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MayBee... I have no words... You made me recall a beautiful moment. Thanks.

Week 80: I took a tip from FarmGirl from her Summerkeys experience. I write out the left hand part for Annie's Song in short hand and then use that to do mental practice away from the piano. For those that are left handed, it may be more effective to write out the right hand part in some kind of short hand. Anyway, it is an interesting and useful thought experiment. Actual practice went better on the day I did that. However, I did find that this kind of mental practice takes concentration and energy. For those short on bench time, but with free time when they can concentrate, at other locations might find it useful.

I again ditch on Songmakers (my local music group). I have missed two in a row and they meet every two months. Sometimes life gets in the way of music. It means that I have some songs in the hopper for four months now, likely going to six months to the next Songmakers. And these are simple arrangements, not classical masterworks.

Have a good week everyone. Cheers.

That's such a beautiful gift. my mom sat next to me and watched me practice when I was a kid. She was very happy to hear me play last time when she visited me here in the States.

Well, I finally recorded and submit the Grieg pieces at the last minute. One was recorded before I went to NY and the other recorded at 2:00 AM on Saturday after a BBQ party since I know I would not be able to do it on Sunday due to church music duty and also another party at night. Hopefully my op-led got it.. I sent her my first batch before I went to NY but it had an extremely bad version of Puck. The one I submitted her yesterday is also not so good but at least less bad than the one I sent her earlier. Have anyone heard from AnnH? Anyways, I sent PM to Cheryl for just in case.

I few days ago I felt like I had to wait for the first lesson of the year to find some motivation...
Then I wrote down a plan for the week (FOYD style, like I did in August) and I'm following it. Not only I recovered from my two weeks away from the keyboard, but I'm even improving again, my Bach's Gavotte is faster (well, less slow) and my Mozart is also growing, even if there are huge differences between sections (from memorized to just read HS); this is by far the longest and most difficult piece I ever tried, so I know it will take time.

MaryBee , what a sweeet image I have of mother and daughter at the piano!

SandTiger -I'm not sure that left-handedness or right-handedness makes a huge difference ....but I do agree on the value of writing out the music!

rnaple: Whizbang is a she? You never know do you I hope you have great fun with your recital work. I've always found it to be a core part of my musical progress.

FarmGirl - I replied by PM - glad your pieces got loaded up despite the technical difficulties!

Torquenale - glad FOYD is working for you! I need to update after today's lesson.

AOTW - not much - I was sick all weekend and (gasp!) didn't even play the piano! (That makes a total of 3 days in 4 years that I've not felt well enough to play)....so my homework was pretty low-key. I said after my previous lesson that I'd been playing a wrong note in the Grieg - well, actually it was a note I'd left out! In order to get it back in I had to change the fingering and I could not get my brain around it. So... given my low level of energy and brainpower, I asked my teacher to coach me through it. What he showed me was (yes, how to do it) but also a new technique for step by step practicing of this sort of problem. I love this teacher - I can so easily see where we're going with instruction.

It was a most satisfying lesson.

Either that or a man with a husband. I could swear I saw a post from her mentioning her husband. That's why I said she.

Maybe I'm just goofed up? I know I've been doing some dumb things lately. My brain is going through a bunch picking up this both hands playing. Major changes.

My AOTW....
One of my songs for the week in Alfred's is: Good People.
It has a little sophistication for the left hand. The kind of sophistication that really clicked with me. Really happy with it and the song. Breaking through a little at a time on the both hands problem.

Ah, I didn't see any husband references

Congrats on the "click" - and be patient on the both hands progress. I find it goes in waves and depends very much on the style of music, but each wave of improvement is very satisfying !

Cheryl, I hope you feel better. I thank you and all other organizer to carry out the themed recital together. Cannot write a detailed comments now as I'm multi-tasking (one compulsory training call on one phone, project update on another and filling the bathtub at the same time). Hope to write more during the weekend.

I'm getting ready for another four days of travel away from the piano. This time a wedding up North. Of course I tried to cram all kinds of (piano) work into last week before my lesson tuesday...with predictable results. I was pretty much a basket case. [ smack hand against head....don't set artificial deadlines...don't set....]

