Repertoire selection, reflections and more

One of the things I do when I finish one exam – okay, it looks like I have done tonnes of them but really I have not – is allow myself to look forward to Exam N+1. In practical terms, this means that when I finished Grade 5, I could select pieces for Grade 8 and now that Grade 6 is done, the next up is ARSM.

I don’t have a teacher at the moment so there is an element of suggesting that maybe I should wait. But I have one very clear criteria about pieces that I prepare for exams and it is this: I have to like them. Thus, I’m going to choose them, and while I’ll take general advice like “cover several time periods”, I’ll not be told what to learn to play. I’m 52 years old I don’t have all that much time to be lived. You can see the current state of affairs in my exam planning here under Goals and Objectives.

The ARSM recital length is 30 minutes. Assuming I go for the highest choices on my list so far, eg, some Brahms, Fauré, Gershwin and Ravel, I have accounted for 21 minutes. So I will look at adding possibly one of Granados’ Goyescas too. I will still need to find something vaguely Baroque and I probably can’t escape Bach this time. Or possibly Scarlatti.

One of the approaches I take there is to just listen to the options. There may some nice things in WTC that appeal, there may be some Haydn. The issue is the time balance. I can’t give 12 minutes to a Bach piece I don’t actively dislike but don’t really want to learn when Pavane Pour Un Enfant Defunt is there and has been on my learning list forever.

In any case, for both Grade 8 and ARSM, learning playlists are being put together and this will hopefully allow me to identify a 5 minute piece that demonstrates depth.

20240824 Practice Diary

It’s been a while since I’ve been practising, sadly. When I got to Hamburg I had not played in about 3 weeks. But I am getting back there this week and what am I working on.

Liszt Consolation Number 2. This is a gorgeous piece of Accessible Liszt for which the left hand starts on a half between the first and second beat. It’s not a polyrhythm but I am finding it a bit counter intuitive. There are moments it comes right for me and I think god, how can I create something so beautiful, and then there are moments it does not.

Rameau Les Cyclopes. I love this and the first page of it is mostly a joy to work with. It’s not listenable (sorry to my Tonic stream audience) as a performance yet as there is a pesky arpeggio in it which must surely have been easier on a harpsichord. So this is very much the subject of slow practice and I need to start putting time in on metronome practice with arpeggios in general.

Repertoire: I keep practising three of the pieces I did for Grade 6 as they are appropriate for, inter alia, playing Steinways in piano stores. Those pieces were by Mendelssohn, Rebikov and CPE Bach. CPE Bach does not work most mornings for some reason and yet it’s the one I use to warm up mostly.

Sight reading: this week I took two pieces from the issue of Pianist sitting on my piano (well one of them =- I have two). It’s the August-September Edition and the two pieces were:

  • Aria by Antonio Fragoso. He was a young composer when he died – 1897 to 1918 so this is basically late Romanticish. It’s a pretty piece in Gminor which makes extensive use of the sustain pedal. Worth a look if you are looking for sightreading practice. Pianist marked it Intermediate
  • Eastern Promise by Melanie Spanswick. This is in A Minor with one or two rhythm tests in it for all that it is a short piece. Again, good sightreading practice if this is a weak point you are trying to fix.

Neither of these pieces are on my 40 pieces challange which has pretty much fallen apart. With 4 months left in the year, I will need to scale that done and reassess how I manage it as a project for next year (or I could star the project a new this week which which case I am 5% in. I will reflect on that the next time I am staring out the window of a bus. At some point, I need to write a bit on sight reading, how I feel about it, and what I want to be able to do.

I did no scales this week. I am a very bad person.

Hothouse flowers

I’m inclined to think that I should spend less time on social media. There’s an ABRSM focused group on FaceBook and during the week, a teacher noted that she had several 8 year olds passing ABRSM Grade 8 and she wanted to know if this happened much internationally.

Leaving aside the fact that the whole grade thing is a British-colony centric thing, the general view was that no, it wasn’t all that common, and additionally, was not positively considered.

