Having written two rants on organisational stuff, I want to touch on where I see skills gaps that I want to resolve over the coming year that support the fluffy “I wanna play anything I want” aspiration we all have when we listen to Chopin.
As noted elsewhere, I have some sight reading fluency gaps. That is to say, the ledger lines still have to be counted and although I drilled them a lot last year, it’s different in actual sheet music rather than on an app while you are getting the bus to work. The other thing I want to fix are ornaments.
There are plenty of resources around for that and one of the things I intend to do is put them into my sheet music sketchbook. It’s a solvable problem and then once that is done, they will need some practice. I expect one of the practice goals to be achieved sometime in the next few days so will put that into the rotation of what I do.
Sight reading demands a bit more effort. I’ve watched enough videos to know that the issue is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of fluency. In short, I need to read more by sight. There are no tricks beyond that other than how to achieve this. Given I’ve just written a rant on the question of excessively devoting time to planning and pussying around with journals and the like, what comes out of this entry might be unexpected.
One of the things I need to make some decisions around is how much time to devote to this. I like to hope that soon, I will not be devoting 45 minutes to Bar 7 of a Bach invention (it’s frustrating given how fast the rest of it will go). I’ve seen some people talk about 10 minutes on sight reading a day, or 30 minutes a week. I’m not sure which one goes faster.
I came across something via reddit this morning: some user pointed at the 40 pieces challenge on Piano World. I dug a little deeper and came up with this blog entry by Elissa Milne. I know this name. She wrote one of my Grade 6 pieces, the jazz piece, Indigo Moon. It’s a lovely piece which will be getting much more of my attention after the dreaded Bar 7 of Bach.
The general idea is to learn at least a piece a week. I liked the underlying thought here because basically, I lived it.
The more students progressed in degrees of difficulty the more their sight-reading skills lagged behind.
Elissa Milne
You should read the piece. It’s an eye opener to know that this has been an issue for about 170 years. It’s one of the week points of the music grade systems in the Anglo Saxon world, I think. That aside.
Where I run into problems – and have done with 100 Days of Practice – is that real life can very often be a great obstacle to dealing with my dreams of playing more Chopin. I get a bit sad when I see people talking about how everyone has the same 24 hours a day. Honestly, the quality of those 24 hours vary dependent on how many of them you have to spend getting money to live on or washing dishes. There’s a reason that there’s a saying Behind every great man, there’s a great woman. Someone had to do the laundry and it wasn’t the man.
So, in reflection over breakfast, I muse on this, and here is one place where planning is truly an investment. It’s not an investment in individual practice sessions but in a series of them. Sure, teachers who engage in this with the kids they are teaching will have a well of resources but for an adult Who Is An Amateur, it’s worth planning this in some way.
There are a couple of useful sources here (and they can be built into a forScore setlist I believe).
- Anna Maria Bach’s little notebook
- Bach: Little Preludes and Fugues
- r/piano piano challenges probably up to level 4 or 5
- The ABRSM lists for grades up to Grade 4
- The TCM lists for grades up to Grade 4
- The RCM lists for grades up to Grade 6
There are books of pieces knocking around. Hal Leonard does one. But I might want to choose freely and there is IMSLP.
Here’s where my inner project manager comes out: pick 40, not including the two easy ones you know already such as the Petzold, and list them in an Excel Spreadsheet. And then tick them off. Put them on the YouTube Channel on a playlist.
We will see how it goes.