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

Jim F
This is off the top of my head (see how good my memory is/isn't)
Scales for level 5 include A maj, E maj, Eb maj, Ab maj, F#m, C#m, Cm, Fm
2 octaves at 104 bpm legato (any of them) and staccato(not all of them)

Same keys arpeggios hands separate at 80 bpm
Same keys broken tonic and dominant chords and cadences hands together in root and two inversions

Also the "scale pattern" found in the exam book

I bought the syllabus and have to keep referring back to it to remember everything I'm supposed to learn. I was taking a practice theory exam tonight and got stumped on filling in the appropriate rests in a few lines of music. I can read rests when playing but to have to fill in the blank made my mind go blank too. Sure hope they use the American words...I'll really get lost with quivers

Yea things definitely do work that way sometimes. I just got back from my lesson and my teacher was really excited about my progress with 36 no 1! She told me to keep practicing but that we can move on to other pieces! She told me to work on op 36 no 3 from Clementi and Chopins op 28 no 6. I'm pretty excited about the Chopin piece. But now I'm going to practice before I have to go to work! Is there a thread just for random chatting about piano and pieces?

Hahaha... Jim, I just had to respond to this. That's absolutely awesome.

And I also have to ask... have you ever seen the movie "The Rookie," with Dennis Quaid?

It's the true story of a washed-out baseball pitcher who decides to try a late-in-life comeback. Early in the movie, he's wondering if he still has "the stuff."

Check out this scene (must watch to the end to get the point). When I read your story about the metronome, this immediately came to mind...

Love that scene

I'm actually starting to kinda *read music*.

Okay, my achievement is that after 2 months of working hard and NOT giving up I finally have my Schubert piece memorized!! This one was particularly difficult to memorize, with lots of key and harmony changes throughout on top of 4 sharps. So now I have all of my 3 major pieces memorized for my next recital. Yea!

Congrats to ZoeCalgary and Albynism for taking their exams. That is quite an accomplishment!

I am considering taking the ABRSM exam here in Switzerland, and I have been doing the requirements for each grade consecutively for the last couple months. Currently I am working through Grade 3, and may take that level or level 4 this fall. The level 3 pieces were more challenging at tempo than I expected.

Until I started this process, I never realized how weak my technical skills were. My teacher in the US did not believe in teaching scales because he felt many kids had all the musicality driven out of them by mindlessly playing scales. My teacher here in Switzerland believes learning scales, arpeggios, and broken chords is essential to advance as a pianist. So, I have only been learning them for about six months. Who knew there were so many scales?? Major, melodic minor, harmonic minor... sheesh! So, my accomplishment of the week is that I have finally learned all the required scales through grade 3 in four octaves at 80 bpm hands together. I am still working on HT for the Arpeggios and broken chords at speed.

Another light bulb moment for this week, is I realized how important it is to stick to one fingering religiously when playing a piece. Often when I speeded a piece up, I would get sloppy with the fingering, and I started to make errors. This created a speed wall for me that was unnecessary.

I've been on vacation for a week in the north of Portugal in a very beautiful hotel (hotel Bussaco). There was a piano in the living room and of course I could not resist and played a few pieces by memory. I managed to play even though the piano was a little out of tune.
The living room was beautifull and huge (see below images) and had some tourists who were resting after dinner. After 1 hour, and when I got up from the piano, an old lady (Spanish tourist) spoke to me, thanking the wonderful time she had to hear me play. Needless to say I was "flushed"... I thanked the lady and I was happy to have made someone happy.
This is why music is wonderful.
This was my AoW.

The Hotel (http://www.almeidahotels.com/nm_quemsomos.php?id=12):


And me:

Carlos, what a beautiful experience. You'll treasure that for awhile. And the story and pictures are truly inspiring.

Cathy

How many notes per beat is that? Two or four?



One of the gradual improvements I've noted is that it's much easier for me to get the fingering right from the beginning which means I can stick with it. As you note, if you don't - forget about it!

But sometimes the fingering I want to play doesn't actually work and, yup, then it's a hard hard slog to overcome it!!

That would be two beats per. I am still kind of new at this scale thing. Grade 3 actually only requires two octaves at half that speed, but my piano teacher wants four octaves as fast as I can do accurately. 80 bpm is my consistently accurate speed right now. Above that I come off track (Let see, was that harmonic or melodic??).

LB - As usual, we are on the same page. The Rookie is one of my all-time favorite baseball movies - and that memorable scene is also a favorite.

What gorgeous photos, Carlos. You must be enjoying that vacation!

Congratulations!

@MaryBee - It is indeed a very diferent hotel!

@jotur - Yes, I was very touched when the old lady got up from the couch (with the difficulty normal for an aged person) and walked up to me to pass those simple words. It is a moment I will not forget.

112 bars of John Blow's Ground in Gamutt (G minor)... Perhaps the longest piece I've attempted to learn since returning to the keyboard.

