tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2128275457376219212024-03-13T15:35:55.897-07:00tangleweeds learns pianomy childhood piano lessons were something of a fiasco, yet in middle age i find myself strangely compelled to try all over again. shall we see what happens?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-34151651481009364752015-07-31T01:13:00.000-07:002015-07-31T01:13:24.786-07:00Resuming with Blues<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You know you've been neglecting your (digital) piano for too long when it takes a couple of minutes to locate the power switch. At least I didn't need to dig out the manual, though I was considering it. And speaking of digging out, it took a couple days of desultory sorting and putting away to get my piano space back in order. Dare I confess it had been repurposed as a laundry folding station?'</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Reopening the blog, it's interesting to see that I'm re-starting exactly where I left off, wanting to focus on material simple enough for me to practice relaxed focus and staying in the zone, as per Kenny Werner's Effortless Mastery. Before looking at the blog, I had only just transferred Kenny's meditations onto my phone, then listening to the first one was the perfect preparation for resuming my piano studies.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My motivator this time around is that my roommate recently took up playing bass, and is learning his blues progressions, so I thought it would be a great time to get back to the piano and practice up on some blues. I'm starting with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Blues-Keyboard-Tricia-Woods/dp/0739033964/" target="_blank">Beginning Blues Keyboard</a> by Tricia Woods, which starts out very easy. Years ago I tried working from Tim Richards' <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Improvising-Blues-Piano-Tim-Richards/" target="_blank">Improvising Blues Piano</a>, but that one is aimed an intermediate level student, while I still linger on the late elementary plateau (being an intermittent player like me can do that to you).</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-18004308182281938242014-01-17T01:04:00.001-08:002014-01-17T01:04:18.169-08:00New Year 2014<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I've been away from the piano and avoiding typing for a couple of months, after hurting my hand while wrangling boxes in search of holiday decor. And then I started the new year with two weeks of a cough so evil that I suspect influenza, so I didn't really get to leverage the new year to reflect, and refine my approach toward my various goals. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This lack of ritualized transition has been extraordinarily frustrating for me, so now as I resume playing piano, I'd like to do some of that reflection and refinement.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One thing I've been feeling pretty good about, and which I want to continue, is my purposeful regression toward material I can work toward playing with Kenny Werner's "Effortless Mastery", and thus concentrate my energy on staying "in the zone".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To the extent I can cultivate that "in the zone" experience, I've been exploring what it feels like to establish a more relaxed yet energized relationship to the keyboard, and listening for the for the more subtle effects of dynamics and timing I can achieve via developing that kinesthetic/proprioceptive relationship with the instrument.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One much more tangible thing I would like to follow through on, is to do more recording of myself. This is pretty easy to do with my DP, I just need to RTFM to remember how. I've been finding the mere threat of recording myself highly motivational in terms of listening to what I'm actually playing (as opposed to drifting into superimposing what I *want* to sound like over the accident-prone sonic reality).</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-83708389904142393702013-08-25T14:28:00.003-07:002013-08-25T14:28:54.111-07:00The eagle has landedI've done much shuffing around of large furniture in a small room, with some of the big stuff getting queued up and down the hall into the living room (in a calculated LIFO stack). And now the DP has exited the walk-in closet.<br />
<br />
The closet turned out just a bit to narrow to work as a dedicated piano studio. It's a pity, as the black and white keys of the piano looked great with the black and white checkerboard linoleum on the floor. I had ruthless daydreams of adding eye-bleeding b/w Op Art posters to the walls of the closet, but alas, it didn't work out spatially.<br />
<br />
Now the DP is in front of the window, but I need to block the lower half of the window with something decorative so the piano is less visible to someone glancing in the window. Plus to diminish the horrifying incidents, when I'm absorbed in practicing a piece, to find myself abruptly face-to-face with one of the young dudes painting the house. Bleagh!<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-31968994064579433382013-08-16T17:58:00.002-07:002013-08-16T17:59:44.301-07:00Moving chaos had a silver liningWell, I have survived this summer's big transition, moving across the river (but actually not a great distance away, just across one large bridge). My room is clogged stacked boxes of worldly goods (gads, boxes of sheet music are heavy!). But amid all that chaos, it turned out that my digital piano faces onto my futon, and I'm just barely high enough to play it if I grab my meditation cushion to sit on.<br />
<br />
