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.
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.
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.
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).
It is a hard call how to review a year in which nothing much was planned, at least not initially, and yet, which seems to have been highly productive.
I started 2023 at near 0. I’ve been playing the piano since I was 8 years old and while I rarely played during the 20 years I didn’t have a piano, I have had a piano for most of the last 6 years now and was playing reasonably regularly if not too much of the challenging stuff. I bought some music in Germany but it’s only since I moved to Brussels that I actually seriously started buying stuff I want to learn.
I’ve never felt I fit quite into the online world of piano. I spent some time as a gold subscriber to Piano Street; I really did not get on with Piano World at all. I questioned my right to call myself a pianist at times. During Covid, I moved from Luxembourg where I played concerts to Brussels where I don’t play concerts. In the background, work was extremely busy and plans I had to go back to university to do a masters in European integration were consistently kiboshed by the absolute certainty that I would miss lectures, and that I was simply too tired to work around work, lectures, assignments, all these things which are fixed in time. Which brings us to April.
I think it was April. Maybe it was not. Anyway, university ruled itself out again, I took a long hard look at the calendar and started thinking about the difference between what I should do and what I would want to do and realised that they were starting to diverge. What I wanted was to get better at playing the piano, start facing into some of the classical repertoire I hadn’t touched since I was 16 years old and learn to play some things like one of the Mendelssohn Gondola songs. I was ambitious too, so you could say I was foolhardy. I wanted to learn stuff that I heard Alexandre Tharaud play. I mean, I would love to play Chopinata but while I was foolhardy, I wasn’t really that stupid. But I went to a Chopin concert with someone in March and on the agenda was Sonata number 3. I have always loved it since I heard it on an Evgeny Kissin album when I was about 21 years old. The someone said he thought the second movement should be possible.
So I started thinking about lessons, and if I wanted to do lessons, I needed to be able to explain my objectives in some sort of rational manner rather than Hey, I wanna play a Chopin sonata. I decided to take a look at the grade repertoire and see if it had improved since I was 15. RIAM wise, no. ABRSM though, it had a list a mile long for each grade, and they had performance grades which meant I could spend time learning to play music rather than being terrified by how awful the sight reading test would be. Yes, past traumas were coming out. Anyway.
Performance grades. That could be recorded and submitted. But I would have to do Grade 5 Theory first.
So I did, and in August, I got a distinction in it. Congratulations me.
When I started looking at the grades, the initial point was to target Grade 8. When I looked at it though, I realised that actually, if what I wanted to do was grease my ego, I would probably want to target the diplomas as well. This made for a big project so now, for the next 10 years, I’m working towards FRSM. And one of the pieces I have lined up for the FRSM is that 3rd Chopin sonata. For 2024, I will need to decide what I need to do about teaching. I’m starting the grades with grade 6 and while I can probably manage that alone, the truth is I will need a regular teacher really soon. For 2024, the objective is to find a teacher who can teach me outside my working hours.
In the meantime, I’m working on some Bach, some Mendelssohn, some Rebikov, and some Milne, the latter being some what jazzy. I intend to do that sometime early in 2024 – my schedule in the second half of 2023 fell apart so while the Mendelssohn is on the cusp of being finished, the Bach is not because I have some issues with counterpoint. So this is behind the big schedule. I have very little time at the piano.
But there’s a great sense of achievement in managing even what I managed. For most of 2022, I didn’t play at all, so already…things are good.
In addition to my own digital Kawai, I have now access to rehearsal rooms with a beautiful Steinway B. In practical terms, things are good. I’m working on exam pieces, all of which I like, and the sight reading is improving however slowly. Next year I will start learning something by my beloved Rachmaninoff, not in C minor mind, but D flat minor.
In other news, I met Evgeny Kissin, the first concert pianist who truly blew my mind (I knew others, I knew William Kempff, I knew Julius Katchen. I knew Tamas Vasary). He played Rachmaninoff, and still did a meet and greet. The concert was life changing. I met Vikingur Olafsson, who is probably the best concert pianist in the world at the moment. His Goldbergs are sublime and so is his Rameau album. If I were to recommend one album for a newbie, it would be his Rameau album.
I also listened to a couple of talks by Boris Giltburg, also playing Rachmaninoff. Those sessions were fabulous and I am sorry I did not get to go to his other two performances in November.
