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.
Last night, to get to a wonderful rendition of Bruch’s first violin concerto, I had to sit through a work called Feast During a Plague by Sofia Gubaldulina. I’ve never heard of her but with Bruch and Prokofiev on the menu, I had filed the piece under “how bad can it possibly be” and bought the ticket anyway. The other two pieces were worth the ticket price. This was not. In answer to “how bad can it possibly be”, the answer is truly, unequivocably awful.
Apparently some people – I don’t know who, whether they really exist or how high they were – have called her the world’s greatest living female composer. I have no idea why. I really have no idea why. I don’t know how the orchestra suffered through it and I believe they have to again tonight in Charleroi. For the first time in my life in a concert hall, with a high quality orchestra on the bill, I heard an audience boo a performance. This is highly rare. If they got applause, it was for suffering through this piece.
I loathed it. I’ll admit I’m not a fan of much atonal output anyway – I think it’s self indulgent trash for the most part, and this was utterly devoid of a melody. It had some structure yes, but who cares when ten minutes in you’re wondering when the torture is going to be over. When you see her name being mentioned in sentences with Shostakovich, it’s the sort of stuff that makes me vomit. Shostakovich – whether you like him or not – wrote singable melodies. The second movement of his second piano concerto is a truly beautiful thing (if not the rest of it) and in one of his Jazz Waltzes he has given us a truly amazing short work whether you hear it played by an orchestra or a piano or two (there are a fair few transcriptions around), it is wonderful to listen to.
There is a recording of this Gubaldulina work somewhere on YouTube where at least one of the ten commenters described it as “lovely”. It is anything but. It is unmelodic, harsh discordant mulch with too much running around by the percussion crew. We use the world “lovely” to describe Rachmaninoff’s 18th Variation from Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. We use the world “lovely” to describe Puccini’s arias. We do not use the world lovely to describe self indulgent atonal compositions that should not ever have the indulgence of being performed and imposed on a paying audience who would not pay money for it if it were the only work on the bill. I cannot imagine that this is the Gewandhaus’s best selling album by any stretch.
From what I can see, the audience hated it. They were fidgety from about 10 minutes in, and shortly afterwards, they started chatting. There was a large group of bored teenagers in who loathed it. We have one of the top violinists playing Bruch like an angel afterwards but this nonsense lost a bunch of young people. Orchestras need young people. It’s why the hell we have concerts of computer game music all of which is better than this. It’s why we have concerts of Hans Zimmer’s music.
I understand the need to schedule new music. But for the love of god, if that new music is atonal please don’t schedule it with Bruch, or Prokofiev. She might have been a contemporary of him and Shostakovich but it’s no wonder they are known and she is not so much.
I love the BNO. I love the Henri Leboeuf hall in Brussels. I’ve been to some stunning concerts there. But whoever programmed that needs to explain why they programmed that with the Bruch and Prokofiev. It was an awful, awful choice, completely counter to the beauty of the other two. It didn’t complement them. People left that concert hall at the interval (as they do for Bartok symphonies).
Contemporary music doesn’t have to be like this. At the end of the day, if you want to play atonal crap, you have to accept that not a lot of people want to listen to it and without an audience, what is music anyway? Meanwhile, people like Ludovico Einaudi are selling out major arenas as did Ennio Morricone.
You might judge people for liking that simplistic crapola and not being sophisticated to recognise the true genius of Feast During a Plague. But there is a reason that when people are asked who their favourite composer is, it isn’t this that they are answering. Nothing from the atonal world comes close to matching a Bach or Mozart.
This was not music. I never again want to hear it.
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.
That wasn’t today or yesterday. In fact, it was about 35 years ago and I bought it in a music book shop in London. I would give anything to find it again but I suspect it doesn’t exist. In my memory, it was a branch of Oxford University Press but it was, above all other things, a dream world. It had floor to ceiling drawers with mysterious labels. Ladders to get to the higher drawers. Middle aged men having heart attacks as I searched for Rachmaninoff’s name on the drawers.
I wanted two things. This and something else called Grieg’s Piano Concerto. Both of them together were too expensive, so after some no doubt annoying humming and hahing in the shop, I chose Rach. I’m not going to say Rach 2 has always been my favourite piano concerto but I hadn’t heard Saint-Saens 5 by then and Rach 2 is currently my favourite piano concerto.
You can tell this is an old edition. It doesn’t have the standard pic of Rach on the front of which most of the Boosey and Hawkes editions of his concertos do. Also, it is extremely grubby.
I didn’t really realise how grubby it had got until I looked at it today. I took it a lot of places with me. I sat in cars, on rugs, at picnic tables, analysing it, listening to Julius Katchen’s iconic recording and picking out bits of it. We got that from the Great Composers back in the day, on cassette and I recommend it. It’s a tragedy he died so young. The tape lived in my Walkman for most of my teenage years except when I was listening to Jean-Michel Jarre.
One of the girls I knew at choir said the coda was very hard and I would never learn it. She didn’t know it was a coda but the notes were small and there were lots of them. My music teacher did not want to know about it. It’s not like there was an orchestra handy where I grew up. I’m not going to say I was actively discouraged but I definitely was not encouraged.
