ABRSM – Concerto in C Minor

20240421 Practice Journal

I didn’t practice at all for the last days. It’s the longest I’ve gone without sitting at the piano since sometime in December, and I’d like to say I have good reasons. But “good” is subjective.

On the plus side, I did buy a tripod for the camera, and some sort of a mic which will probably struggle with the sound of a piano. I did that 7 days ago.

For myself, I’m sorry. I’ve been tired, and I’ve been getting home late from work. And I’ve been wondering what the point is about this and a lot of other things. I’m tired of online discussions about the piano – many of them seem to be either far too superficial (Is this piece of Rach too hard for me; I can’t sightread) or too deep.

I’m tired of YouTube. It’s got fantastic stuff hidden away but what it is pushing is utter crap about self improvement. I’m wondering if it is worth the monthly subscription I spend. It probably is because instagram’s sponsored posts are running at around 2/3rds of what they push to me. It certainly isn’t what I have followed.

I’m very close to being ready to submit the Grade 6. I have no idea how that will go either because I made the bad mistake of reading piano teachers asking if it was really necessary to comply with the instructions of ABRSM around being able to see the pedal – I’m sorry but I am not a piano teacher, I don’t have one, but I really cannot see why you’d even ask this question? ABRSM went to the trouble of recording a video for you.

So I need to go back to practice and see how that goes. I had started June by Tchaikovsky (although one of his nocturnes is around distracting me at the moment – I need to check if it is in any of the music books I own. Could be.

I will get to the piano shortly – I will set up the tripod then and we might see abut a youtube video later. Anyway. Have a good week. I have a couple of other pieces to write so this practice failure on my part might not be very noticeable to my 1 or 2 readers.

Whither piano exams

During the week I found out that there was an ABRSM group of some description on FaceBook so I took a look in. It was a weird experience, but I wanted to touch briefly on some of the discussions I saw in there. Somewhat surprisingly, there are people who do not like the performance grades.

They think they are too easy and exams are a waste of time.

The discussion I read during the week was sad. One primary push from certain of the contributors was that in the old days it was harder, and the exams were more of an achievement. And that ABRSM only does things for the money. And the exams are meaningless. And if you don’t have to do sight reading or aural or rhythm tests they were just too easy and no one was doing exams any more.

I’m going to be honest. ABRSM should roll back the decision to only issue digital certificates by default. The exams are not exactly cheap but I doubt the diplomas are the biggest problem. That aside, what do I think of it?

Well, these graded systems are really a feature of the British world, and mostly pervade countries that were under British rule when these things were getting off the ground. This explains, for example, why the US is clueless about this sort of stuff but Canada, Ireland and Australia all have parallel systems and because no other countries really do it, if people want them, they tend to ABRSM and TCL. ABRSM is, I understand, especially popular in South East Asia.

What I found infuriating about the discussion is that one of the loudest voices against the performance grades and doing exams in general now Argued From Authority and the authority they argued from was having done all the ABRSM and TCL diplomas. I mean, have they no idea how utterly privileged they are? Most people haven’t time to do all the grades, never mind the grades and the diplomas of two examining bodies? Why would you do ABRSM’s top diplomas if you already had the TCL ones? And vice versa?

In practical terms, I’ve already written about how annoying it was to be forced to do pieces I hated (side eye to RIAM in the 1980s). Once you get to grade 6 onwards, I’m not sure you can actually progress without being reasonably competent in side reading, aural understanding, rhythm tests and some basic theory. That extra piece is a good chunk of work. Being told it’s worthless by someone who implies the whole thing was harder in the past (but easy.cheap and accessible enough for them to do both strands) is utterly insulting. It also doesn’t really deal with the key points here. What are people’s motivations?

What was this person’s motivation to do both FRSM and FTCL? What on earth does their business card look like?

Why does it matter more than mine? I got up in April and said “I regret not completing to Grade 8 when I was a teenager. The only other thing still possible is book writing, the dream of an Olympic figure skating gold was always out the window).