On the digital services point of view, I signed up for Tonebase, and listen into the lectures regularly. I signed up for Tonic but would prefer that to pick up bluetooth as I often practice late at night and so, by definition, headphones are required. I also bought some piano instruments for Pianoteq and love how they sound when I play. I tend to emulate a Steinway D or a C Bechstein concert grand. I would like them to model Fazioli pianos and then my life would truly be complete. I also finally put sheet music software, namely Henle Digital Library, forScore and imslp, on my iPad. The last thing I kind of need is a page turner.
I played a concert again, possibly the last for a while. But done, nonetheless, and with a lot less of the panic and nerves compared to the first concert a few years ago.
In terms of music I discovered this year, I came across The Cyclops by Rameau when looking for something for Grade 8. I’m also interested in bits of Liszt’s B minor Sonata. But to see what I came across this year, it’s worth looking at the Sheet Music Category. I need to learn some of this stuff. I’ve looked at some Rachmaninoff, I’ve looked at some more Bach (easy stuff). I bought the Anna Maria notebook because Barenreiter did a Jubilee edition. I heard someone say at some point that you should work on your weaknesses, and for me, Baroque really is. Bach is mathematical, so he should work for me, although he doesn’t. Let’s change that.
I read two piano focused books, one of which I did not like, one of which was engaging. I bought myself another copy of the Piano Shop on the Left Bank.
For 2024, I have some ideas and some plans. On the main objective side, there are two primary KPIs:
Take and pass Grade 6 Performance with ABRSM
Start the Grade 8 pieces.
After that, I have some ideas. I put together an instragram account which has been neglected. The fact that I cannot embed videos from there is infuriating. I’m considering setting up a YouTube channel. I’m not a virtuoso, and I have gaps in my knowledge. But I like things like the 1 minute 10 minutes 1 hour challenge that Annique Gottler does. And I have ideas for sight reading challenges, and occasional live streams. I’ve livestreamed from the Steinway rehearsal room once and found technical glitches. So this will require some planning.
I am also looking at some of the intermediate repertoire recommended through Tonebase, and one of the items which popped up today was Raindrops by Chopin. I occasionally sight read Chopin but there isn’t anything my repertoire so that’s an idea. After that, I want to look at some of the other pieces from my learning list.
I also want to learn some bits of a couple of piano concertos. I love the opening phrase of Beethoven 5, for example. And I used to be able to play a chunk of Grieg and Rach II. I’m hoping that as I get better, more chunks of all three become accessible.
We’ll see. 2023 was unexpectedly fruitful when I made that sudden decision to take this much more seriously. I hope 2024 gives me the change to finish the Grade 6 pieces and make inroads to the grade 8 pieces.
I’m way behind in a couple of things but it is Friday evening, Sebastien Dupuis is streaming some Liszt practice. I’m ashamed to say I play no Liszt so I picked up a book of easy Liszt (for a given value of easy, when Liszt is at play) today. I didn’t deliberately intend to do that, but there you go.
I was in Strasbourg this week which means two main things: another shop to visit selling sheet music and stuff, and I didn’t practice at all. It’s safe to say I am now awfully behind with the whole Grade 6 things and it is frustrating to say the least.
I’m behind in photographing and uploading books and sheet music, although on the sheet music front, it’s just Strasbourg and Brussels.
On the book front, I bought another lot of Notes Legeres, a biography of Clara Schumann = still looking for one particular piece of music by her. I also bought a book galled Guide de la Musique de Piano which intrigued me and there is, somewhere around my book collection a copy of the letters. All of this is in French. The dtv-Atlas Musik came from Trier – not sure I mentioned that.
On the sheet music front, I bought a couple of bits and pieces. I bought the Wiener Urtext of Schumann’s Carnival. I bought some studies by Camille Saint Saens, and I’m sure there was something else, oh yes The Lark by Glinka-Balakirev. Here in Brussels, I bought a Handel Passacaglia arranged for piano and now I am hoping it is the “right” Passacaglia. I’m not sure it is which is going to be challenging (but that’s what Reddit support is for). I will take a look at that later. I also bought 599 Czerny as the in-the-knows on Reddit bang on about it and I have never done very much technique work.
So yeah, I need to catch up with photographing all that stuff and maybe updating the piano sheet music and literature library.