The only saving grace was a nice performace of Misty, which only took me about two weeks to totally revive from the ashes of learning/playing it two years back. And it sounds much better now with better technique and more control. So thats my AOTW I guess.

Hope you are feeling better C. Have a hot drink and listen to some fine music....always cures me.

Hope you are feeling better, Cheryl!

This has been an interesting week for me. My AOTW is getting the Villa-Lobos piece pretty much in hand, and finally getting the feel for the rhythm. I am starting to believe that I can make the November recital with this one.

My AOTM (month) is I am starting to see a real difference in my normal hand position with a higher bridge and better arm weighting, and I can feel non-working fingers relaxing on the keys. Slow play on the Kuhlau is bringing this about. In another thread someone mentioned "releasing restraint" in learning a piece and increasing tempo. Maintaining restraint to keep playing this very slowly and work the runs with accurately prepared thumb crosses has been a struggle, but it has uncovered my weaknesses. Someday these runs will sound like a string of pearls--just not yet. At least I know what to work on!

My AOTW: Relaxation.

My achievement: I started practicing again after about a two week hiatus! Still inching along the Ballade though. I'm starting to tackle/memorize the waltz, and moved my way to the second iteration of the second Theme. My goal is to get this piece memorized by Thanksgiving or Christmas, whichever holiday I decide to visit my parents and my (likely very out of tune) baby grand.

My 1st AOTW is playing for strangers in public (these poor folks didn't have a choice, mind you ), twice.

Boston Street Pianos started officially yesterday, but the logistics of putting out 75 pianos on one day are daunting, I'm sure, so they actually started putting them out earlier in the week. I stumbled across one and then found another as well. About all I have memorized at this point is the portion of Clair de Lune that I've mentioned many times, so that's all I've got to offer.

I played at Boston City Hall, which has one of what I believe is only two grands out of the 75 pianos. It's an enormous open plaza, so very hard for anyone to hear anyway (including even me sitting right at it, with the lid closed). I did get lost near the end and had to back up a couple bars to get myself reset, but it was OK overall.

Only a few people walked past while I was playing, but one woman did stop and offered to take my picture. It's funny, these days I guess one assumes that everyone has a smartphone camera on them? I did, but it is funny how this shift has occurred in the last 5 years or so.

The 2nd piano was a lovely little console right behind the Old North Church. It's tucked into a corner of the exterior of the building in a small courtyard, so the sound is nicely contained and it's a lovely intimate setting with a large fountain nearby. For this one, I got to measure# 15 and realized that... Ugh!, Bb6 was sticking when the pedal was down.

For those not intimately familiar with the piece, measures 15-18 completely revolve around Bb (in both left and right hand), so it's played 24 times in a row. One can't very well skip the pedal here and finesse legato, or at least I wouldn't know how to go about doing so.

That completely threw me for a loop, and also made me realize the degree to which I rely on feeling the keys before hitting them -- which one can't do so well when the key is down in the keybed.

Anyway, I recovered after four awful measures, and was quite happy with the balance of it -- didn't get lost where I did at City Hall just a few minutes earlier. By the time I was done a few people had stopped to listen, some even sitting down, and some of them clapped, which was very gratifying.

My 2nd AOTW was that I'm starting to get less nervous about this. It dawned on me that having pianos dotted all over the place with a cavalcade of strangers wandering by is a truly unique opportunity to expose oneself to public performance over and over again in a very short period of time. I mean really, aside from jotur & others with some sort of regular gig, how many opportunities do we have to perform publicly?

So, I found on the 2nd take that I was much less nervous. By the end I was not thinking about making errors at all, and was able to be completely focused on the music from an interpretation & performance standpoint. And that, felt really good.

I don't have performance anxiety ("oh no, what if I mess up?!") as much as I just get soooo much adrenaline because I'm worked up at the prospect of only having one shot to get it right. I feel that if I do this frequently enough while I have the chance, it will help me tremendously to be more relaxed.

How you are finding any time for the piano given what you are doing with Notable Scores boggles my mind. Good for you to be making progress on this.