I thought I had attempted to reach further than my grasp. Yesterday, even just the LH was missing some twiddly bits. Today I've mastered a few ornaments (following Purcell's Rules for Graces), the LH ones only so far, and all the twiddly bits are vanquished. HT is still slow, and I need to regularise some RH fingerings, but I feel it's a lot better overall, I'm feeling much more at home with all the chords, sequences of thirds, syncopated sections, ledger line notes.

I'm quite surprised at just how chromatic some sections are... Some chords sound almost 'modern'.
I can find only one recording of this piece on Youtube (as part of another recording) and the sheet music is not on IMSLP. Blow does not seem to be widely known, but he's definitely worth exploring.

Hi, all.

I hadn't followed this thread at all until a few days ago, when I peeked in and found that a number of my favorite PW friends are here.

So I'll play along...

My AOW is getting back on track. Until about 3 weeks ago, I'd been having a great run with practice time... keeping up with MOYD and all that... really pleased with myself and my progress. Then a few weeks ago some life events intruded, as they will sooner or later, and I really let myself fall off the wagon. As one week with scant practice time turned into two... and then into three... I was really getting frustrated.

This week, I seem to have found my mojo again (keeping fingers crossed that it holds).

Edited to add: speaking of which, CAS, I need to be moved to the "back on the wagon" category in MOYD

I have the hardest time with ornaments (though ones in the right hand are becoming easier to pick up). I went through CPE Bach's treatise on them - talk about soporific. Hopefully Purcell's Rules for Graces is a more interesting read?

Wow, what a busy time this has been...where to start...

BeccaBb, scales are always good warm ups and help so much with fluidity and simply recognizing how to move through running passages -you're building up great skills.

Valencia - The Winter Wind Chopin piece is lovely ! You must be pleased!

Cabazon - Congrats on your first recital- how exciting!!!

WiseBuff, there's something wonderful about minor scales - they are so much more mysterious and interesting that the majors.

SwissMS - isn't it great you were able to play well for your visitors? And you are so right on the need to be consistent with using the same fingerings. Once you start doing that you are on the road to success for sure!

Pckhdlr305 - that's a tricky name to type! I know what you mean about going back to a piece, like the Clementi, where you had previously worked on it. I noticed that with my Beethoven Sonatina I'd but aside for a while. What a great feeling to see how much easier it is monthys later!

Pianostudent88 - Congrats on your recital!!!!

JimF - I think it is pretty funny you had mis-set your metronome and played so much faster. Just goes to show that sometimes progress hits at the strangest times.
(Aside: In Canada the speed limits are in kilometres per hour, in the USA they are miles per hour. A few years ago, while visiting in Canada, my American Aunt was up visiting at the same time. One of the Canadian family members borrowed the American Aunt's car and somehow didn't realize the speedometer was in MPH, and was luck to not get a ticket for driving 100MPK (160KPM) !!

Carlos, your story of playing on your holiday was wonderfully heart touching - what a lovely experience. And what a beautiful place!!!

Eglantine - you play such interesting music - I'm really looking forward to hearing what you'll play in the recital!

Meredith - That sounds very satisfying. Which Schubert piece are you playing?

LegalBeagle - welcome back on track. I saw your post earlier and was going to tease you about being Awol from MOYD, but since you've "'fessed up", I won't.
Glad to see you joining us here in AOTW.

My AOTW..hmmm what is it? I suppose in a way it is getting over my obsession with Chopin and finding some balance. I am now working on refining the piece, but also starting up with some new music - (Mozart Theme and 3 Variations and Diabelli Bagatelle)There is also a Biabelli Andante in Bflat that has caught my attention and is going on my "play soon" list.
I did my recording for the ABF recital, but when I met with my teacher she suggested adding pedal to it so I'm going to work on that this week.
I guess my achievement was being able to put the expression I wanted into my recital piece (even without pedal).

Yesterday my teacher asked if I wanted to play in a recital in a few weeks - if it is on a night when I'm free, I plan to participate. I have to decide which pieces (2) to play. I'm thinking one will be a Kabalevsky waltz and the other Soft Shoe Blues from the last ABF recital.

Andy, Purcell's Rules for Graces are reproduced in some Purcell editions, and also some editions (such as Stainer & Bell) by his contemporaries, such as Blow. There is a version of them in the IMSLP, in one of the two fat Purcell keyboard volumes (not a particularly good copy though).

All the versions I've seen are just one page: with 1/2 page description, and half page of table of half a dozen ornaments, which I think covers all of it as far as the music is concerned. So a lot less mammoth than some of the ornaments material produced by later Baroque peeps such as CPE.

It's just as well we have this, as the symbols/ornaments are different from later Baroque.

I've decided that this piece is the one where I'm going to go heck for leather on the ornaments - in part, because it's mainly crotchets that are ornamented - and make some progress on this front.