I was in Trier for the first time in a few years at the weekend. It was a great weekend and since it was Trier I took the opportunity to visit two grail shops; one being Musikhaus Kessler, a place where I bought quite a lot of sheet music when I was living in Luxembourg. I also bought quite a few bits of music giftery – they are very good for that.
Anyway, my current music shopping list included the Sinding, already mentioned in previous entries, and Solfeggio by CPE Bach. I’ve since discovered that Solfeggio has previously been a Grade 6 piece for ABRSM (so I could have used it as the self selected piece for my currently stalled Grade 6 piece). It’s been mentioned a lot in r/piano and it sounds nice. So yeah, on the learning list it went, and also, not like everything on my learning list, it also made its way onto the sheet music shopping list. The Sinding was really more luck – they don’t have a lot of second hand stuff but that was there, and more importantly, this is the edition that was there; a lovely older imprint. I really wish Peters would use more beautifully engaged title pages again. I had been looking for this edition on Ebay (there were a few) but lo, here it was in my hands, and subject to being bought by my credit card. This made me happy. I haven’t started it yet although both pieces are sitting on my piano stand at the moment. This leaves only a piece of Sibelius, Opus 76.2 on my list. I don’t see many versions of it in print so I think I got it from IMSLP in the end. Incidentally, I signed up for them for a year because they are worth supporting. The current print version that I found on Stretta did not really appeal to me.
So I would like to accidentally find that too. I didn’t score on Ebay or AbeBooks yet.
The other grail shop – and I really do recommend it to anyone in the area who loves pianos – is Marcus Huebner Pianohaus. It’s about 5 minutes from the main railway station in Trier. It is a lovely piano shop, a major Steinway dealer, and the staff, and Marcus himself are really lovely people to talk to. The last time I was there (before this trip), they had two beautiful Model Ds out. This time, they had a couple of special editions, some Model Bs, some Model Os and a Model C. I played the two special editions. I tried to play one of the Bs but it was already reserved for someone and while it seems irrational, I never do well with pianos that I know are for someone else. It’s better if I don’t know.
The two special editions were a maquette Model O and a silver Model B. I spent a lot of time with the silver Model B and have to say, it’s a beautiful piano to play. It seems similarly priced to a new Model B so if the piano appealed to you and you have the money, the choice between silver and standard wouldn’t be driven by price.
The Model Os felt less light under my fingers, a little heavier. As they are a smaller piano, that would have surprised me. Nevertheless, the piano was a beauty to look at. There’s been the occasional debate of black versus not black – I have mixed feelings. It’s pretty much the case if I were buying a new piano, I would default to black polish. But for the older pianos from the earlier 20th century, the different wood casings are very attractive.
Steinway Model O, LE
I’m not currently in the market for a piano, although I am always in the market for a Steinway B when I have sorted out an apartment. So the question of whether I would go for the marquette casing is more or less moot. I very much appreciated the opportunity to play the piano though as I don’t often get the opportunity to play unusual pianos.
Marcus Huebner has also his own range of pianos and although I’ve played one in the past, there was not one on display last weekend. This is a pity. I’m privileged in that I have played one of his, and also one of Chris Maene’s straight strung pianos.
It’s lunchtime on a Saturday afternoon, and my flight has been delayed over an hour. There isn’t a piano here (CORK Airport in Ireland, hint hint) and I’ve already spent a chunk of time considering exciting philosophical discussions like, will I sign up for Josh Wright (well I just signed up for ToneBase, so do I need another one?) or, should I upgrade my digital piano? I’m about to sign up for more Pianoteq voices anyway. I’ve scrolled through r/piano, and I have idly considered looking at piano world. I have sheet music with me and because I haven’t been playing much, I haven’t been writing much about playing yet.
One of the items on my “Maybe Do List” is to build a YouTube channel to accompany the blog. It seems like madness, because I assume the only person who looks at this site much is myself. So I am thinking about that. But I’m not the kind of person who can build a viral video channel about the piano. You need to look at what I would be up against – there are a couple of very good sites with mediocre numbers – Sebastien Dupuis does great content but he’s not got the numbers of say a TwoSet or Denis Zhdanov. There’s a lot of audience for the synthesia and while I think it looks engaging, I can read music, and synthesia makes no sense to me. I love Annique Gottler’s One Minute Ten Minutes One Hour challenges – I think they are a great idea.
