendelssohn between then. I’ve also worked a little bit on Brahms 118/2, one of the bridges and it has some polyrhythms so I have worked on that too (hence the post the other day).

When I read/watch tuition on best ways of practice, there’s a point at which most say “blindly repeating things is a waste of time”. I get the need for a strategic approach to practice. But eventually if you haven’t played something right, because, for example, your fingers are slipping off the black notes (I feel like my keys are very slippery lately)m and you make an occasional mistake, well, you can’t not go through it again.

Ultimately, I’m going to be playing these pieces a lot – one of the next things will be to play them in the order in which I intend to present them for the Grade 6 exam which is Bach, Mendelssohn, Rebikov, Milne, ie, the order in which they were composed.

In the grand scheme of things, it was a productive week.

  • I can mostly get the Mendelssohn right
  • I can most get the Mendelssohn right
  • The Bach Bar 7 is moving in the right direction
  • I’m practising daily at the moment
  • I’ve picked up the Milne and the Rebikov again
  • I’ve started picking at the Brahms I want to learn
  • I’m planning a miniproject to improve the sight reading (need to select the 40 pieces and put them in a spreadsheet.

All told, better than last week, and in fact, better than most of November and December in which I barely touched the piano. I’ve probably doubled my 3 month practice total in just this week alone. Pretty much everything I touched is showing an improvement.

Oh and I also realised that my Soundbrenner app on my phone has some handy features on the metronome front that my Seiko does not have.

On the gap analysis: Sight reading

Having written two rants on organisational stuff, I want to touch on where I see skills gaps that I want to resolve over the coming year that support the fluffy “I wanna play anything I want” aspiration we all have when we listen to Chopin.

As noted elsewhere, I have some sight reading fluency gaps. That is to say, the ledger lines still have to be counted and although I drilled them a lot last year, it’s different in actual sheet music rather than on an app while you are getting the bus to work. The other thing I want to fix are ornaments.

There are plenty of resources around for that and one of the things I intend to do is put them into my sheet music sketchbook. It’s a solvable problem and then once that is done, they will need some practice. I expect one of the practice goals to be achieved sometime in the next few days so will put that into the rotation of what I do.

Sight reading demands a bit more effort. I’ve watched enough videos to know that the issue is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of fluency. In short, I need to read more by sight. There are no tricks beyond that other than how to achieve this. Given I’ve just written a rant on the question of excessively devoting time to planning and pussying around with journals and the like, what comes out of this entry might be unexpected.

One of the things I need to make some decisions around is how much time to devote to this. I like to hope that soon, I will not be devoting 45 minutes to Bar 7 of a Bach invention (it’s frustrating given how fast the rest of it will go). I’ve seen some people talk about 10 minutes on sight reading a day, or 30 minutes a week. I’m not sure which one goes faster.

I came across something via reddit this morning: some user pointed at the 40 pieces challenge on Piano World. I dug a little deeper and came up with this blog entry by Elissa Milne. I know this name. She wrote one of my Grade 6 pieces, the jazz piece, Indigo Moon. It’s a lovely piece which will be getting much more of my attention after the dreaded Bar 7 of Bach.

The general idea is to learn at least a piece a week. I liked the underlying thought here because basically, I lived it.

The more students progressed in degrees of difficulty the more their sight-reading skills lagged behind. 

Elissa Milne

You should read the piece. It’s an eye opener to know that this has been an issue for about 170 years. It’s one of the week points of the music grade systems in the Anglo Saxon world, I think. That aside.

Where I run into problems – and have done with 100 Days of Practice – is that real life can very often be a great obstacle to dealing with my dreams of playing more Chopin. I get a bit sad when I see people talking about how everyone has the same 24 hours a day. Honestly, the quality of those 24 hours vary dependent on how many of them you have to spend getting money to live on or washing dishes. There’s a reason that there’s a saying Behind every great man, there’s a great woman. Someone had to do the laundry and it wasn’t the man.

So, in reflection over breakfast, I muse on this, and here is one place where planning is truly an investment. It’s not an investment in individual practice sessions but in a series of them. Sure, teachers who engage in this with the kids they are teaching will have a well of resources but for an adult Who Is An Amateur, it’s worth planning this in some way.

There are a couple of useful sources here (and they can be built into a forScore setlist I believe).

