Apps for the piano playing iPad owner

One of the most useful and also, most frustrating, aspects of modern life is the absolute proliferation of tools that don’t quite do what you are looking for. But from day one, one of the truly promising things about tablets or iPads was the potential for digital tools to support music. I didn’t get with it all that quickly but I want to touch on some of the the apps I use and comment on why I made some decisions for now.

For sheet music, I use two apps. I use the Henle Digital Library, and I use forScore. I use Henle because they sell me the music that I want, digitally, and it’s mine. I also have a vast (for me) collection of their blue Urtext editions and the third album of classical music that I bought was a Henle edition of the Chopin etudes. I haven’t learned much from it, but I love it. The application is great, it has all their music and so far, I haven’t any complaints about using it. It’s just, it has Henle music and only Henle music. If you look at my piece on going back to the exam world, you’ll see some music which is not on the Henle library, namely Indigo Moon by Elissa Milne and Autumn Leaves by Vladimir Rebikov. Indigo Moon I downloaded from Stretta Music for a small some of money and my local sheet music shop ordered the Rebikov for me.

In theory I can move any of the Henle purchases to forScore but I don’t see the point. Any other music I have (some by Olafur Arnalds and the odd thing I pulled from the IMSLP) I put into forScore. Already, this is tidier than Apple Books even though in theory, you know, all I need is a pdf reader. Both apps allow annotation, with the Apple pencil and both of them have the hellscape that is a Metronome Nagging Machine integrated.

The other app I use mainly for practice journaling is Andante. I like that this does stuff I cannot get a project app to do in terms of tracking and measuring time, dropping brief notes about the session, a larger practice journal which I don’t tend to use much because in theory, that’s what this blog is about. I find it handier to use my phone for this but I paid for the app (there is a free version) which means it syncs up with the iPad it’s installed on. I’m especially interested in tracking that to see how much work it takes me to get the Bach invention that I am supposed to be working on up to reasonable scratch. I started other pieces before I started using Andante.

Current projects

I decided a couple of months ago that I had not really achieved anything very much for me personally; don’t get me wrong, I did some amazing stuff professionally, but personally, I was not feeling super great about myself. So, I started looking at things I had wanted to achieve when I was about 12 years old (a long time ago now) and whether they were truly gone, or whether there was still a chance. The figure skating gold medal is a non runner.

The children’s book, could yet happen.

And then there were the piano exams.

I stopped at Grade 5 at a time when Grade 8 was the ultimate pinnacle of piano playing. I’d done the exams with the Royal Irish Academy of Music local centre set up and it’s fair to say, I didn’t totally enjoy the experience. I still have some of the repertoire books at home, possibly grades 3, 4 and 5. Fur Elise turned up for one of them which was a relief, and Sonata in C major, K545 Mozart. But I was traumatised by pieces by Bartok and Kabelevsky at times. The Kabelevsky, I have totally blocked out of my mind and I found the Bartok on YouTube once. To be frank, I didn’t find the repertoire engaged me very much although my mother liked a little Sonatina in G written by someone whose name I can’t remember. The point is, the repertoire offered to children needs to keep them engaged with the repertoire. On this, the RIAM’s exam options in the 1980s failed with me. This is a pity.

But now I’m fifty and I want to see if things have changed. Also, I am on r/piano on Reddit and they don’t talk about RIAM much, and anyway googling it failed to give me access to the current grade repertoires. I got to five so I would have been interested in 6. I found something called the RCM which had huge lists as options for each grade, and I got very excited until I realised they are based in Canada. So I looked for the UK based academies and landed on ABRSM, the Associated Boards of the Royal Schools of Music. Interestingly, they had more or less just introduced performance diplomas which you record and upload to their exam site, and they had interesting repertoire. You did three pieces from assigned repertoire and chose a fourth yourself. In this way you could avoid the less attractive sight reading and aural tests. So I got planning.

If I wanted to do the diplomas, I had to pass Grade 8, and if I wanted to do Grade 8, I needed to pass Grade 5 Of Some Description. It’s possible that the Grade 5 I passed about 35 years ago with RIAM might be adequate but that involved some soul searching and archive searching on my part. I decided that it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to do the Grade 5 theory and went about checking how far behind that I was. Around a grade, it turned out. And then I found music on the Grade 6 list that I either had lined up to learn anyway, I figured I was a bit shy of Grade 8 for a while anyway so it would be no bad thing to do Grade 6 and then review whether to go straight to Grade 8 or give Grade 7 a shot. Or, even, abandon the whole shooting gallery. So I’ve been studying Grade 5 theory; I’m confident of passing it now but naturally, my ambitions have increased and now I want an distinction. I also know what my two main weaknesses are. So I’ll write a piece on preparing that separately.