But hardly a unique selling point for Concerto in C Minor. I like a lot of the other teachers like LeCheile and Josh Wright too. Not such a fan of Jazer Lee. I’m also only a young/un if you are over the age of 60 and I’m never going to be a concert pianist (hold that thought…)
So my market segment would probably be the “Middle Aged Regretful Pianists Who Could Have been a Contender”.
I need to think about that of course. Put a mind map together, find a useful name for the channel that slips off the tongue. Do Shorts. Join TikTok although I’m not sure so many of old fogies are on TikTok. I might think about it when I am on the plane again.
While I was considering the Josh Wright angle this morning (Black Friday does this to you), I went looking for reviews of his premium offering (I’m in favour of life time offers) and came across a discussion on realistic aspirations and telling the vast majority of pianists they will never be a great concert pianist.
When you spend any time on the internet at all, you run into the whole idea of why people are motivated to do things. I see it with running, I see it with swimming. I don’t see it with knitting for reasons which remain unclear although it’s possible that there are other issues there if r/craftsnark is anything to go by.
The vast majority of people don’t really want to be concert pianists, I think, They want respect, adulation, if it’s going. But they are happy to come home, play a bit of Chopin and day dream. A lot of discussions around teaching/learning are not based on this reality. It’s based on the idea – especially for young people – that the only reason you would do this is for purely competitive reasons. Be a great concert pianist.
It’s not why I do it. I do it because I actively like playing. I mostly play at home, alone for escapism. If I am doing the ABRSM grades at the moment (and god is that going slowly for the time being), it’s not because I want to be a concert pianist. I have played piano in concerts. I have stage fright. My absolute zen place is playing a beautiful piano in an empty concert hall, which I do every once in a while. Everyone is different, I guess.
There’s an element of elitism around the discussion sometimes. I’m generally in favour of people learning to play the piano properly, like, using sheet music or their ears like God intended (I don’t have any truck with synthesia at all), but after that, if you want to play Jingle Bells, knock yourself out. It’s every bit as valid a motivation as Un Sospiro is.
There are a couple of people just streaming practice sessions – I’ve listened to a guy playing scales every night for a while. I don’t much like his camera set up but I like the idea that he uses this for accountability.
The vast majority of people who play the piano past the age of 18 are in it for reasons that cannot be summed up as “I want to be the next Yuja Wang”. Don’t get me wrong – some of them are exceptional pianists who have worked for years on their Liszt and Islamey if they are particularly masochistic – but being a concert pianist is a whole host of other things besides playing the piano. It is often, playing music you don’t much like. It is playing music that puts people in the auditorium. There is a whole administrative/costly side in terms of managing agents, record companies, tax liabilities, and your pianos. I sometimes think that gets forgotten.
You see it with sports too. We’re only interested in the ones who are winning races and yet humanity as a whole benefits hugely if we encourage people to get exercise throughout their lives without the added pressure of winning something. I honestly think the win at all costs attitude sucks. Every person benefits by going running if their frame is up to it, without the motivation of winning a race.
Anyway, I think the first thing we need to do is get people enjoying what they are doing, while being open to getting better all the time.
In other thoughts, I also happened across a weirdly common theme of whinging about Lang Lang (actually I need to check if I have written this bit before – it seems not).
I’ve seen Lang Lang in concert. He played the Chopin ballades and I think some preludes. It was a remarkable concert; he is a wonderfully talented pianist who takes an immense amount of pleasure in playing the piano. I was left with the impression that he considers it an immense privilege to be able to play and that people actively want to come and listen to him. What I consider to have been completely absent from his performance that night was any arrogance or undue showiness. I’ve seen the argument that he is an entertainer, not a musician. So let me put it this way: all professional musicians are entertainers. Daniel Barenboim – whom I have also seen in concert – is an entertainer.
They don’t earn money otherwise.
What I particularly appreciate about Lang Lang is that he places a massive amount of importance in enticing other people to play. It’s why he has a really well thought out sheet music collection for people who want to play the piano. It’s why he plays some wonderful music from Disney movies. I’m looking forward with interest to hearing how he handles Saint-Saens No 2 which is one of my favourite concertos.
The thing is he, and Yuja Wang, kind of stand out as the first great, great Chinese concert pianists. I sometimes wonder if they earn greater attention because they are not white men pianists from patrician backgrounds. You see it with women in general – often held to much higher standards purely for being women than corresponding men are. There is a famous study on recruiting women to orchestras.
