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Very nice idea and thread!

This week -and up till the 14th- I'm focussing on learning the piece I'll be sending to my first ABF Recital, and on forgetting that the red light is on!

I have managed to understand the music sheet, and am starting to work on both hands together, but just for a few bars so far.

Will need to speed things up and also learn where to put the expressions, not only the fingers! This piece was originally for strings and although the full piano arrangement sounds beautiful I'm working on a graded 1-3 arrangement for easy piano and the "difficult" arrangement I'll leave for a while till I feel more confident with sight reading. I think this one is a 1-2 level, not sure.

I seem to have found my way with easy music sheets, the bass clef notes seem to stay in place rather than mixing with the treble one as before, but still now and then my fingers take the wrong direction, which really really annoys me.

I created a whole new FOYD today. I sent in my application for an ABRSM exam. That is going to change my priorities a little. Originally I was going to do grade 5 in the fall, but I decided to do go ahead and do grade 4 in May as a warmup since I have never done a graded exam before. I figured I would be less nervous with the less demanding technical requirements and pieces. I am taking the grade 5 theory as well, and then hopefully grade 5 practical in November. I am actually very excited about this. Coming from an academic background, I like measurable milestones, and I have always felt I needed an incentive to fill in the holes in my technique. So, my FOYD list just got updated!

Technical: Work on Contrary motion required scales. I have done very little of these, and they need work.

Joplin: My assignment this week is to play 1/2 measure fast, 1/2 measure slow, through the whole piece and then reverse it. This turned out to be harder than expected, and quickly shows the trouble spots. Getting this up to tempo is going to be a challenge.

Tchaikovsky: This is finally starting to flow. This week's goal is to memorize and continue playing at 1/2 speed.

Kuhlau: My teacher's assignment is to record the entire Sonatina and send it to her this week. Yikes!

ABRSM grade 4 pieces: Listen with the music, then play mentally. Try to interpret and ingrain the music before playing.

SwissMS... can you explain the half fast then half slow technique? It sounds very odd!

SwissMS, that is just wonderful. I am envious of you. I need something like that. I may go to music school upon retirement, hahaha (half serious). I cannot find time to take theory class on-line. It's sad. Have 80 hours of continuous education need to complete by the end of March for my profession.

Ok off to go to work.

Hi everyone! Right now I'm rehearsing for my second practice performance of Clair de Lune scheduled for Thursday. I have it mostly memorized. However, there are a few rough spots that still need work. I'm also planning to play the Prelude in D Flat Major (Chopin) with my sheet music at the practice performance.

I've haven't had much time to work on the Bach Invention 8. However, I will be back to that again the rest week. I am writing up my fingering for the left hand, and will continue prating the LH & RH independently.

I don't have much time to write. However, I've started to realize that I need to play each piece in my entire repertoire every week. I've noticed that I need to do this for maintenance as well as continued improvement. This week I started playing my first ABF recital piece, Rhapsody by Margaret Wigham.

It is a little odd. The Joplin piece is a stride base, so I play the first three left hand moves fast: 1 and two ---- and then the 4th slow ---and--1 and two -- and. Then I reverse it. The purpose is to learn the very quick moves, have time to catch up, and then move fast again. It helps to cement the movements and the memorization. And, it has been hard to get the swing of it!

The last few weeks I'm not rushing the hands-separate work. I think spending lots of time on hands-separate and trying to get close to the right tempo before combining hands has shortened the overall learning time with fewer mistakes. Plus I'm hearing more in the left hand and it's more musical.

It's better that what I've done (on and off) for the last 50 years. Why didn't I learn this before??

I'm taking a break from the Tchaikovsky Album Leaf this week to get Morning Prayer ready for the recital. I'd started on the Peasant Prelude but prefer this piece. What a shame not to have Cheryl do it, though.

Revision pieces for the week are Invention 13 and Scarlatti K.159 with regular pieces, the Rags, getting very close now, and the Beethoven 10/3 Presto. The invention is the least stable of my Bach inventions as I learnt it with off-the-cuff fingering a long time ago and never fixed it properly. It needs slow and strict management now. The Scarlatti is newly learnt and still needs babying. If I've time I may look again at the Chopin Nocturne or try and clean up his D-flat Waltz. That's been getting a bit sloppy of late. I may look again at the Mendelssohn Funeral March either. I've been hitting some wrong'uns in the second part and the big chords in the third part are getting muddy.

Any news on starting the Rach, Carl? I'm curious, rather than impatient, as I like to plan ahead. I submitted Invention 8 in the quarterly recital, you may like to know, along with Sinfonia 1.

Richard, I have a lesson scheduled for later this week. I hope to get a clearer idea of when my teacher will want me to get started with Rach.

Last week I did two practice performances of Clair de Lune (Debussy) and Prelude in D Flat Major (Chopin). These have been helpful for me to identify weak areas that need more attention.

This week I'm putting a lot of time into the Invention 8 playing both hands separately. I seem to have the fingering worked out pretty well. Richard, I'll be listening to your recital performance of this piece. I am having fun learning this piece. I also started doing some revision work on Gymnopedie 1 and Rhapsody.