What was their motivation when it all comes down to it, if all they do is belittle the motivations of other people, run down their achievements and then boast they did it all and more anyway?

It must be very sad.

20240406 Practice Diary

I dragged myself up to Sapphire in my Tonic League journey and the week has been such that I will be lucky to stay there. I’ve not been listening much and nor have I had much time at the piano.

That being side, there seems to be a point at which progress seems to fly. I don’t see the progress at the individual practice sessions now but more in recognising that today, I am playing things much better than I did one week ago or three days ago. I’m definitely playing them better than I was 2 months ago but then I started one of the pieces three months ago/

I open each practice session with a full run through all four pieces in sequence; I play them in order of age, oldest to newest. I call the self selection piece “list D” so in practical terms, this means I play Lists A, B, D and C as C is the only piece by a living composer. It takes 7 to 8 minutes. Mostly, I will play three of them cleanly except last night when I played none of them cleanly. After that I will work on whatever needs to be worked on, which is usually CPE Bach which is not far off target pace and one of the other pieces where the errors have been rather unfortunate. Occasionally I give Mendelssohn a little more detail.

What I’m finding is that I am occasionally bored of all of them now; I guess this is human and it’s one of the reasons you get advised not to work on something beyond your current skills +a little stretch – you will get bored. Because the Bach invention took so much time and then I whisked away from it, I’m behind with the CPE Bach and it’s really the last thing to cover before I do the recording for the exam. But I have to maintain the other 3.

I love playing the CPE Bach. To be honest, I’ve found it far easier than any of the other 4 pieces I’ve worked on for this exam. It’s not even the sound of it but the way in some places, particularly the F Minor section that my fingers fit so perfectly to the run of keys. It’s amazing.

One of the things which surprised me in the shakedown was that all 4 pieces I’ve lined up for Grade 6 are in minor keys. This wasn’t deliberate, and initially, the List A piece was in E Major.

I’m looking forward to having the Grade 6 submitted and recorded. It won’t be so long now I think and I really need to get a tripod so that I can do the recording.

In the meantime I have started working on the first of the Grade 8 pieces. I think I’ve look at all of them briefly at the piano and during the week, the one that made it to the piano stand was June by Tchaikovsky. It didn’t occur to me to vet it for small finger problems (let’s say the Rachmaninoff was the highest risk there) and that was somewhat of an error.

I scheduled Grade 8 for the end of 2025. I won’t object if that comes in slightly ahead of schedule; in any case I will need to track down a teacher at some point. Grade 8 is a gatekeeping certificate; the diplomas do not open up until I have it.

This afternoon I have piano time on a grand acoustic, hopefully a Steinway. I’m looking forward to it; I don’t think I’ve had the opportunity for the last 3 or 4 months.

20240327 Practice Diary

I missed the weekend because I was in Dublin, to see Maxim Vengarov. I know he plays the violin but still….

Anyway, the practice was daily except Sat and Sunday so I broke my streak. I’m struggling. Really struggling to get further than about 15 days in a row. But all that days I have missed in March so far were travelling days.

So where are we: quick look back at last week. Okay. The fingering accuracy problems which were a major feature of last week are not such a problem this week. I’m inclined to think they are hormonal and I probably should track them as such in my practice journal. This leaves us with a review of what I got up to since I last posted.

CPE Bach Solfeggio. This is going pretty much okay. It is still below concert speed but it’s increasingly accurate at higher speed. I love my metronome. I’m still surprised at how much better I got on with this rather than his dad’s Inventio in E major. I may go back to that at some point in the future.
Mendelssohn Gondollied 19b no 6: this is great actually. I play this and think, yu know, six months ago I couldn’t play this at all, and I wondered if this whole Grade 6 idea was batshit crazy for someone who is otherwise very decent at non-classical stuff.
Rebikov Fallen Leaves No 3 Con Affizione: I think of all the would be and were broken relationships since I was 13 and this is rightly afflicted. It’s mostly stable, I’m happy to record it
Milne Indigo Moon: After moaning a while back that I couldn’t really memorise this, the finger work is mostly sound, it sounds great when I get it right. I get it right 80% of the time and for those people who drop into my Tonic stream from time to time, it seems to be very popular.