There’s no way I would have been ready for Grade 8 at the age of 8 and I was generally precocious. I’m not sure how kids would be able to complete the required Grade 5 theory by that age to be honest. Nevertheless, I assume there are occasional cases.

I don’t have children and I am not a music teacher but I realised a while ago, that as an adult, I didn’t find the streams of tiny children playing Fantasie Impromptu by Chopin to be all that impressive. I mean, it’s impressive for the kids that they can make their fingers do it, but it’s not impressive for the society that causes it to happen. I’m inclined to the Let Children Be Children mode – they should be out playing with friends, getting their hands dirty and all and yet somehow…And childhood geniuses don’t magically appear or spring out of nowhere. An awful lot of work goes into creating one. The question is whether it is a benefit to the child or not…on that I’m not sure the answer is a clear yes.

Not least that for every 100 prodigies which get flagged by the media at an early age, not many of them make it to adulthood as successful musicians. I’m inclined to look more at those who are still playing gifted at the age of 17 or 18.

Meanderings

It’s the last Saturday in July and to be honest, I’m not really sure where this year went, and especially, where the last six weeks or so. I have piano time booked in a couple of hours time and I haven’t been practising so nothing much is going to come out of that.

The opening ceremony of the Olympics was last night and we were gifted the sight of Alexandre Kantorow playing Ravels in what has to be the worst rain storm I’ve seen in Paris. My heart went out to the organisers, and yet…it was a superb ceremony which touched on loads of facets of French life, and not merely the ones thought “worthy”. The right wing are blowing fuses this morning.

I’m not sure what audience I write for here – I don’t push the site much – it’s kind of a place for me to do social media without the social bit, I guess. Lately, Reddit has been depressing in ways that it’s hard to respond to without being heavily sarcastic. So many people want to be able to play the piano; so few of them willing to actually work at it. Yesterday I came across a thread from someone who can’t play, doesn’t want to learn, will not engage a teacher. Bet someone some money they could learn the opening movement of the Moonlight Sonata without lessons, without a teacher.

The main issue I have with people like this is not so much that they have stupid ideas – I still want to learn to snowboard after all – it’s that they think anyone who can play the piano has an obligation to be polite about what is essentially a very impolite question. There are a lot of people who want to play the piano, are willing to put in work but still won’t pay teachers and expect the online community to teach them for free. I don’t see the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk living on vapor but any number of rich people in the tech sector expect other sectors to implode and provide work for free. I’m reading Chip War at the moment which isn’t helping my mood.

Anyway.

My Grade 6 Certificate arrived this morning. It still has HMS Queen as patron on the certificate which feels a bit funny given I grew up in a republic and don’t really like this whole inherited power thing at all. Plus she is dead. But the certificate made me happy when it arrived yesterday. Oh, yes I ordered it, and yes I knew it was coming. But…

I needed it to show up. I get mixed results, especially from people not close to me, when it comes up that I’m back doing piano exams. Why would I bother, people ask.

It’s the tone of voice that really doesn’t help. It can be dismissive. People are impressed that I might play every day (oops to that lately) but the idea that I might align it with a goal….it’s problematic. Rationally, I know I can ignore this but often, it doesn’t do my somewhat fragile self esteem much good.

I’m always delighted when people tell me they are starting any project. It can be further education, or it can be tactile, like building a Lego piece, or training for a triathlon. There’s a point at which it’s important to have goals for yourself. If you’re minded to ask why someone would bother doing something you don’t value, remember they might value it differently.

Sheet Music acquisitions (July 2024)

I was in Paris yesterday so had the chance to go to two sheet music shops. This is dangerous. But I got a couple of things I was looking for. So, I have the Dvorak Humoresques beside me, the Henle edition. I’ve wanted to pick these up after coming across a really nice Barenboim recording and I have this delusion I’ll have time to learn them.

I also picked up Liszt’s second piano concerto – that was something I had failed to find a few months ago, and it was never urgent, per se…I have some more Liszt to report but the last thing I got in that show was Rhapsody in Blue, which I want to do some bits of. Gershwin music is a bit odd, probably because most of it isn’t out of copyright yet so I have an Alfred edition which was apparently restored to his original manuscript. This is that fetish for “Urtext” which I think is fine for music that is two hundred years old, more recently though…it depends….a bit.