  • Anna Maria Bach’s little notebook
  • Bach: Little Preludes and Fugues
  • r/piano piano challenges probably up to level 4 or 5
  • The ABRSM lists for grades up to Grade 4
  • The TCM lists for grades up to Grade 4
  • The RCM lists for grades up to Grade 6

There are books of pieces knocking around. Hal Leonard does one. But I might want to choose freely and there is IMSLP.

Here’s where my inner project manager comes out: pick 40, not including the two easy ones you know already such as the Petzold, and list them in an Excel Spreadsheet. And then tick them off. Put them on the YouTube Channel on a playlist.

We will see how it goes.

I am an amateur pianist

To be frank, if I had a life plan, the reality did not exactly align with it. What this means is I didn’t comply with society’s expectations for me (to bankrupt myself buying property in a property boom in Ireland, effectively) and I only got around to buying my own piano when I was 49 years old. I started hiring one about 4 years before that. So for a good chunk of my life, I assumed that as soon as I bought an overpriced house in Ireland, I would wander down to Pianos Plus and buy a piano too. Something to play until I had saved up the money for a grand piano, probably a Kawai. They have nice grand pianos.

The holy all of that is that for most of my adult life, I didn’t play the piano regularly. I played pianos in piano shops. I was too scared and shy to play them in railway stations, such that the first time I did was emotionally a big thing. I chose the Gare du Nord to do it as well. For some reason, I’ve always been afraid of disturbing people. I’m not sure why. Plenty of people disturb me. Anyway, the frank end all of this is that I’m never going to be a concert pianist and people are never going to be discussing my habit of wearing trainers and a Christian Dior dress on the stage of a concert hall. I don’t know how Yuja Wang plays the pedal with high heel shoes. That aside. I do want to play as well as I can and that means pushing myself.

One of the other things I put myself through were work recitals and there, there were a lot of people who clearly played classical music better than I can. There are a couple of reasons for this but the clear one is they played more than I did. I’m not saying I want to catch up but I will say this: if I play more I will get better.

There is a lot of material about getting better at the piano on the internet. None of it is really obviously pitched at me or people like me.

Most of what I find on the internet – with some notable exceptions – assume one of two things:

  • I am a complete and utter beginner
  • I am a full time student with aspirations of being a full time concert pianist playing all the great concert halls.

There are different impacts for both assumptions:

Complete and utter beginner

Here’s all the stuff you need to learn how to read music. Here are easy arrangements of famous pieces of music. Here are cheat sheets so that you can get away without practising that much. Here are crappy videos so you don’t even have to learn how to read music in the first place.

Full time student who is the next Evgeny Kissin

You have all the time in the world to engage in reading crap tonnes of things, practice 12 hours a day, create practice journals, bullet journal planning, learn every study written by Chopin plus the Liszt transcendentals.

I am none of these people.

Seriously. I would suggest that the following is more likely to be true: I’m not a complete beginner. I also have a full time job that often spills over into more than full time. There are days I have worked pretty much 12 hours. I spent a good chunk of my life dealing with household management. For any adult, especially people who have kids or pets, there is not 24 hours in every day. I sometimes have to get up at 5.30 to go on business trips. I get home at 8 or 9pm. Around that, I have to eat, clean. All that.

What I am saying is that for people like me, we’re looking for a little organisational help which does not involve spending ages in personal piano administration. I do not want to spend time doing lots of planning in advance of a practice session. Right now I’m trying to correct fingering for one bar of Bach. I don’t need to write a paragraph or a bullet point on this.

I probably need a teacher but without cleaning up my work schedule it’s going to be difficult (it’s coming though, oh boy is it coming).

So, yeah, I intend to avoid the YouTube videos that tell me to spend time I haven’t got over planning one line objectives: Play this piece properly.

That aside, I want to mention that there are a couple of actual teaching accounts which focus on technique and clue you in for how to play particular pieces. So special mention to the online teachers who assume you can organise yourself but if your objective includes dealing with the polyrhythms in Debussy and Brahms, here’s some support. Kudos thus to ToneBase, Josh Wright Piano, Denis Zhdanov, LeCheile music, Pianist Magazine

That being said, Pianist Magazine ran a competition for amateurs and wrote a piece on a review of their competitors and how many of them had full time, often highpowered jobs. They focused a bit too much on the music/maths link for my liking.

I suspect the vast majority of people who buy that magazine are people who are not full time concert or otherwise pianists. In many respects, it’s the people who love pianos, the sounds pianos make and they sounds they can make with pianos who are where the money is in the piano industry.