My biggest challenge right now is a time management issue. I have a lot of pieces to work on. However, my total approach to practicing is undergoing some major changes right now. I have to add more time into my practice sessions. I also need to create at least two daily practice times that are uninterrupted. This is far different than the scattered approach to practicing I was doing while I was still working and had far less control of my schedule.

Now that I've retired (nearly seven months ago) I'm now beginning to see that I have to make this transition. I suspect there are some retirees out there who know what I'm going through.

I don't really care to go into too much more detail about this right now. Why? Because I gotta get on with it and go practice!

My focus right now is getting a good recording of Joplin Chrysanthemum. My hat is off to ragtime players. This is an "easy" piece and it has been a workout. I have it at final tempo (for me) but I still have a couple of awkward spots. I hope to get a good recording this week-- or next.

I down loaded recordings of my pieces for the ABRSM test, and I like them. I should receive my sheet music tomorrow. I will start the Scarlatti this week, HS.

After looking over the sight reading samples that will be in test, I blanched. New FOYD requirement: sightread at least 1/2 a day. I am woefully lacking in this area. The aural test also requires sight singing, so I guess my neighbours will have to get used to me singing as well as playing piano.

Tchaikovsky March: This is ready for a first record this week. Joplin will get priority though.

Kuhlau: This is fully memorised, and I am working on the running passages to improve smoothness. I still need to record the entire Sonatina in one sitting. My teacher had requested this, and I have not achieved it yet. I think she wants my to play this in the next recital. Eeek!

I'm looking forward to listening to all the recital pieces this week. Lot's of my personal favorites are on the list - Greensleeves, The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, Sarabande, and more. The recitals and this thread are also a great opportunity to discover music and composers that I've never known.


Trying to wrap up and record the Bach Italian Concerto first movement before the deadline. I'm starting to make mistakes where I haven't been making mistakes, so it's pretty close to the over-practiced level for now.

One of my main goals for this year is to have 10 pieces simultaneously memorized and maintained, based on analysis instead of finger memory. I'm almost done with Debussy's Reverie, which has an understandable structure.


Slowly working through Debussy's Brouillards (Mists) prelude.
To be quite honest, I had only heard really fast versions of this played, and found it almost completely uninteresting.

But after playing it for a few weeks, it could be a wonderful image piece - not a morning fog that quickly burns off, but a really spooky American-Werewolf-In-London-mists-on-the-moors image.

Technically, it has a lot of hand over hand playing, which has been a challenge. For part of it, it finally made sense to sit a few more inches to the left and to lean left to make it easier for the right hand playing a low octave.

Various authors have described Debussy as playing with mostly flat fingers, and sometimes when a piece isn't coming together, I try to imagine him playing, and shift from rounded fingers to flat. For this piece, that's making it a lot easier to play some of the sections.


The reward for finally recording the Bach will be to try out a piece from the IMSLP - a solo piano version of Holst's Mars, the Bringer of War.

Now that the quarterly recital is over, I am focussed on getting Joplin wrapped up. It is getting close. I can play it consistently error free at 50 bpm/quarter, but I still have a couple of sticky spots at performance speed (60/quarter). It is written in 1/16th's. The goal for this week is to get a good final recording.

Tchaikovsky March is coming along nicely, and just needs time to mature a bit. The goal for this is to continue playing at 2/3 tempo until everything is working smoothly. The 1/64ths still are popping the way I want.

The ABRSM test pieces are learned, but not memorised. They are at the stage were I need to hold back the tempo until the fingers know where they are going. So far I have taken a disciplined approach to these and have avoided introducing errors. I love the Scarlatti piece!

I have added a minimum of 1/2 hour sight reading daily. Interestingly, the pieces in the sample sight reading ABRSM book I received look like they are the same grade as the pieces for performance at that level, only shorter. Go figure.

My focus this week will primarily be working on Invention #8 (Bach). I am practicing left hand and right hands separately. I am not sure how much I'll get memorized. However, I think I'll have made substantial progress by the time I have my lesson next week.

Clair de Lune
I plan to start making some practice recordings this weekend for a few friends here. (You know who you are) . They've already agreed to review it and give me feedback.


Prelude in D Flat Major
My teacher has said it is time for me to start performing it for a friends. I'll be spending a lot of time polishing that. I am on my own with that one. I still have some memorizing work to do. However, my teacher agrees that I can work on this independently.

That's it for now. Hope everyone is doing well!

SwissMS, carlos88, and griffin - recordings and performances and repertoire-building have done good things for my focusing, too, and the focusing has done amazing things for my playing ability. So it's fun to read about your efforts in those directions.

But I will have to add that if the focusing isn't fun for me, I don't do it. Last week I dropped out of a band I've been playing with for almost 20 years. Their focus has shifted from playing for community events - dances, charitable events, friends' weddings, etc - where the "audience" is a larger group to which the musicians also belong, to playing for commercial places for which the band focus is "the band as performers". And with it the focus at band jams has shifted from "we're all trying to be as good as we can be but our primary focus is on having fun and being a coop" to "every jam is a rehearsal and we're going to point our fingers at people and say 'this group has to work harder at being together, and the whole group would be more respected if it always insisted on getting paid'" and it just isn't my thing any more.