I played other stuff this week at various times, sometimes when I am tired or lost and also because I passed through Brussels and Dublin Airports and touched pianos in both airports. This week that included the Waltz Opus 30/15 Brahms, the A major setting (by Brahms himself). Currently stuck on the opening piece as I shape my fingers to it, but I love it and I think it will be a useful building block to 118/2, the other great expression of unrequited love I think. From the Celtic repertoire, there were the following pieces:

Blind Mary (O Carolan)
Gracelands (Cunningham)
Gaelic Air (unknown, sadly)
Eamon A Chnoic
The Foggy Dew
Kimiad (based on Stivell)
Voyage en Irlande (Bensusan).

All pieces that I love. I also touched Exodus, Scarborough Fair, I dreamed a dream from Les Miserables, and I think that was about it for the late night session last night.

For my next trick I need to start booking grand piano time a bit more frequently, and then I also need a tripod for my phone so I can film the exam submission by the end of the month. I’m really pleased about this.

20240317 Practice Diary

The Isle of the Dead is playing in the background. I used to want to learn that; it’s a transcription of a Rachmaninoff piece. I’ve changed my mind.

So, to practice this week. I survived to Platinum for a second week in a row and to be honest, that was doing well because while I practised every day (go me), I only had one long practice. Next week has travel and two after work engagements. I’ll have to do a lot of active listening to offset the lack of practice next week because they will be mostly short sessions. Still and all, I intend to hang in there for my practice streak.

Tuesday was the big session and it must have done well. Since then, for probably hormonal reasons I’ve struggled with finger accuracy and memory issues across the board. It’s infuriating but as I don’t think anyone reads in here, I’ll be frank. I had sleeping issues and headaches and some serious nausea. All of that points to hormones all over the shop and yes, my period showed up yesterday.

Most of the practice time was devoted to CPE Bach. I can now play the piece more or less cleanly but far too slowly. So the effort for this piece is to raise the speed up to around 100bpm initially and then up to 125. After that, I think it may be dangerous. There are moments (time rather than place in the music) where I can tell my fingers where to go but not when. I would like it to be secure. It needs more time.

That being said, every practice sessions now starts with a performance run through of all four to get myself accustomed to playing them in sequence. I was wondering when I would get to the point I could do this.

All in all, would like it if my brain didn’t succumb to my ovaries but still on schedule to deliver the exam video before end of April.

Talking about the journey

One of my bucket list items has been to go to Verbier, and I am thinking of trying to make it happen this year. There are two or three concerts I’d like to go to – Alexandre Kantorow’s solo recital is one because that I would like to see.

By the way:

Alexandre Kantorow and friends celebrate their teacher’s time in France

I start off with Verbier because well, another bucket list item but which felt unattainable was grade 8 piano. And somehow, this is now realistic.

I love pianos. I’ve played piano in one shape or form since I was 8 years old. The world is full of people who are much better than I will ever be at this stage. The world is full of people who started learning at the age of 64. I’m better now than they are ever going to be.

But I wouldn’t be here without some hard thinking about a year ago and it boiled down to this: the work schedule I had would not allow me to do another university degree. It simply wasn’t possible and to be frank, I didn’t see the point any more if the outcome was to be more intense and constant exhaustion. In 2022 and 2023, I was constantly stressed and exhausted. So things were going to have to change.

So I started wondering about going back to music lessons and to see what I might yet be able to manage on that at this stage of my life. I looked on line and found Canada’s RCM and its extensive list of pieces. I have to confess, I didn’t realise it was in Canada until after I had selected some pieces for Grade 6 that looked doable. As far as I could remember, I had done up to Grade 5 in Ireland.

