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Hi all,

Eglantine: Nice to know that you're getting hand independence with your piece. About archiving sheet music: I also use plastic wallets to store it. It works for me.

SwissMS: wow, learning piano and German? That must be chalenging.

Lain: I'd love to play with another instrument. And I love violin. Great.

Andy Platt: i'm sure that with some work you and your daughter will make a huge success playing a duet. Playing with kids? Oh, that's for sure a AOTW!!!

GlassLove. I see people here are starting to play in duets. Nice idea, piano and cello is a good combination.

FarmGirl: In Portugal we use Dó, Ré, Mi, Fá, Sol, Lá, Si, instead of CDEFGAB (C is our first note). And that's the system we learned in school.

JimF: Nice to read that you have a real plan to play with other musicians. Great!

Finally, no AOTW for me... just wondering how I will make a record for the recital because I'm far from home and without a piano near me...

Hi all,

I've enjoyed reading about your accomplishments and thought I'd jump in. I started piano about a month ago and have no prior experience, so my accomplishment isn't too exciting, but I'm happy with it My accomplishment this week was to learn to play the C and G major scales hands together. Within the next two weeks I want to learn eighth notes and then start working on my first "easy" classical piece.

No achievement is too small for sharing here. Congratulations on your success! After eighth notes, sixteenth notes?

ATOW - rather gingerly, i am noticing that I have to put more effort in trying to achieve excellence to the best of my ability. I went to my lesson and played the 2nd movement of Beethoven which my teacher has let me work on my own. It's beautiful but I was feeling like, gee, even I got almost had it memorized. In fact, it was getting rather boring. I was thinking that I prefer Rachmaninoff better since there are so many opportunities for discoveries, melody line buried and weaving out both fingers like a gem!

Well, after she heard me once, she told me to play only the melody lines at a certain spot. I said, sure, but you know what it was fuzzy.. I got kind of the melody lines but not all. My teacher started laughing and said, "Isn't it funny? Whenever I ask this, 8 out of 10 times my advanced students (she somehow puts me into this category along with her very capable college students but the only advanced part about me is my age) cannot recall the melody lines". I know why. Because I get into this robot like play mode. I can read the notes, which is not an outstanding accomplishment. If you play the piano for more than 10 years, note reading becomes fairly easy mandane task. Especially, the classical period music. Those composers use lot's of similar patterns that make it easier to read. So what happens is that most of us (me anyway) start sightreading a piece automatically with both hands, leaning on to the top notes, peeking at the music at each cadance preparing for the next sections and just continue to play without thinking. The resulting product is of course not so interesting, sleepy kind of background music. No wonder I could not recall the melody lines! No wonder it sucked (sorry). No wonder I did not find gem in the piece when I played it - because I was like a robot actually worse than a robot (I dont' have their precision).

My teacher played the piece emphasizing the melody.. It was night and day. I did a bit of HS for the first time since I started playing the piece at home. Remarkable difference. I thought why didn't she tell me before I waste all this time. Then I thoguht, perhaps, she might have wanted me to discover this like a bitter pill. Yikes.

Thanks for the anecdote. You remind me of Kenzaburo Oe's usage of the term "robotizing" from his novel A Quiet Life:



To paraphrase, robotizing prevents us from uttering a chain of emotional words in music.

Lain,
I think the book quote summarizes my experience. I have to read the book. Hope I can understand it. Thank you for your insight.

You will enjoy it and probably more so than me since you could read it in the original language. Also of interest is that one of the main characters plays the piano. The piano lessons are described beautifully, as expected of a Nobel laureate.

Welcome to this forum and congrats on that achievement!

My AOTW was that my teacher didn't had any corrections on my play of Granados. Yay!

Now I only have to study the mid section to finish it. It has some repetition in it and it is played slower than the rest of the piece. My teacher already explained how to do it. So I'm quite happy.

Great job, Paperclip!

Jim - I could only find one version of Scarlatti Arioso on line and the fellow playing was wickedly fast...... I've played one Scarlatti but it was quite slow and gentle (also a 1 pager) - let us know how you do with this one.

Andy - great "reading ahead" - I'd say your accomplishment is one to be proud of. I know I'm not ready to jump in to a situation like that - maybe someday!!

Carlos - I wonder if a music shop might be able to help you out?
Piano shop near where you are?
I hope you can find a way to record.

KKL83 - welcome! Scales, scales, we have a wave of scales activity lately. I'm still fighting with Bflat, but I'm also moving on and doing A, which is easy-peasy compared to Bflat.
I'm really loving the fact that the scales help me keep my arms loose and relaxed.

Farm Girl - I doubt your teacher wanted you to swallow a bitter pill. Perhaps she was just hoping you would make the discovery on your own, and was trying to give you time to get the idea.

PaperClip - great news! I hope we get to hear it when you are ready!

I'm working on my little Margaret Miers Ragtime piece (I said Jazz before, but it is an easy rag), a Spanish sounding piece from Dennis Alexander (La Serenata) and now a Waltz by Kabalevsky. Very cool.

This week my teacher and I did a lot of sight reading together - she played the bass I played the treble. the purpose of this was to help me with getting used to playing along side someone else so that when friends are over I feel more up to speed joining in.
I've also started working on my Christmas music. It is nice to see that last year's book is a bit easier now!

edited to add: I'm also doing A LOT better with the pedal - my husband keeps saying..."That sounds different, fuller, richer" - he's very entertained. (so am I!)