For Grade 6, I’ve chosen the following pieces:

  • Invention no 6 by Bach
  • Venetian Gondola Song no 6 19b by Mendelssohn
  • Indigo Moon by Elissa Milne
  • Feuilles d’automne, no 3 by Vladimir Rebikov.

The first three come from the syllabus lists for Grade 6 which you will find here, and the Rebikov is the self chosen piece because I realised that Reverie by Debussy was probably more suitable for the Grade 8 exam. One of the objectives here is to span a reasonable amount of time in musical history and I think I achieved that.

So at the moment, I’m focusing on the Grade 5 theory for most of my effort with almost daily practice littered across the four performance pieces. The Mendelssohn has cropped in a monthly playing challenge so I will probably prioritise that for the month of June and see if I can finish that at least. I like it a lot, and then I’ve made a lot of progress on the Milne. Less happy, but also, less time devoted to it are the Bach and Rebikov. I hope to record the exam session for that in February 2024. After that, the current plan, pending time and organisation, are

  • Grade 8 (partially planned)
  • ARSM (partially planned)
  • LRSM (repertoire planned)
  • FRSM (repertoire planned)

We will see how it goes, I guess.

Where I am at now.

I’m not entirely sure why I stopped writing in here and I was without a piano for a while.

In August, I moved from Luxembourg to Brussels so the Roland digital which I was using in Luxembourg went back to its home and I had an 8 month period sans piano. Well, I bought a piano at the end of January but it was 2 months before it was delivered.

The new piano is another digital because I still live in an apartment, a Kawai CA-59. I love it. In preparation for it I bought a lot of sheet music to mess around with. It occurs to me that possibly I need to organise the sheet music better. This is not actually straightforward because I was hoping there’d be some sort of cloud application that you could point at and say “I have these books” and it would automatically list all the contents. Now, it’s not a big problem with piece specific scores like the concertos but I have the best of Ludovico Einaudi and several books by Yann Tiersen as well as a bunch of Rachmaninov. And also, do I need to list all the the Chopin Etudes? Yes, actually.

So this works if you have all your sheet music digitally. However, I don’t. Most/all of mine is in printed format. So I looked at the book apps like Goodreads and LibraryThings. Not really great either. Mostly I want to use this to track what I am learning. An Excel Spreadsheet is lining up for duty I fear.

Of course this doesn’t include the music I arrange for myself so yeah. And that will all only ever be digital and printed on my laser printer. This is mostly possibly because I bought Notion for iPad and it’s a side point for the time being.

In addition to that, I’ve been considering the need to do some goal setting and planning for how to arrange things and now I’ve realised that I tried to do something like this when I built this site. I’m rather embarrassed by that so will look at a different way of setting goals and objectives offline.

Dreams and a new year

Some time before Christmas, this cropped up on my youtube recommendations.

We don’t get Pianist Magazine here and being somewhat concerned about moving, I tend not to go for postal subscriptions. But I figured I had a couple of trips to Ireland so if I got lucky, I’d pick up that magazine and if not, I’d do a one off online order for it. I liked that piece a lot. It seems I like certain waltzes as my queue of music to learn includes a Sib waltz and there is the ongoing behemoth Valse Fantaisie and I’ve got a transcription of the Masquerade Waltze by Khachaturian as well.

But I have no hope of actually learning any of these things without a bit more work.

2018 had some high points. I performed in public again for the first time in a few years; I played a few beautiful pianos, some more than once. I fell in love with a Steinway; I won’t ever be able to afford it. And I built this site with a view to working harder. Some of the work happened but not regularly, so objectives and goals were either not met, or were interrupted.

So for 2019, the overall objective is to get more work done, more technical improvements, and a couple of pieces finished or pushed forward. There are two big pieces I want to learn which are challenging and long term projects.

Hard pieces

  • Ballade No 1 in G Minor – Chopin
  • Valse Fantasie – Glinka/Gryaznov

Less hard pieces

  • Valse Triste, Sibelius
  • Sur Le Fil – Tiersen
  • Valse d’Amelie – Tiersen
  • Nocture in C#m – Chopin
  • Christmas Tree – Ribokov

From a technique point of view, I have some Hanon and Czerny to work on. After that, no skillset issues – keep practising sight reading and relative pitch exercises and continue auxiliary reading.

performing

5 December, concert at work. I volunteered despite the fact that the previous time I did it, I had been terrified. In a way, I did it because it did terrify me. I sometimes wonder about my motivation. 