The upshot of this is that I've been finding myself sleeping very lightly, given this new set of urban sounds to adjust to. But when I wake up, I can roll over, grab the zafu, and play some piano. It's been very psychically recuperative. Moving is stressful!<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-49547082356486344452013-07-29T12:23:00.004-07:002013-07-29T12:23:58.060-07:00One step forward, two steps backI've been nudged into updating this poor, neglected blog, as a lovely member of PianoWorld has spoken very kindly of my intermittent efforts here. I had been been wanting and needing to write for a while, as I've been making a fresh start on my piano playing, which has made me crave an appropriate venue in which to be entirely self-centered and chatter about it all this at length. Where better to be self-centered than in one's journal? But summing up the gaps between my spurts of blogging is difficult, and up until now I've done as much deleting as I've done writing, leaving no evidence of my efforts.<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The big bad news is that those loathsome migraines have continued, creating a serious roadblock to my piano progress. As I mentioned in the migraine entry more than a year ago, the migraines are often accompanied by surges of activity in my inner musical life, but the reality is that the headaches make me so light and sound sensitive, that purposefully creating sounds for myself to listen to would be outright masochism. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And before that was the phase during which I felt so overly emotion-ridden that I didn't want to touch the piano. But even that phase served a purpose in my musical life, reawakening a long-closed-down level of emotional responsiveness in my psyche, which has very much enriched the musicality of my playing (when I've managed to squeeze some in between migraines). </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The upshot of all of this is that I've played so little in the past three years that my skills at the piano have degenerated so very spectacularly that it's time to work on turning life's lemons into lemonade. So I've decided to view this as an opportunity to make a fresh start with my piano playing. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I've moved back to mid/late level 1 method book material, so that I can focus all of my energy on getting rid of unnecessary tension in my playing, and developing better control over the dynamics and articulation in the sounds I create. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
More on all of that later. First, I'm going to quickly publish this entry, to get all of that annoying backstory out of the way, so that henceforth I can chatter about what I'm actually doing at the piano these days. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-29308252039655694402012-06-29T03:14:00.003-07:002012-06-29T19:38:24.367-07:00Reading about Sight ReadingI've been doing a bunch of reading about sight reading lately (my that sentence parses awkwardly, doesn't it?). So I thought I'd put links to some of my reading materials here for future reference.<br />
<br />
Here are a couple of theses/dissertations<span style="background-color: white;"> on the subject:</span><br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://gradworks.umi.com/14/64/1464039.html" style="background-color: white;" target="_blank">A survey of the development of sight-reading skills in instructional piano methods for average-age beginners and a sample primer-level sight-reading curriculum</a><br /><span style="background-color: white;">Scott Dirkse M.M., University of South Carolina, 2009</span><span style="background-color: white;">(h/t Veelo on PianoWorld.com)</span></li>
<li><a href="https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/4123" style="background-color: white;" target="_blank">A Theoretical Model of Piano Sightplaying Components</a><br /><span style="background-color: white;">Dneya Bunnag Udtaisuk, Ph.D. </span><span style="background-color: white;">University of Missouri-Columbia, 2005</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="background-color: white;">And here's some other long and scholarly articles:</span><br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://blade2.vre.upei.ca/ojs/index.php/psychomusicology/article/download/733/832" style="background-color: white;" target="_blank">Performance without Preparation: Structure and Acquisition of Expert Sight-Reading and Accompanying Performance</a><br /><span style="background-color: white;">Andreas C. Lehmann & K. Anders Ericsson, </span><span style="background-color: white;">Florida State University</span></li>
<li><a href="http://ojs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/psychomusicology/article/viewFile/699/806#page=88" target="_blank">Sight-reading Ability of Expert Pianists in the Context of Piano Accompanying.</a><span style="background-color: white;"> (p 186)</span><span style="background-color: white;">A.C.Lehmann & K.A. Ericsson</span></li>
<li><a href="http://musicweb.hmt-hannover.de/kopiez/Lehmann%26Kopiez(2009)Sight-Reading_HandbookMusicPsychology.pdf" style="background-color: white;" target="_blank">Sight-reading</a><span style="background-color: white;"> (Chapter 32 of The Oxford handbook of music psychology (2009))</span><span style="background-color: white;">Andreas C. Lehmann and Reinhard Kopiez</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="background-color: white;">(Please leave a comment if you know of more I can add to this list!)</span><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-35782123085945046722012-03-15T03:26:00.000-07:002012-03-15T04:00:37.766-07:00Migraines<br />
<div style="font: 13.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
This has been an odd period in my piano life. A month and a half ago I found out that the therapist who had seen me through the last 2 years of momentous personal changes was leaving town. While my conscious mind accepted this philosophically, and worked toward tying up loose ends, my body felt all the angst. Two days after I got the news, I got a migraine, my first one in eight years, and the blasted thing has been coming and going for the past six weeks. </div>
<div style="font: 13.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font: 13.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
Strangely enough, along with the migraine came a sudden, deep urge to play piano again. Unfortunately pianos make sounds, and when I have a migraine, each sound is like a nail driven into my skull. But whenever the migraine lifts, I've been playing piano, and experiencing a new passion and power in my relationship to the instrument. It's been amazing...</div>
<div style="font: 13.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font: 13.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
... until the migraine returns, and then sounds and lights are no longer my friends. The sound thing is frustrating because of the piano, of course, and the light thing is equally frustrating because it is my favorite season here, early spring, when the sun begins to return to the Pacific Northwest, and the world has the wonderful aroma of early blooming fruit trees. But instead of blossoming in the sun as I usually do, I've had to hide from it, because even on days that the migraine has abated, the damned thing is guaranteed to return if I get sun in my eyes. </div>
