First Fun with Ragtime

At my Dr.'s visit, I was diagnosed with a post-infectious (i.e. caused by my bout of H1N1) case of Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. Our starting strategy will be to wait a bit and see if it goes away on its own -- which actually seems to be happening. I'm no longer having room-whirling "paroxysms" of vertigo, just some milder dizziness when I move around. But I'm still queasy from the ongoing sense of motion sickness, and I have trouble walking in a straight line once I get tired.

So overall it's not been the best climate for piano practice. I've persisted with my few pages of sight reading per day, in spite of wondering whether I should just call in sick on MOYD until my world holds still (heh, Freudian slip: I almost spelled "world" as "whirled").

But!!! Tonight I finally took some of my new sheet music upstairs to where the DP is, and had a really good time starting to play from it. The book I was playing from is called First Fun with Ragtime, and it has very easy arrangements of classic Scott Joplin rags along with some easy rags composed by the arranger, Hans-Gunter Heumann. I bought it along with two other elementary ragtime books, but it seemed to be the easiest of the three, so that's where I started.

I've been on quite the ragtime kick this past month or two. It started when I was thinking about what keyboard music (besides Bach!) has ever made me think, "Ooh, I want to be able to play that!!" and the obvious answer was Scott Joplin. So I've been using my eMusic download credits toward stocking up on ragtime recordings, and before I got sick, I had downloaded sheet music to various Joplin rags and was working on reading along as I listened.

Actually, I found reading along with Joplin scores surprisingly difficult -- for all that I'm used to hearing syncopation, I'm not used parsing out what I'm hearing, and found myself easily confused distinguishing primary beats from accented backbeats. But since I've been sick and dizzy I spent a lot of time lying in bed listening to music, and tapping out the beat as i listened has helped me sort out this confusion, as well as enabling me to orient what I was hearing more firmly within a standard 4/4 call & response phrasing structure.

Anyway, it was quite fun to play some syncopated music tonight, simplistic as it was. With a very few exceptions, all of the music I've learned so far has been very foursquare and upright and predictable in its rhythmic movements. I've been pleasantly challenged by the small tastes of rhythmic unpredictability I've run across here and there, and find myself looking forward to enjoying many similar challenges from my new baby-ragtime books. I'm not usually a fan of simplified arrangements, but I'm just dying for some rhythmic variety in my musical diet, and hopefully these will provide it.