So he is a Japanses and Novel laureate, wow. I will order it through Amazon Japan and read it in my folks house during my vacation. I will go out there on Dec 17.

Sometimes I don't know what world I've been in:) The forum is very educational. Thank you Lain.

CAS - you are right. My teacher is a sweet old lady. This year, she has not asked me to do any Christmas music yet. I am crossing my fingers. May she forget about Christmas music this year.

KKL - welcome to the forum.

Paperclip - good job.

I now have to go back to work.

Thank you all for the warm welcome. I'm looking forward to learning. This forum has been a great source of motivation and information for me.

Farmgirl,

Your post reminded me of a discussion here on PW a while back about really listening to what we play. Someone wrote that what we "hear" is some mixture of what we think the piece sounds like, what we've heard in the recent past, and lastly the actual sounds we are producing. The point was that it takes a lot of effort to really listen to just the sounds we are actually making (or not making). We can go on for quite a while thinking we sound different than we actually do.

Maybe that was happening with you. Those melody lines were there in your head but you weren't really bringing them out in the playing because you were not really "hearing" that they were missing.

I know this happens to me. Sometimes when I record something I've worked on for many many repetitions I am amazed at what I hear, or don't hear, on the recording. I often think I should record more often just for this reason alone.

Andy - What a ham, showing off in front of the kids again. (just kidding, I'd probably freeze up)

Carlos - If you miss the recital submission, you can always record something for the Piano Bar

Paperclip - Good job on Granados - I'm so impressed you can play that. I was hoping to ask my teacher if I could consider one of his easier pieces - maybe "Dedicatoria".

KKL - No need to be shy about your accomplishments. Beginners actually have more to celebrate than folks with a year or two under their belts - they face new challenges almost daily in their practice. Very exciting stuff, so don't forget to fill us in.

Cheryl - Ha! I saw the same guy's Scarlatti. Don't think I'll be shooting for that tempo, but its the right piece. With all the scales, three pieces, plus Christmas music it sounds like you are back in full swing after the summer lull.

I sight read a pop piece last night - Jimmy Buffett's "A Pirate Looks at Forty" - one of the songs I know my Christmas group likes to play. It went ok, although I wouldn't really call it sight reading. More like just slow reading with occasional on-tempo burts. Oh well, it was fun anyway. ~~ Mother, mother, ocean... I have heard you call...~~ Did I mention this was also a sailing crowd? Yep, in fact that's one of the things that brought a bunch of us together.

Thanks Lain, Casinitaly, JimF and Farmgirl.

Yea you are right, Cas. I should do the online recitals. Until now I never have played for anybody, which is actually a shame.

JimF, Albéniz op 168 no 1 is a beautiful prelude and not so difficult. It isn't in the Imslp database. But if you like it, I will try to upload it.

I realize this quote is from the first page of the thread but it sort of sums things up for me right now - except that the week is most definitely not young. Its late Friday night. I'm about this far away (imagine my fingers almost touching) from starting a "Lack of achievement, what got you bummed" thread. We're supposed to put things in perspective by focusing on what we have accomplished in this thread but since I haven't gotten anywhere lately I'm going to try to achieve the reality check by looking at why I haven't made progress in quite some time and why I shouldn't be so hard on myself for it. I haven't managed to learn/memorize anything new since March. Today I was trying to play something I learned quite some time ago and I keep getting stuck. My concentration has been very poor and I've been avoiding sheet music because its been hard to look at (migraine auras have been messing with my vision a lot lately). I think most of my trouble has all come down to stress and I've decided I'm not going to let frustration over what I haven't accomplished this last few months add to it. That would just give me more migraines anyway. March was when the snowball of stressful events started so it only makes sense that it was where I "left off" on my progress and since everything seems to have quieted down I'm going to try to just take a deep breath, be excited that I have at least stayed on the MOYD list and trust that I'll actually have something to report here soon.

Well, that's an achievement! Congrats!

I hope you get better soon. Just don't give up the piano. Better times will come.

Little Blue Engine - it's commendable that you've stayed on the MOYD track despite your challenges. I hope you can find a way to let piano relieve your stress... certainly not add to it!

To all who are playing duets, etc... that sounds sooooo fun. My wife plays piano (better than I)... I'd like to find some fun pieces for four hands for us. Other than cello, what instruments do you think go well with piano for duets? (I happen to love the sounds of cello, and no-so-love the sound of violin...)

My AOTW is getting my sonatina up to speed and occasionally "major defect free". I'm also finally playing - albeit rockily in the second half - through Bach's minuet in G, hooray! I've loved that piece ever since I first heard a recording of Segovia playing it on guitar.

At today's lesson I started on another sonatina by Clementi. I *think* that I'm getting faster at reading/learning since it seemed like I was picking it up much faster this time. It'll be interesting to see how the next few weeks go... whether learning the whole piece (actually just one of the movements) continues to go faster than last time, or whether today was an illusion.

Note added: guess what else I was assigned today? Yep, you guessed it - more scales. B and F#. And please work harder on the ones I already know.

Great job, bessel!