Playing the piano is very much subjective. It’s for this reason I listen to several recordings now of any piece I am earning. Key example at the moment is Le Cyclopes by JP Rameau. My preferred version of that is Vikingur Olafsson’s recording. It is imperious and bright. I also listen to Grigory Sokolov’s arrangement of it too which is less emphatic, but no less compelling. I wonder how they approach this. On a far less ambitious level, I am working on one of Mendelssohn’s Gondola songs at the moment (I have plans for an entry for that but currently lack the time to build it). But I look at the story I want to tell myself there. I see the gondola on the canals of Venice. I have a story being described. [Procreate Dreams has been released so I will learn to animate]. Is the story that Vikingur tells very different to Grigory’s film? I don’t know.
But I have to think about this.
All that to say though, that no one really has the definitive view of how to play the piano and some randomer on Reddit or PianoWorld isn’t really the sole arbiter of anything. Liberace and Viktor Borge were complete entertainers but they had the classical chops too. Not one or the other.
Which takes me back to the question of what do I do about a video channel? I don’t know. Ultimately I’d like people to want to play the piano after watching it. But not to constantly demand Misty as one young man called Craig did to me in a bar in Germany one night when I was 18 years old. Play Misty, Treasa, can’t you play Misty?
I still have no idea how to do it so, sorry Craig, it is not going to happen.
Someone found some sheet music at a brocante a few weeks ago and picked up a couple of pieces for me. 2 Polonaises, Opus 40 was one of them.
Sheet music for Chopin’s Opus 40, a couple of polonaises
I kind of like that the editor was Henry Litolff. But that’s by away of an aside.
ON a separate but related note, lately, I have been fighting an internal battle on the question of markings. Fingerings. Emphasises and things like this. Basically, when I was a child doing RIAM exams, there was a painful experience of many months attempting to decipher a piece of music, convert it into something remotely recognisable. My piano teacher had a pencil, and what I considered old lady handwriting at the time. My exam books tended to get covered in pencil markings around fingerings and the notes that I consistently misread, and much more than anything, the dynamic markings. A week before the exam, an eraser was carefully applied and the markings all removed. To this day, I hate marking sheet music with any markings at all. This, from what I can see is completely counter to the practices I see around the internet. I sat through practice planning with ToneBase lately and someone noted that of course you should keep your markings, why would you DO all that work and not be able to access it if you set the piece aside and wanted to come back to it months or even years later.
I see the logic. But I don’t want to write on it so my markings tend to go on my digital copies of the music on my iPad. And I am clearly just not used to it.
What does this have to do with Chopin? Well, when I opened the sheet music pictured above, I see the markings. They are (this is awfully familiary) in pencil. And I can only read some of them.
Forte?
Molto forte?
There are definitely far fewer markings than was on my K545 back in the day. I’ve never tried this. I should.
From what I can see, the person who used this before I got my hands on it only played No 1. There are no markings on No 2.
I’ve found that between this and the couple of second hand sheets I bought myself lately (Hummel and Guastevino amongst other things), I’m starting to get fascinated by it. I’d love to know about more second hand sheet music shops.
I did a recital at the end of October at my current place of employment. I also agreed to play on the recital at the end of November. I have no idea what I will play and I have a chronically overwhelming lifeload for the next few weeks.
My brain is refusing to cooperate on all sorts of things. Bach, for one thing. Planning for the next six months, which has implications for the Grade 6 plans for end of Q1. I have a brand new notebook beside me for that, and calendars and stuff like that but the ideas for what I want to do are currently in a high security jail in side my head.
And I am afraid to even touch the piano. I don’t know if that is JSB’s fault (it’s hard to blame a man who has been dead for more than 200 years) or whether it is mine or whether it is linked to a whole pile of other stuff. Net result is the practice account is empty for the week. This is a pity on two fronts; one I made no progress on the piano and two I’m also berating the hell out of myself. About the only thing I did do was tidy the sheet music library (the printed one):
Lovely tidy sheet music organised alphabetically
Oh and I found lots of lovely music in D Flat. More about that below.
