Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Achievement of the week - what got you excited?

Andy, I laughed so hard too. Wouldn't be funny if there was actually such update from your wife.

My recital is in May 2011. Yeah, these are big pieces for me. It’s been taking while to learn them partly because I am busy and also I am lazy. I got myself a teacher so that someone else will put pressure on me. I’ve been with piano long enough that I know how to practice. It’s just “doing” is the hardest part. It’s much easier to play around Christmas songs than working on difficult 2 or 3 measures concentrating for a couple of hours trying to get it. My usual pattern is to start that sort of true practice the night before my lesson. My new year’s resolution is to include at least 3 days of real practice in my piano playing routines. Let’s see…

TMID: (your name is really long!!! )
I'm working on improving my practice sessions too -but I'm also making sure I do a bit more "playing" I've got to keep my hard-learned pieces in my memory bank!

MaryBee I was wondering if Andy was wondering if he was going to have more news! lol....

JimF...... "Hello, My name is Jim, and I'm a sheet-music addict."
I'm glad you straighted out the mystery! I was feeling my book wasn't up to snuff! I'm so tempted to get more of the Dan Coates books, but I really need to wait a bit. I've already got alot of material (much of it given to me as gifts) that I can't really play!!!

You must be having fun shopping for your piano! I think my hunt was simplified by my space and budget constraints! I got the best piano for me at this moment..."fairly" quickly. It has taken me about a month but I finally feel I'm "almost" used to it! There are still some moments when I'm very startled at how loud it is. However, I also find it very interesting that I have almost NO interest in using the silent feature. If I'm dying to play late at night, I will... but for the rest, I'd almost rather not play than use the head phones. The silent sound is decent enough... but it just isn't the same thing.

I seem to have rambled a bit there.... oh well, just feeling in a good mood and a bit chatty.

Achievement of the week- today, I was able to play Chopin's Farewell Walrz from memory for the first time! That is big for me because memory is my weakest link. I like to memorize because even though I use sheet music when I play, I play much better when the piece is memorized.

I've been working on a little prelude by J.S. Bach, BWV 930. Most of the sonatinas I work on consist of melodies made up of scales passages, familiar broken chords, and basic I, IV, and V harmonies. By contrast, the pieces by J.S. Bach that I've studied are filled with intervals that are not very familiar to me, and there is a lot of awkward (awkward to me, that is), moving "deeper" into the white keys (toward the fallboard) to be able to better reach black notes. The result is, whereas I need few fingerings written in for the sonatina literature I've studied, I usually write in fingerings for every single note for J.S. Bach's pieces.

Anyway, I recently came across a book on the history of keyboard technique. In this book, there is a photograph of BWV 930, written in Bach's own hand, with Bach's own fingering for practically every note. Supposedly, this is one of the few pieces still in existence with J.S. Bach's own fingering. I compared Bach's fingerings with what I had written in, and lo and behold, except for two notes, all of the fingerings matched! So, this was a long winded way of saying perhaps I'm getting a better intuition for good fingering (hopefully).

It's a small victory, but I'll take what I can get!

Thinking like Bach - that's an excellent achievement of the week!

How cool that you've got a photo of BWV 930 written in Bach's hand! and even better that your own fingering pretty much matches his!

In my Christmas book, there is a photo of the original handwritten Silent Night, which I thought was pretty nifty.

i took my grade 6 practical exam today and it went ok, no major slip-ups, just a couple of missed notes. So relieved it is over, think i did enough to pass, we shall see. My hand was shaking at one point but i managed to keep my cool! I'm looking forward now to taking a break and just playing new pieces.

GTPI - I had to go look up Chopin's Farewell waltz... It is very pretty - are you going to record it for us?

Piano U1 - CONGRATS! Mastering your nerves in an exam is a tough thing to do - I bet you feel very pleased.

Have fun relaxing with new pieces!

thankyou Cheryl.

i am too computer illiterate and much too shy to post a recording. But I will post a recording someone made of the band I play flute in:

http://ptmvideo.blogspot.com/search/label/Family%20Events

We played Sunday night and I am in the second flute chair to the left of the director. I had to angle the flute out a little so I wouldn't hit the person next to me.

PianoU1
Congratulations on your Level 6. I'm working on 5. Haven't done any of the exam process but that seemed like a good place to start. What repertoire pieces did you play?

thanks WB.
beethovens bagatelle in d
jennifer linn - a lighthouse in the fog
kabalevsky - variations in d

A small woooohooo

My teacher liked the Chopin E minor AND the Khatchachurian piece at yesterday's lesson, so I won't be playing those for her any more. And she liked Sound of Silence too and wants me to keep working on it. She got me a book of jazzy Vince Guaraldi Christmas tunes that I'm going to work on too.

My name is Jim, and it has been 1 day since I bought sheet music

Oh, and I was right, it was too good to be true - turns out there are two Bach G-minor minuets and she wanted me to work on the harder one. Oh well, I'll finish up the easier one first, and then tackle the other. I guess you can never get too much Bach. She is also going to pick out something juicy for me to start in on next week.

Cheers

QTPI (I just figured out your name!! lol).... What a fun video - nothing like playing in a concert band! I played bass clarinet for 5 years and learned so much. Thanks for posting it!

Jim, I agree, you can never get too much Bach. (And let us not forget there are several Bachs - his sons also composed!)
Congrats on being 1 day clean Jim, hang in there for day two.

.. took me a few seconds, then LOL! I suspect this is a running gag here but I haven't seen it before. Made my day
Admitting the problem is the First Step. The second step is...?

It is hard to believe how much music Bach was able to write in his lifetime!

Thanks for sharing, Canonie! I love your ideas for the piano journal!! (Mine would read something like: Mon.- played all wrong notes, swore heavily. Tues.- played mostly wrong notes, but only swore twice. Wed.-got through entire practice without cursing. Thurs.- actually played the notes I supposed to play! Fri.- somehow 'forgot' the song again, back to square one, profuse cursing.

NPGal That's a great start you've made on your journal In a real journal you could ask the very pertinent question of "what were you up to on thursday night eh?" Was wine involved perhaps? or rock-climbing? And there you go - Friday is explained

Not really an achievement but I got my new repertoire piece this lesson. And that wasn't a surprise since we'd already talked about it. Anyway, I will now be torturing my family with
Chopin's Waltz No. 10 in B minor, Opus 69 no. 2.

My teacher has also told me she is going to "torture" me this coming semester to fix my technique And she's throwing some theory in ... I already have a good grasp but she wants to start from close to the beginning just in case I've missed / forgotten anything along the way. That doesn't bother me but it's amusing when I had to correct her on a chord she still wants me to start near the beginning. It's all good!