Looking back, I think this was a pity. Claire Huangci says she learned it at 14. I bet she was encouraged. It’s standard repertoire. There are any number of renditions of it on YouTube. God I would have loved YouTube as a teenager. I just had The Great Composers partworks in cassettes. I learned the opening chords, before I bought the sheet music, from the accompanying magazine. I think my mother donated those magazines. I may regret that now.
I started learning it the summer I was 17. I was doing exams; I had worked my tiny little heart out on chemistry French and maths for two years; I had 2 weeks off before my exams would start and at that point, I didn’t think there was much I could do to improve further my chances in the Leaving Certificate in 1990. I scored two As, 4 Bs and a C back in the day when that meant something (old woman shakes fist at sky about the simplification of the maths syllabus amongst other things) so I probably wasn’t far wrong on that. I knew my theorems and I was the first person in years to do the chemical equilibrium question at my school and I got it 100% correct. I’m not bragging here. I’m about to explain that what I engaged in for the study break was the greatest torture known to a family in Ireland whose piano was in the same room as the TV.
I started learning the second movement of Rach 2. It was in E, a key I preferred to C minor in general (this is still the case). I used to get up, have breakfast, fill a pint glass with Ribena, the sugar filled version, put it on top of the piano, open Rach 2 somewhere in the middle and repeat a few bars endlessly. I must have spent 5 or 6 hours on it on occasion. I have a very fuzzy memory now but I’m certain I had had afternoon practice sessions which lasted 4 hours or more. I cannot imagine the focus I had that allowed me to decipher the notes (sight reading is not my strongest point although it has improved lately), and get myself to a point where I could play around the first – well this is the question. If I look at where I think I stopped, I got about 4 minutes in before I hit the polyrhythms for which I had no help at all and never navigated. But I really didn’t realise it was that far. I almost definitely got about a minute and a half in. There are some notes in the script – not many because mostly I tend to put in things to help to get the rhythm right and after a few years of RIAM and the Leinster School of Music, I have a horror of notes on my script (so I’m totally out of sync with most musicians, it seems) and everything is carefully in by pencil.
Why are we talking about this today? Because I have heard people learning Rach 3 on Reddit and Rach 2 on Tonic and I realised, if they are doing it, why can’t I? I am sure I wrote a bit about some of the people learning Rach 3 and yet I cannot find it quickly. So squirrelled away at the back of my head is that I would pick up the piano concerto again. The same movement – I love it – and start seeing if I could reawaken the memory of what I was able to do when I was 17 years old, drinking Ribena by the pint class. Today, I took it out and looked at how godawful grubby it is. I have the Henle Urtext on my iPad as well but there is some sort of emotional connection between me now (better sight reader and with some tools to deal with polyrhythms) and a girl with a crazy unrealistic dream in a house in the middle of rural Ireland.
I cry tears for that girl sometimes. She had a lot of life before her; I know now what that life included and a lot of it didn’t include a piano which is perhaps a shame.
I can’t still play the first 4 minutes. But I can – almost at will – play the opening page without fault and I can make it sound heart breaking. There is something about I play that which is absent in how I play Mendelssohn, for example. You can pick up senses of it in the Rebikov that I play with affliction when the mood takes me. But the heartbreak in these notes by Rachmaninoff is on a different scale.
I should be learning other exam stuff. I can’t even say how far I will get with this piano concerto this time. It’s mostly way above my skill level when you look at the piece as a whole. But I am now 50, and I can do what I like and what I like at the moment involves pieces of the greatest piece of piano music ever written.
I have blocked my right ear lately – I know this is too much information and yes I have drops and yes I enjoy the absolutely awful sensation of them. Nevertheless, the last time this happened I wasn’t playing the piano.
So practice today has been pretty challenging as only one of my ears is working.
I had some empathy for Beethoven and I am terrified about losing my hearing.
On the practice front, it has been mixed these last two days. I dropped out of Platinum back to Gold on Saturday night in the Tonic Community. Not a disaster but currently I am second which means I will be probably on my way back up on Saturday. The issue here is that I won’t have a piano on Sunday, Monday and most of Tuesday. So I don’t even have to guess but I’ll be staying exactly one week in Platinum again. Last week was the lowest amount of time I spent playing in quite a while.
Mostly today was marked, in addition to half deafness, to having the craziest memory issues that I’ve had. They kind of started on Sunday at some stage, so that the two main pieces that I know more or less by heart were just into roadblocks on occasion. Milne is almost ready though so out of the 4 exam pieces, 3 of them are usually under reasonable control so only the CPE Bach remains to control. That has been challenging with a memory that is just laughing at me.
I will see Alice Sara Ott in concert on Thursday this week (so yeah, I may run out of practice time and not make Platinum after all).
On Reddit there is someone learning Rach 3. He’s 6 years younger than me and he has always wanted to play this. I get the motivation; I want to do it with Rach 2. It’s likely to be a 10 year project if I do it. There are bits I want to have a go at in both it and Rach 4. But I need to do effective planning skills and decision making and I give a pretty decent chunk of that to work. That pays for all the music I buy. And will pay for my grand piano when I buy it. I should blog about those dreams again. I don’t regret letting that last one go but at some point I will want to buy one.
And there are some opening themes in Brahms I that are talking to me at the moment.
It’s 1040 on a Monday night. Really, I should be in bed. But I worked from home today and that disrupted my view of myself and my little world. I did get to practice at lunch time though which was nice.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