I sit at the piano; in this case, a rather lovely K Kawaii which I imagine is around 20 years old. The previous time I did this, my hands shook so much I could not fix them; this time, they shook too. But this time, unexpectedly, I could control them. It transpires that talking, however briefly, to an audience, goes a long way towards soothing my nerves. 

And for that reason, I think it went well. 

Gounod’s piano music

I was looking for some choral music today, a piece out of Mors et Vita which I have already loved. Unfortunately I find it hard to find stuff on Google Music sometimes and a search brought up a load of Faust but no Mors et Vita. There aren’t too many recordings of the choral version of it lying around although an orchestra transcription pops up now and again. This is what I was looking for:

It is a great recording. Well worth buying. Michel Plasson did some great stuff with Gounod – I think it’s his recording of Faust I have too. Anyway the choir kicks in after about 2 minutes. Absolutely great stuff. I know this is a piano blog but seriously, you need to have an open mind.

However, Google did reveal that there was a new album of piano music by Gounod lying around, by Roberto Prosseda. I’ve been listening to it since I switched away from the Pearlfishers by Bizet this evening and I have to say it is gorgeous. From the opening La Veneziana, to the variations on Bach’s Ave Maria.

I’m not sure what sort of piano they used for the recording Prosseda seems to use some historic instruments and this has very much the feel of una corda. In particularly, I like this piece here:

It’s the opening track on the album and rather gorgeous. I’m tempted to go looking for it. ETA: Sheet music is here.

 

Christmas is coming and with it, arranging duties

During the year, I volunteered to play at a concert of international music, just a couple of pieces from my home country, and following that, I now occasionally get invited to play again at regular work concerts. I love the idea; I’m not always around but I want to do it because the first time I did it, I had a major attack of the nerves at the keyboards, and it did not go as well as it could have, compared to rehearsals.

So really, I need to do it more often, to cater for dealing with stage fright.

The run up to Christmas sees an interest in Christmas music, and so, I was looking at Christmas carols from Ireland. There are actually very, very few carols in the Irish tradition. A good chunk of the ones actually in Irish are basically translations.

The best known of the Irish carols is probably the Wexford Carol – everyone has had a go at it (there’s a particularly interesting version involving Alison Krauss, for example). It is sometimes called the Enniscorthy Carol as well, another town in the Wexford area. In the Irish language, we also have Don Oíche Úd i mBeithil. After that the options are a little limited.

The Wexford area, however, has another set of carols, which are very tightly bound up in a local tradition. They are called the Kilmore Carols and they are song in the church in Kilmore every year. They used to contain large chunks of Yola, which is a local English dialect, although that has been standardised to some extent, in the intervening years. They have been sung in that church every year since the 1700s and they are sung by a choir of six men. That choir, since the 1700s, has always included at least one member of a local family line. According to research I have done, they used to be sung in most churches in the Wexford area as an annual Christmas habit.

In terms of style, they can be described as a combination of sean-nós and plainchant. There are snippets of them online, and the sheet music has been available for years.

I am still looking at the choice, limited as though it is, and considering which I will arrange for piano. But I am looking forward to playing them.

The death is announced…

I woke up on Thursday to the news that Micheál Ó Súilleabhán was dead.

Micheál Ó Súilleabhán was an iconic musician in the Irish world of music. He worked his way through academia – not a route commonly followed by musicians operating in the trad genre, and he pushed the music forward in ways which I’m sure shocked many people at the time. He put out some iconic albums – for me the Dolphin’s Way was life changing.

Most of the piano players operating in trad world at the time were pretty much background fulfilling the role of a base/percussion filler. Vamping, we called it and it’s all over albums from the 1960s, 1970s, any classic céilí band album. The first person really to do anything to bring the piano to the front and centre; to make it an instrument of melody was pretty much Micheál Ó Súilleabhán. At home alone, I could not really get the hang of vamping and I didn’t see why I should. I played the piano accordion and that was a melody instrument, so why not the piano also? I’m not saying I’m groundbreaking – I wasn’t. But I did things that I heard no one else doing.

The Dolphin’s Way changed all that. To my mind, it is one of the most influential albums of Irish music of all time, and the person behind it was Micheál Ó Súilleabhán. While the Dolphin’s Way was purely piano, he had also done some work with harpsichords on earlier albums.

The piano still isn’t really a central focal point of Irish music. Maybe in a way it is too classical, and most of the training in Ireland certainly is. But the thing is, people came after Micheál Ó Súilleabhán. Caoimhín Vallely for example. And Micheál Ó Súilleabhán pushed the forward and promoted them.

He is an awful loss to music in Ireland, and he was very young when he died. I was deeply shocked by the news.