From Ariosa, a new to me shop, we have Liszt Consolations, the Budapest edition, Africa by Camille Saint Saens, and his 4th piano concerto. For Africa, it’s the Durand edition (because it was the only one there), and for the 4th concerto, it was the Henle edition, because it was 10 euro less expensive than the Durand edition. The other two books I bought was the Chopin collection of Mazurkas and Liszt transcriptions of Beethoven Symphonies 6-9. The latter is a Dover edition which seems to be easier to get than the Budapest edition.

Strictly speaking I am already learning Liszt Consolation 2 so there is some work there. From the rest, I don’t intend to work too hard any any of them in the short term except possibly the second movement of the Beethoven Symphony no 7.

20240628 Practice Diary

I wasn’t near a piano for around half of this week, so here we are. Not a lot of practice done. But to be fair, I’m at the beginning of my new cycle so it’s not totally tragic.

This week, I started Rameau’s Les Cyclopes. Of the Grade 8 pieces I have chosen, it is my favourite, and the one I really want to learn. It’s got some challenges but I think once I’ve mastered the ones on the first page, the others should fall easily enough. I’m going to give it a couple of weeks on its own, and then, from around mid July onwards, I will add one of the more recent compositions.

Probably the Rachmaninoff, as it’s in D flat, and I have been working on the very nice scales to go with it. I would like if some sort of shape was on the two of them by Christmas and by around September I will start either the Liszt or the Debussy.

In addition to the travelling, it’s been swelteringly hot in Brussels. It hasn’t been totally pleasant to play in. I’m still waiting for the Grade 6 certificate to come through, to mark this year’s second major achievement (it’s less than a year since I put Grade 5 theory away).

In other news I got denied posting access to the ABRSM Exams group on FaceBook. This might have been the biggest achievement of the week. Apparently I didn’t agree to the rules. I don’t remember even getting a request to do so, so *shrugs*. It isn’t life essential at the moment.

Practice Diary 20240622

I’m on a 29 day streak!!!!!! Tomorrow I get another badge in Tonic provided I play in the morning. This is handy because I don’t have a piano for Monday and Tuesday and most of Wednesday.

So, having finished Grade 6, and pondering on what I would do, in the end I did some work on a piece of music by Fazil Say and then switched to Rameau’s Les Cyclopes. The latter is on my Grade 8 schedule and although I hadn’t planned to start that until I came back from Ireland next week, the truth is I could not stay away from that – I have really been looking forward to that piece and I wanted to get started.

So I’ve broken it into pieces and I am working on two pieces of it to start with (maybe 30 minutes in). I struggled with the Fazil Say piece in contrast, made less progress.

When I decided to drop the JS Bach piece in February, I chose the CPE Bach piece because I needed something that would feed into the Rameau. This seems to be very sensible as a lot of what I need to be able to do with the Rameau came out of the Solfeggio too. The primary skill I am missing are efficient baroque trills. I have a trills course via ToneBase and YouTube is probably swimming in them.

Outside that, I’ve been maintaining the Grade 6 pieces – all four of them are handy party pieces.

On the technique front, with the lovely Mr Rachmaninoff on my to be learned list in the next year, the D flat scales are in.

Around practice organisation, I’ve managed to maintain the streak of daily practice by guaranteeing 5 minutes every morning before I go to work. For the last month or so, that was CPE Bach time but now, I think it’ s scales time. I’ve already noted that I have some fun with the D Flat stuff and then I also need to look at some of the D minors. I’m inclined to separate that away from the Grade 8 planning aside from supporting the keys of the 4 pieces I am learning. The breakdown for the next few weeks will be Random stuff, Rameau, and some technique work.

What I will do on my holidays…

I bought some sheets by Fazil Say lately. I’m taking a couple of weeks’ break from my ABRSM schedule as I have some travelling to do during that time as well.

So I have decided for now to start learning this

Brahms in Izmir by Fazil Say

It is really pretty and although it’s not getting hours of my time, it is very lovely to play even in learning mode.