More people like me, I guess.

Practice journaling and related thoughts

Since I started being “serious” about objectives with the piano (rather than just sitting at it and playing by ear), I’ve done what people do these days: read a lot of stuff on the internet, and watch a lot of videos on YouTube. It’s the time honoured way these days. Anyway, one concept which comes up now and again on the music front is practice journalling. Journaling and bullet journaling is a hot topic on the self improvement industry, or as I like to dub it, the “you’re not good enough” industry.

I have certain mixed feelings about this, not least one of them being, I’ve been keeping a personal journal for 30 plus years and I started because I fell in love, not because I wanted to do self healing, or be more efficient or change the world. But it’s a habit I have kept up, and in any case, if you have spent any time working in IT, tracking is a habit and if you have been a project manager, well….then.

Anyway. Back in the day about 6 months ago when I was working towards grade 5 theory I selected a notebook and tracked my way through the mock exam papers (several times). I wrote a bit about that here.

The notebook was a very nice Beethoven unlined Paperblanks. It seemed wrong just to abandon it, so it is morphing somewhat into a music planner and journal. I’m just not very systematic in handling it so I of course resorted to TeachTheWorld site, YouTube and Instagram. Neither were very helpful. Nor were comments about rushing to the keyboard. I’ll write a bit more about that in a separate entry in about 25 minutes but in short: I don’t have a lot of free time. I have a piano because I want to play a piano.

Currently I have one primary goal (yes, I know I’ve written something slightly different elsewhere) which is to complete ABRSM Grade 6 Performance. I have four pieces and November and December were washouts (I’ll discuss that in the next entry). The tasks I need to achieve that goal are, basically, play four pieces in a reasonably engaging way such that an ABRSM examiner doesn’t vomit and die on watching the exam video. The four pieces include a piece of Bach which is relatively straightforward, apart from one bar, I’ve written about that too.

So, back with the practice journalling, you get the advice about laying out what you want to achieve with each practice session. I have to be honest. For session A, I want to be able to play Bar 7 of Bach’s two part invention in E major and for session B, I want to be able to play a Mendelssohn song without words without making any fingering errors. I can play every bar of it without an error but by God I can’t string all of them together error free.

One of the big concerns I have about the journaling industry (and not specific to music practice) is that an awful lot of time goes into the planning, the laying out tidily [the use of washi tape, ten colours of highlighters and special pens ordered from Japan and a dozen stamps]. All this takes time. I don’t have this time [watch for that entry].

Journaling for me is not planning. So if I practice journal at all, it’s to outline how I feel about how the practice went, how I feel after it, how frustrated I am, what went wrong, what went right. I think most people would do well to start with that.

It doesn’t have to be in a nice notebook (I have about 100, however because when Covid hit, what I did was Buy NoteBooks, Buy All The NoteBooks) but something that you can put somewhere and get it out after practice if you feel like it (doing practice is a lot of discipline, it being 11pm and your alarm clock being at 6am means that you don’t need to feel guilty about not writing in your practice journal).

If you’re a music student though, these rules will not apply to you. Do the planning. Do the postpractice analysis.

Some thoughts at the start of the year

I’ve already done a review of last year and talked a bit about some of the things I did [or not did] last year. But I have signed up for Pianist membership so that I get [what I have wanted for a long time] ongoing access to the digital archive – this matters to me because they have a lot of really nice music and accompanying tutorials.

In the latest issue which I think is from pre=Christmas, there is a piece on deciding (as an adult) to do an exam and a lot of practical advice. I value it a lot. It covered some practical advice, some timing and planning advice, discusses some of the pitfalls.

I’m also interested in using the sheet music as a resource for improving my sight reading. I’ve two major goals I think:

  • Complete the prep for Grade 6 and do it
  • Start the prep for Grade 8.

Supporting that are some improvements in basic skills, such as the dreaded polyrhythms and above all else, the sheet music reading fluency. For me, it’s not good enough but having gone through a lot of the tutorials on reading sheets, it’s obvious to me, I have the basic skills in place. None of the hints are new, I understand intervals. I understand the mnenomics and have done for years. I have some trouble with extreme ledger lines. These things are basically practice.