When I figured out it was Canadian and not UK system, I went looking again for a British one as I assumed there would be exam centres here in Belgium. This is how I discovered ABRSM had these performance grades that you recorded and uploaded. Also, they allowed me to prepare 4 pieces and avoid some of the other skills that I didn’t really want to try and structure according to their syllabus. I play by ear, and I play a rhythm instrument as well. I wasn’t totally worried about that.

But I had to do Grade 5 theory or prove I had done it in Ireland before. I figured it was easier to just do the Grade 5 theory rather than search remotely for proof I had done RIAM. In any case, I don’t think I did Grade 5 with the RIAM in Dublin, but with the Leinster School of Music which isn’t on the list of accepted alternatives for ABRSM. Doing the exam was a good idea.

It was really interesting. I learned a lot. I learned that I could still remember most of the theory covered up to Grade 4. What I didn’t know was really interesting and helpful. It covers a lot of how I think about music. From my point of view, obligation or no, being aware of Grade 5 theory is a good thing and I haven’t excluded doing further theory grades. For now I’ve been working on the performance grades.

I play the piano almost every day – if I miss a day it’s usually because I am travelling. To that end, I can now play pieces by Mendelssohn (dream come true), CPE Bach (love the piece), and two other composers that I didn’t really know before I fished them out of the syllabus. It’s really great.

The benefits though have not really just been musically inclined. I think the simple decision in April last year to start working towards something that a person I used to be has pushed me back into being some of the person I used to be, someone a bit more comfortable in myself. It took a long time and I’m really only starting to see the benefits now. My self esteem was still rock bottom in January; but these days, I think about those moments when I fly through CPE Bach – and I learned that incredibly quickly. I learned it in 6 weeks to be honest and now it is in polishing mode. I can’t quite believe it to be honest.

In the journey, it helped me to move around changing other parts of my life so that I could manage stress more effectively. That I could realistically think about learning some of the lots of sheet music I own. I go to more concerts. I’m thinking about going to a master class in the local conservatory. My resting heart rate is down. I’m sleeping better and some other health indicators around stress are also better.

I still have a lot of things to fix both musically and personally. But genuinely, making room for the exam one of my colleagues thought was crazy has changed my life.

20240310 Practice notes

If I am absolutely honest, what I am trying to do here is avoid house work. I could and will go back to the piano shortly but first a summary write up now that I am more or less back on stream with daily practice.

Anyway, in terms of playing objectives, there are four primary pieces which I would like to submit for my Grade 6 exam with ABRSM within the next couple of months. I write about them frequently, but the important part is that although they are all short of where I want them to be, they are all adequate to actually doing performance practice as well. What do I mean by this?

The exam is a single take video. That means I have to be able to play the four pieces in a row, preferably faultlessly, but most importantly, coherently. I couldn’t do this last night; I could do it today. I need to update the project plan for this actually. I’m happy with that.

All four pieces need work. For one, they are erratic. That means, there is no one piece I can reliably play through without faults. But the truth is, now, I have done a couple of start to finish recital practices, and this needs to be done a couple of times each practice session.

Solfeggio, CPE Bach

I’ve come to really like this piece and it came on stream much faster than I expected. I delayed the exam window to April after missing 2 months of practice (and untold problems with a different piece) late last year. I am close to 99% memorised here and the primary challenge will be to play it at an adequate speed.

Gondollied, 19b/6 Felix Mendelssohn

I love this piece but I am not happy with it in places and I am not sure how I want to adjust it. I will relisten to some recordings of it and see how that goes. I think there is a tutorial as well. I think the pedalling is overly heavy which is one problem.

Autumn Leaves, No 3 Con Afflizione, Rebikov

This was an unexpected pleasure to learn; and it’s brought a lot to my playing I think. It is about 90% reliable. I have two months to get it performance ready. We will see how it looks at the end.

Indigo Moon, Elissa Milne

This too was unexpectedly pleasant to learn. I’m happy with it although the memorisation is not 100% reliable.