If you frequently practise as if you have one shot to get it right it will help you tremendously to get it right with one shot and that will give you confidence.

The rest comes from knowing you can recover quickly from screwing it up. That means finding where you're most likely to screw up and practising starting again from the next beat and on the next beat.

I do try to do this (and I mean really imagining a very particular performance scenario including the venue & audience vs. a generalized "OK, this one is for real" vague intention), and I definitely have adrenaline when I try to really put myself in the moment and somewhat convince myself that it is actually happening. There's nothing like the real thing though!


This, I definitely need to work on. I don't make it a disciplined habit to start from the exact spot that I need to when practicing. I generally go back to the beginning of a section or phrase because I rely so much on the flow of the notes before. Even with what I know of Clair de Lune, if you pointed to a given spot in the middle of a phrase and said "play this one spot", I'd really be fumbling.

I find that recording myself when playing helps with performance anxiety as well. It's a way to "perform" (albeit just for myself) without having to put my friends through my halfway-practiced pieces.

Week 81: The highlight of the week is the church coffee house night. There is a young couple that moved here from the Toronto area, with the goal to make it big in the music industry. I always encourage young people to have big dreams and goals, and to move towards them. There are a number of professional level songwriters, that have performed at the coffee house. While there were no pro songwriters there this night, it might later become a resource for a young person with big dreams. No piano on the night. I did not perform, was not invited to do so. I tend to perform at that venue about once a year, often when someone cancels a the last minute.

Not much excitement aside from the coffee house night. I am getting closer to Annie's Song. It takes me an embarrassingly long time to learn these simple songs. Many with similar experience probably can learn the same song in a day or two (the veterans in an hour or so), and I am to week four, five, six? Part of that is arranging the song. Part of it, is that I can be a slow learner of certain things. Spending a lot of time on A Thousand Years (five months in the rotation?) has gotten me to a more intimate point with the song. Others don't seem to report this, because they are almost always moving on to a new piece. It is an old debate, and I would definitely to prefer to have a few pieces that I know intimately, that I have memorized.

I would also prefer to be able to learn new material at a reasonable pace, but so far I haven't found any way to do that. Three or four months is often how long I take. I can write new music quicker than many, but learning covers has always been a slow process for me.

Some things I am doing for my time crunch are to practice for a few minutes early in the morning. It is often only 5 to 8 minutes, but it is something. I am cutting down on computer time, and trying to cook meals that are quicker to prepare and clean up. My time crunch is going to get worse as the year continues, peaking in early December, but by January, it will be much better.

Have a good week everyone.

/edit to add: I took some of my own advice from my reply to a recent thread about practice. I do shorter passages with much more repetition of each phrase vs. playing the complete piece. I do some arpeggio work, using the arpeggio cascade in my original piece Shadow. I try to play forte (real loud), but likely fall short even of the chicken poop mezzo forte level that Cas quotes in her signature. I find it difficult to play with velocity, my fingers fumble around. Recently, I have playing softly a lot, especially Annie's Song.

Thanks FarmGirl - for the wishes and the feedback on the recital - it sure has been a lot of fun working on it! (Be careful not to drop your phone in the tub!)

Thanks Jim, I'm on the mend, but soooo lacking in energy!
Isn't it great to go back to a piece from a while back and see how much more you can do with it? Safe travels!

SwissMS - thank you too ! I am always very interested to hear about your improved relaxation - it was so clear when I saw you play in person, and in your recent videos, that you've made significant progress on that . I continue to work on it! (Everytime I read "Villa-Lobos" I think "Los Lobos" ...not the same thing at all! )

TallGuyNH - what a great experience! I promise that if I find a sidewalk piano I will play it. In the meantime, I have invited myself over to my friend's house next week to play her piano.

Neuralfirings - looks like you've got a good plan ahead of you! Good luck.

SandTiger - the coffee house sounds like a wonderful way to be supportive of young (or older!) folks who want to work on their music! And as for Annie's Song - one of my favourites! I hope you play it in a recital!

I have not much in the way of achievements this week, but I have managed to get the new& corrected fingering sorted out for Grieg. It isn't smooth yet, but it will come.
Once I have my piano tuned I will make a new recording