In the last few months, maybe the last 6 months, I have put a lot of resources into becoming a better piano player. This site is one; I’ve signed up for ToneBase, I have signed up for a Pianist membership, you can find me on Tonic for practice accountability. I have bought a metronome and I want another one (you can probably have too many metronomes – I have a lovely Seiko one which is totally not helpful for dealing with my Bach pains). What I want, more or less, is to be able to play any [bits of] music I want to. The grades are less to do with that and more to feed a little piece of my ego that is feeling neglected.

I’m also looking at practice journaling – I already log what gets practiced on a day to day basis since start of this year (a very nice Japanese agenda is used for that). One of the points raised in the Pianist article I mentioned above related to the difference between practice and rehearsal. This is not something that occurred to me but I’m happy enough to consider it – it allows me to highlight the differences between my Mendelssohn (rehearsing, sort of) and my Bach (ugh practising).

Nice Cup of Tea

When I look at my weaknesses, the number one item on that list (according to me anyway) are polyrhythms. I understand how to calculate how the beat is divided but I struggle to make it work. So I addressed this Gap via Professor of Music Youtube.

For 2/3 polyrhythms, there are two notable videos which I am going to place here:

RIAM Practising 3 against 2 rhythm

What I like about this one is it provides a scale exercise for making your fingers work on the concept.

Denis Zhdanov has a very useful video here also.

Currently I am working on these away from the piano and I’m interested to see that I can manage them away from the piano.

Christmas piano bar and projects

A couple of social media things over Christmas to note: Sebastian Dupuis is working his way through Liszt solo piano albums on YouTube, it’s very enjoyable and watching him play is always a pleasure.

Gavan Reilly, one of the leading political journalists in Ireland, took an hour out of his family Christmas to sit and play internet piano bar from requests sent in via Instagram while he was streaming. It’s an interesting idea. It demonstrated the extent to which I don’t know pop culture (I know very few tv themes, for example). But he put out a fair few tunes and raised over 3000 euro for charity. He did it by ear as well, so fair play to Gav for that.

I will add links for both later.

Airport pianos

Firstly, I need to apologise to Cork Airport. They have a piano, as in Dublin, it is in Arrivals on the ground floor of the terminal and you need to retrieve a key to use it. If I have time on Monday I will do so. The piano is supplied by Moloney Pianos and my point about there needing to be one airside still stands.

Before Christmas, I passed through both Brussels and Amsterdam and played pianos in both airports. As Brussels is my local departure airport, I know the set up there slightly better and they have two pianos, one in each terminal, A and B (Schengen and non-Schengen). I always try to find time to sit there for a while and play and I duly did. I’m in the process of setting up a YouTube channel for this site so will add some bits and pieces from public pianos over the years when it is up and running.

The one that surprised me was Amsterdam. I hadn’t known there was a piano there and I found it by accident in what I think is the non-Schengen side of the airport on Christmas Eve. There was a young American with a leaning towards jazz and blues playing there. I was impressed and listened for quite a while. His flight had been cancelled. Two teenaged boys came up and asked if they could have a go. The first of them played Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, the second movement, and then he played a medley out of what I think was the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Hans Zimmer. The second played a couple of bits by Yann Tiersen, at least one of which was from the Amelie movie. I played some stuff from Ireland.

The piano is in the library in Amsterdam Airport. Already, I love that they have a library area, I love that there is plenty of place to sit and relax or work, plenty of sockets. It’s a K.Kawai, and from what I can see from the internet it has been there for more than 10 years. It’s in tune, and in reasonably good condition. So AMS takes care of it and that’s to the benefit of passengers passing through.

What I loved about that interlude on Christmas Eve was how supportive a) all of the musicians were of each other despite playing very different music and b) how supportive the audience were. In fact, I’m always surprised by the feedback I tend to get playing public pianos – I’m not Lang Lang – but I have had people come up to me on trains in Ireland who heard me playing on the pianos in Heuston, and each of the four of us playing in the Library in Amsterdam Airport on Christmas Eve got rounds of applause. It makes you feel good.

I didn’t learn the name of the young American pianist but he was utterly charming. He showed a four year old how to play scales and then improvised with her so that they made something very special. We need more people around doing stuff like that, I’ve done it in Heuston once or twice when children show an interest. It’s one of the reasons I think public pianos are important.

The two teenagers were French I think. At least one of them spoken English with a heavy French accent. The other said very little.

I’ve played public pianos in Belgium, Ireland, France and now the Netherlands. I’ve not seen any of the public pianos in Germany and I couldn’t get near the train pianos in St Pancras the last time I was in London. I think this is kind of a good thing.