Because we passed from October (that month flew), a new set of Piano Jam pieces went up on r/piano. I tend to look at that list with a view to using it as sight reading fodder which is something I managed once and then found a long searched for piece of music. Somehow I missed the three monthly list that went up in October (despite catching the Tiersen that I genuinely intended to do for that month but never got around to) and it has George Winston’s arrangement of Carol of the Bells, together with a link to MusicNotes. I have mixed feelings about MusicNotes and nKoda (I really don’t much like the subscription model) and it’s not clear to me with all the “you can only print once” or “you can’t print at all” how much this is really musician friendly. I don’t tend to want to print the stuff I have on Henle but nKoda and MusicNotes, and Sheet Music Plus are really in your face about that. I have downloaded a couple of pieces from Stretta and they had some version of the Carol of the Bells arranged by George Winston sans prelude. I have no idea when I can possibly start it and it will hopefully go into my forScore.
Rather irritatingly, on the first real day off I had in months, ie, I didn’t have to do anything, go anywhere, be anywhere, I was sick and I was effectively useless for 2 days for anything that involved concentration. Very unhelpful. I had hoped to get past the problems with the Bach that stands between me and the Rameau that I want to start sometime after Christmas, and clean up bits of the pieces for the exam which I had initially scheduled for March on the basis of regular practice which is just not happening since about the second week in October.
This has an impact on the planning for the following exam which includes a grade skip to 8. Like grade 5, Grade 8 is a gatekeeper grade in that unless I pass that, I cannot go onto the diploma programmes. I’m fifty and horribly afraid I won’t be up to Chopin Sonata III which is my plan for the FRSM in about 10 years time. It frustrates me and worries me. I get nervous about it.
My plan was to be more or less finished the finger/learning/memorisation work for the Grade 6 pieces by around Christmas and to continue polishing them for 2-3 months while starting some basic work on one or two of the four pieces for Grade 8. But I got impatient and looked at the Rachmaninoff sometime recently, mostly to investigate it for murderously big chords (there are two that I will need to roll) and to see how hard it was to read. It’s a measure of how differently my mind works that in fact, I don’t find it harder than the Bach that is eating into my self esteem. So at some point this week I watched a Tonebase webinar on planning piano practice for the next six months and I really need to start nailing down actual practice session goals.
I just wish I wasn’t missing so many. It’s like the piano is laughing at me.
Things in D Flat
For Grade 8, one of the pieces is in D flat, the aforementioned Rachmaninoff. For this, I’ve at least started two exercises that tend to support the playing of stuff in keys I don’t usually think in, the scales and improvisation. Because I somehow played stuff in C sharp when I was a teenager (by ear, so who knows, it could actually have been in D flat) my fingers fit the shape and improvisation and scales fit okay. I read through the Rachmaninoff, and I keep forgetting that G is flattened. What would be helpful would be other things in D Flat.
Reader, there are other things in D Flat. This for example:
Christan Sinding Rustle of Spring
Have I already mentioned this last week? I think so. Anyway, there was also a piece by Cecile Chaminade. We’re not talking about other things in D Flat that will make the Rachmaninoff any easier.
So I will probably finish off the C major Prelude by Bach (not the stuff that is keeping me awake at night) and transpose it into D flat. I’m not sure how much that will help but I think it might be complex enough to force me to write it. Someone told me the jazz guys, or at least the good ones could all play all of Well Tempered Clavier in any key they liked.
It’s just occurred to me that I haven’t played the piano since I went to hear Vikingur Olafsson play last week. I’m not sure why.
In the meantime, my brain is currently attacking me with the following: “Do All the Bach”. “Do all the Rebikov” = Oh Rebikov, I forgot to mention that. There’s a piece on the Grade 6 repertoire. Some days it goes beautifully, other days there is open warfare between my fingers and the piano. Isn’t the word mercurial? But also, a few years ago, Pianist Magazine listed one of his pieces, Yolka? Waltz from the Christmas Tree as a nice idea for Christmas, not too taxing. I should like to learn that. And the Carol of the Bells. Do the Carol of the Bells. Do all the sightreading from the November piano challenges. Do bits of the Chopin Ballade in G minor just for the pure hell of it. And you can start that Rachmaninoff.
LEAVE ME ALONE.
Oh and there is that waltz that Gregory Sokolov plays as an encore from time to time. And Le Matin by Tiersen which I was supposed to do in October on the side while working on the exam pieces as well.
WAILS IN PAIN.
I know the best thing to do is sit in front of the piano and at least do some of the Bach so that it goes forward. But I also want to plan. And I need a mindmap to get all of these cries out of frustration.
May I recommend Dvorak’s Piano Concerto if you are looking for something different to listen to?