So, my ability to focus in the sense of being centered and in the minute has improved a lot because I'm not stressed that I'm obviously not on the same page with the band I just don't understand people who are so intense about music that they not only beat themselves up, but insist on beating up everyone else, too. Not that I don't know that some people in the ABF struggle with that perfectionism, I do know that. But at least in the ABF we don't seem to require others to be perfectionists, and can see that some aspects of it can actually get in the way.

So this week has been much better. I got some ideas for dealing with difficult parts of my Joplin recital and they've been liberating, too. I'm actually on track for playing more piano in Feb than I did in Jan, even tho Feb is a shorter month and I'll be out of town for part of it. I still notice a lot of tenseness in my shoulders, but since that's apparently a life-long habit just being aware of it is a step forward. It'll come, I'm sure.

This is a great thread for me, so I appreciate all of you who post here. I learn a lot.

Cathy

edit: "their" focus, not "they're" focus. sigh I hit submit instead of preview.

Not much to report of late as most of my focus is on old material.

The rags are looking ragged right now. I'm struggling with them, as I guess many people are, and it's getting closer. I've been given some relief as the Rach. Prelude is being postponed another month. The Tchaikovsky pieces are both looking safe at the moment and I'm close to picking a piece for the next recital.

Pieces from the last two years are coming back into memory quicker than expected but there are shaky patches in quite a few that are needing several weeks each to reach previous highs. These are taking most of my efforts for the time being and I'm still tweaking and getting used to my new working method for this year.

Richard - it's also nice to know that other people have shaky parts in pieces they "know well" - it's one thing that sometimes discourages me. But knowing that it's fairly normal takes some of the pressure off, and *that* definitely helps! I'm hoping that playing more by ear and paying more attention to listening adds to my toolbox for that issue.

Cathy

I completely agree that the rags are harder to get to a polished state than other things that I have played so far. The "shaky parts", just don't want to transition to easy. I have one 2 bar section in Chrysanthemum that I have done a thousand times- slow, fast, and in between. Still I choke on it. Today my teacher closed the piano lid and said "Play it!" So, I played it over and over on the wood, until it was clear I was confirmed in the fingering. Once I managed to "play" it correctly on the wood, she had me play it on the keys with my eyes closed. It became clear that I knew it, but I just did not trust myself. Now, I think I have it. We will see if it is still there tomorrow!

My goal for last week was to get a good recording of Chrysanthemum. I have a recording, but it is not of a quality I want to submit. So- this week- same goal!

Grade 4 pieces- Because these must be note perfect for the exam, my assignment is to memorise hands separate, assuring that fingering is absolutely fixed, and preparation is built in. This week I hope to accomplish that on the Scarlatti.

Grade 4 aural training- My assignment this week is to sing major and minor scales. Look out neighbours!

Gran 4 Technical- HS and HT all required scales at 120/quarter. I have not practiced melodics much, so the focus will be there.

Kuhlau Sonatina Rondo- This has some intricate running passages with quick turns plus rapid Alberti base. I am currently playing the Alberti base at 80, and it needs to eventually be at 120. So these sections will be practiced this week with fast/slow/fast/slow to build up fluency at speed.

Tchaikovski March- This is another piece that needs time to slowly build up speed. It is flowing accurately at practice tempo. Now I need to push it a little.

Wow, what a bummer. This has always sounded (from afar) like the center of your musical life, so I'm sure this must have been very difficult to reach this point.

Here's hoping you find a new set of more amiable and relaxed musical partners.

Cathy, I'm sure it was a difficult decision to drop the band. I probably would have done the same thing, given the circumstances you described. If you're not getting the enjoyment anymore, what's the point?

I must admit I can be a bit of a perfectionist. However, I only put the pressure on myself -- not others.

I've often heard it said that when one door closes, another opens for you. Perhaps your work on the Joplin recital and other ABF recitals is only the beginning of many new doors opening up fun opportunities and adventures with the piano!

BTW, be glad you're not in Minnesota these days. The snow and cold is ridiculous! I have a piano lesson this morning and I have to get out there a bit earlier to clear another "dusting" of snow from my car and sidewalk before my lesson!

Rather than continued whining about the weather, here's my update on my piano practice. I've put much heavier emphasis on the Invention. My teacher wants me to complete learning this before he starts me on the Rachmaninoff piece.

With the Invention I'm learning each hand separately. I've gotten half of the piece memorized. This week I'm working on the second half. I am having fun with this piece.

I will start work on recording Clair de Lune Thursday. I hope to have something ready this weekend for a few folks to review and give me feedback.

This weekend I plan to dedicate more time into memorizing some critical sections of the "Raindrop" piece. I have done some practice performances with the sheet music. That's gone pretty well.

That's all for now. I have to get ready for my piano lesson. Have a good week everyone!