In terms of upcoming work, there will be a lot of drilling for the CPE Bach with the metronome. I tend not to play that late as I don’t know if my neighbours can hear the metronome. There are 3 bars very close to the end where I often trip over my fingers but recent practice has seen that reduce significantly. I intend to keep this in my repertoire. For the Mendelssohn, I’m not really sure what to do about it at the moment. I listen to Igor Levitt’s version from time to time and it seems to be a different piece in his hands. I listened a lot to Jan Lisecki’s recording too.

I think I don’t play it as musically as I would like. Of the four pieces, in certain respects, it is now the most challenging (even above CPE Bach) from a fingering point of view. I’ve always wanted to learn it but while I can play it, I don’t think I have learned it. My fingers don’t sing. There may need to be some deconstruction.

For the two more modern pieces, they are done or undone by how I am feeling emotionally at the time I am playing.

I will do the recording without sheet music in around 6 weeks’ time if I can.

In addition to these pieces, I have also started one of Brahms’ waltzes; the sheet music I have is in A Major, it’s an arrangement by Brahms himself so the fact that it is the “easy” version isn’t bothering me. Anyway, the version Henle has in its Brahms piano album is that one. I can see elements of it will also help with 118/2 which is on my piano stand most of the time for when I feel like having a go at pieces of it. It’s lined up for my ARSM so it’s not super urgent. For reference, by the way, I picked up on this via Kantorow’s encore on Friday. I bet he plays it in A flat though.

The practising since about Wed is mixed. I had a couple of terrible sessions (this morning’s one was a horror) and I have also had some highly focused and productive sessions. I’m told that the improvements, especially in the Bach, are highly noticeable if you listen to me through Tonic. But the practice planning is not perfect for me – it’s still more emotionally driven based on what I feel like doing.

20240307 Practice Notes

I targeted April (revised after missing most of November and December) for the exam recording and while the switcheroo from JS to CPE Bach made me consider that a delay was likely, I’m not certain that it will be. I’m now starting to play Mendelssohn reasonably cleanly, I regularly get Rebikov cleanly (although when it goes badly wrong, it’s a spectacular disaster near the end) and I can play the Milne cleanly albeit not yet from memory. People who hear that seem to like it a lot. And then there’s the CPE Bach bit. I can’t play it cleanly yet, but it’s 95% in memory, is playing okayish at a low speed. There are shaky bits near the end – about 4 bars – and after that, it’s going to be a long journey with a metronome to bring it up to performance tempo. I do a lot of work with a metronome for this. I never got his father’s piece even close to this level. I am not in the mood to analyse why.

The week and a half, nearly two weeks, was odd. I was travelling so lost 3 days completely. One day got 20 minutes in Amsterdam Airport where I was too self conscious to play the classical pieces so it hardly counts for exam purposes.

For some time, and more sustained than usual, I’ve been playing when I come in from work, minimum 20 minutes, often longer. 90 minutes if I can. The Bachs have often accounted for a lot of that time. There’s something really nice about coming in, sitting at the piano and forgetting about computers, policy and applications. Today, I put about 45 minutes to CPE Bach, learning the last gaps so that I start the gluing process. It took fifteen minutes to achieve my objectives for the other three pieces together. They are, admittedly, short pieces but usually, they take about 30 minutes. So here I was, an hour in to practice with time. I haven’t had time on a practice for ages.

So I read through Reverie by Debussy which is scheduled for Grade 8. I’ll be chunking it, of course I will. But the RH is accessible. I’ve now read through two of the pieces and, in line with plans, I will probably start learning one of them even before I’ve done the grade 6 test.

I did something else but it’s going to get an entry on its own shortly. All told, the last few days have been good.

20240224 Practice Diary

Last week was busy and yet, I some how managed daily practice until yesterday. They were just short practices which is a pity.

