piano
- Between now and July there are only 2 weeks where I’m in the office for 5 full days. This week I was in DC Monday through Wednesday.
- I’m gonna be back in the saddle, er, on the bench as a church musician the next couple weeks. Looking forward to it.
- Pretty dang excited for the concert tickets I bought this week. More on that later.
- Next week I’m out of office for 3 days for Anwyn’s high school graduation.
- This means that by next week at this time we’ll have 2 of our 3 kids out of high school. When did we get old?
- I’ve been helping pick out the hymns for our church services for the past several months, which has been a good way to learn the Episcopal hymnal and also to pick out songs I enjoy singing. Is that self-serving?
- Obviously I mean that I got old but my beautiful wife is as young and lovely as ever.
Bullet Points for a Friday
Happy Friday, everybody.
Because I need more piano music...
Because I’m a sucker for trying out new piano music that I’ll probably never be good enough to play (or at least to play well), I just ordered this one:
A Russian composer writing jazz-styled preludes? Too much awesome.
Here’s a video of the composer playing one of them:
Chopin Being Mean
I have hacked through the Chopin Ballades for years now. I started learning the first one in high school, and in adulthood I played through #3 and #4 often enough that I can, well, hack through them. I never spent the time working everything out and polishing; I just kept sight reading until I could blaze through it.
This past week I decided it was time to actually sit down with #4 and work it out more carefully. Today I got to this pictured section which, when sight reading, had always thrown me for a loop. Practicing the right hand by itself, I finally realized what makes it such a pain.
It’s 6/8 time. On the first line, the bass has gone to triplets in each eighth note. Then on the second line, the right hand picks up triplets per eighth, while the left switches to sixteenths. Ok, that’s 3 against 2, no big deal.
But while the right hand is in triplets, the pattern written (as indicated by the eighth notes on the up stems) is a four-note pattern, almost an Alberti pattern. So, you have what is by pattern a four-beat pattern, played as triplets against two in the bass. My brain wants to interpret that as four against two, which is very simple. But it’s not - rhythmically, it’s 3 against 2, but the 3s are logically and musically grouped in sets of four. This one is gonna take my brain a while to work out.
A little piano music for the season
A couple years ago I recorded a little album of solo piano Christmas music. Here’s one of my favorite tracks from it:
You can download the whole thing from the original post if you want. Merry Christmas!
On Playing and Variety
My primary instrument has always been (and likely always will be) keys of some sort. I started piano lessons when I was 7. I started playing for church at age 14. I first started playing with a church worship band in college at age 19. I’ve led worship while playing the piano hundreds of times. Those fingers on the keys at the top of my blog are my fingers, playing piano at my sister’s wedding.
Back in high school I taught myself to play guitar, and I’m a reasonable hack there, though my fingerings are never very clean. From there I did a lot of playing bass lines on the guitar, though I’ve only played bass as part of a band a handful of times. Keys are where it’s at for me. And that’s worked to fill the need where I’ve been. After college there haven’t been an abundance of other keyboardists.
For the last year or so, though, while I love playing keys in the worship band, the instruments that are in my head all the time, the ones I dream about playing, are bass and drums. I’m not sure why. Maybe because so much of the music I listen to is guitar/bass/drums driven instead of piano-driven? Maybe I’m just getting bored with piano right now?
In reality, I’m a passable bass player. I can keep tempo on the drums, but one listen to a real drummer (of which we have several at church) quickly reminds me that I’m just a hack. (Of course, I have no practice… maybe I’d pick it up quickly?)
I don’t know where this leaves me or even really what my conclusion is. It’s just odd to observe that after having piano ingrained in my brain for almost 30 years, I’m now doing a lot of my primary thinking in terms of other instruments. (It’s suppose it’s also entirely possible that piano is just so ingrained that I don’t notice it any more.)
Time for some piano music
I switched over from my usual podcasts and indie rock this morning to give some iPod love to a genre I’ve ignored far too much as of late: classical piano. To be more specific: Bach and Chopin. What a fantastic way to start the morning.
Now, I’ve spent innumerable hours over the past 20+ years with my backside on a piano bench and my fingers hacking away at some composer or another. And ever since I was a kid, let’s face it, I did a lot of hacking. Sure, I had assigned pieces that I was supposed to practice every day. But more often than not what I’d do is just play through those pieces once or twice, then put them down and move on to something far too hard for me, say, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto or a Chopin Ballade or something by Debussy. The weeks when I actually did practice my lesson, my teacher was always blown away by my progress. I wonder at times how well I would’ve progressed if I’d practice like he expected.
When you have small children, though, the amount of time available for you to practice the piano goes down quite a bit. First, they take up your time directly. Second, they go to sleep early and playing the piano would wake them up. So I haven’t done a lot of practicing in the past few years. Occasionally I’d pull out a book and hack through a little bit of Rachmaninoff, but that has been about it. If I get a chance to sit down at a piano somewhere else, I usually just improvise for a while, though it has been frightening just how much I remember of Beethoven Sonatas and Bach Fugues that I learned back in high school.
The other night I sat down at the piano after dinner and actually practiced a new piece. Rachmaninoff’s Polichinelle Op. 3 No. 4, if you really care. (You can hear Rachmaninoff himself perform it on YouTube.) It’s difficult enough that I can’t just sight read through it at full speed, but not so difficult that I get disheartened trying to practice. I am hoping that I can actually put a little time into it, commit it to memory, and eventually have something new to play on occasion, rather than just murdering a section from Chopin’s Ballade #1 like I usually do.
How I do love my piano music.