Last week I got myself into the Platinum League on tonicapp, which was great while it lasted. I immediately ran into a week that was several late evenings at work, one choral concert, one day hiking in the countryside. Most days I barely made 20 minutes at the piano. The plus point is that I made it at all.

In short, I only did the four exam pieces I was working on and I looked at two Clara Schumann pieces for reasons outlined below as well. For the exam pieces, the CPE Bach is coming on, faster than I expected but I doubt it will be ready by end of April. The other three pieces are close to done. I still make mistakes with the Mendelssohn, and with the Rebikov. But both of them are memorised and the Milne piece is almost memorised although I still haven’t decided if I would use it with or without the sheet music when playing the exam.

I really like the CPE Bach even as my fingers trip over themselves. I am way short on speed of it, but half of it is more or less memorised to support dealing with the speed that it should be played at. If I get a reasonable run at it today, maybe during laundry, then I might have it all memorised by the end of the week when I will blow my practice schedule again by not having enough access to a piano for a few days.

On Sightreading

One of the gaps I identified for myself at the start of this more recent piano journey was sightreading. I suppose in part, it was because I wanted to read music as fluently as I read English. This might be unrealistic; I’ve been reading English since I was three years old and that is now a frighteningly long time ago. But arguably, my sightreading is weaker than I would like. I imagine a world where I can read anything I want up to and including Chopin’s third Sonata which is the apex of my ambitions, apart from buying a Steinway B, that is. But I struggle with sightreading, especially lefthand because I learned treble clef a couple of years before I learned bass clef. I struggle with ledger line notes too.

So I did what any sane person does when they want to get better at something. I searched sightreading on YouTube and disappeared down an increasingly disappointing black hole. There is a huge amount of advice out there from people telling you how you can sight read better. What most of them have in common is that they are targeted at people who know absolutely no music theory at all, have no basis in reading at all. I suppose it’s the easiest place to start with pedagogical stuff on sight reading. I’m not the target audience. I realised I was not the target audience because once you got past the names of the lines on treble and bass, there was an emphasis on understanding the length of notes. I know this. Understanding intervals: I know this. Understanding key signatures. Come on!. I know most of these too. I know that five sharps tells me it’s B major or G sharp minor. I’ll possibly draw them in the wrong order but interpreting them, I get there.

So what I’ve come to understand is that I’m a better sight reader than I gave myself credit for. Still not good enough but the hints around knowing how to read are unrealistic for someone who actually knows how to read; the point is to read more and more and get faster. When you see discussions about this on Reddit, the advice is that it is a numbers game. I read a piece by Elissa Milne a few weeks ago where she noted that in general, the higher some of her students went in the graded music education system, the worse their sight reading got for the simple reason that they weren’t doing enough of it. I’m not a fan of the Numbers Game but in general, she came up with a plan to increase engagement of students and to get them to sight read a whole lot more. That’s the 40 piece project that I have going in the background (see here). I’m not really on top of it because I don’t always have the music to hand and practice time has been thin on the ground these last couple of weeks. But I have done some things outside the scope of the exam pieces I’m working on. There has been some Beethoven, some Shostakovich, some Haydn, all composers that I don’t regularly touch. I have worked on a couple of pieces by Beethoven – the infamous Bagatelle that everyone knows, and I intend to learn the second movement of Shostakovich’s piano concerto no 2 and one of his waltzes. I have sheet music for both. Haydn I tend to bypass.

Of the pieces that are being worked on for repertoire, there is Handel’s Sarabande and Variations, and Prelude in C Major from Bach’s WTC. I’m not a fan of Bach senior but there are some glorious things knocking around. I also have Siloti’s transcriptions of some of Bach’s stuff. So I may adjust the list currently here to take account of other things I want to learn.

I started learning CPE Bach’s Solfeggio during the week to replace the List A Bach that I wanted to abandon. It’s astonished me how much easier it was to sight read than I expected. I’m assuming that part of it is linked to the short pieces I work on now and again and that this has helped a lot. So yes, in short, it’s a numbers game.