<div style="font: 13.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font: 13.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
But when it fades out for a day or two, playing the piano is a joyous experience.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-19434572463297400622012-02-18T01:57:00.000-08:002012-02-18T01:57:18.859-08:00Ch-ch-changes...It's amazing how much of the important stuff never gets written down, or ends up scattered across half-empty notebooks, dead laptops, and various internet forums.<br />
<br />
A year and a half ago I was happily involved in learning piano, until <a href="http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1498789/Virtue%20sucks....html#Post1498789" target="_blank">I quit smoking</a>, after which I suffered a severe and persistent deficit of musical motivation. Even a year later, I was experiencing periods of <a href="http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1722438/1.html" target="_blank">active revulsion from my instrument</a>.<br />
<br />
Now, at last, I think I've finally gotten over it. Playing piano is fun again, in fact more fun than it's ever been before -- it's as much fun as I've always thought playing music would be (yet it never quite was...). My inner critic, who used to growl discouraging things like "This is hopeless, that doesn't even sound like music!" has changed his tune to quasi-positive comments like, "Not bad, with a bit of polishing that might be worth recording :) "<br />
<br />
Yes, you saw it. My inner critic even smiled at me.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-43783709169706719812011-08-01T13:17:00.000-07:002011-08-01T13:17:43.926-07:00All roads lead to Rome...I thought I should probably link to a <a href="http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1719766/Playing%20piano%20causing%20emotiona.html#Post1719766">thread on PianoWorld</a> that I started about some of the issues I've been having as I return to piano, rather than recap everything here.<br />
<br />
I've started playing again, but with breaks as the piano-related emotional overload I talked about there has come and gone. I've been pretty successful at working through the biter emotional residue lingering around the piano courtesy of the mean, bitter old lady who was my childhood piano teacher, and her ghost no longer haunts me. What haunted me instead was a memory which arose in response to another PW thread: the ghost of my mother's sarcastic commentary, shouted from the other room as I dutifully plodded through my dismal method book tunes<br />
<br />
Again, I'll spare you the gory details, but let it suffice to say that my mother and I suffered a catastrophic failure of mother-child bonding (she suffered no such issue with my younger brother, making for a painful contrast throughout our childhood). She bought our piano and instigated my lessons, which turned them into yet another opportunity for me to try desperately (but invariably fail) to win her approval. As I said on PW, Iooking back I interpret our (visually attractive but virtually untunable) piano and my subsequent lessons as an expression of her new money class anxiety -- in reality, she never showed any interest in music, and turned out to loathe the sound of my practicing. Thus the constant sarcastic commentary on my grim practice efforts.<br />
<br />
So this whole "Mom-thing" that I'd been working though in therapy turns out to have metastasized deeply into my relationship to the piano. But this has enabled me to use my "mental piano junk" as a pathway into some deeper issues which had been too distressing to access directly, so maybe all roads do lead to Rome. Or Mom. Or at least something productive, if one can be mindful of the luggage one has been lugging along. <br />
<blockquote><br />
Therefore the sage, travelling all day,<br />
Does not lose sight of his baggage.</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-84403197805761132162011-07-23T14:42:00.000-07:002011-07-23T14:42:26.669-07:00Working on my piano comebackI've gone through several phases of obsessive pianism since I posted here last, as well as periods of craven piano neglect. I feel like I've neglected to notate all sorts of interesting and innovative practice strategies and their various benefits, and eventually I'll like to retrospectively record all of that. But I'm going to begin where I am now.<br />
<br />
Which is not actually playing the piano yet. Over the past month I've been sporadically revisiting the Adult Beginners' Forum at Pianoworld.com, which generally indicates a renewal of interest in playing again. But I've been strangely reluctant to actually touch the instrument, and there's a story behind that. A long one, in fact, and I've been spending a lot of time the past few nights reviewing my musical history, and revisiting the origins of the difficult emotions that trouble me when I consider actually putting my hands to the keyboard.<br />
<br />
Contextual digression: I have a long history of depression, but I was fortunate to find an excellent therapist, alongside a prescribing psychiatrist who has helped devise a cutting-edge pharmaceutical cocktail which really works. By that, I don't mean a mere emotional band-aid, but instead a pharmaceutical intervention that gives me the stability to process the emotional fallout of revisiting, and then reframing, the personal history which had made suicide a very tempting option from a disturbingly young age.<br />
<br />
Don't worry, I'll spare you the gory details. What's relevant here is that I've learned techniques that allow me to approach and reprocess traumatic experiences in a way that is remarkably healing and liberating. And now I've begun applying these techniques to events in my musical history, which have, at times, made even touching the piano quite excessively fraught.<br />
<br />
Over the past year, as I've been doing this kind of emotional work (and it is hard and harrowing work, never doubt it), I've experienced widely divergent effects on my piano playing. On one hand, I've experienced periods in which my music has blossomed with new dimensions of expressiveness and rhythmic flow -- qualities it had sorely lacked in times past! On the other hands, there have been other periods in which my emotional state has been far too raw to expose via music, if you have any feeling for what that might mean. These are times when my gut says quite clearly, "I can't go there right now" -- not by any means to be mistaken for the sort of funk that one needs to "just push through". <br />
<br />
My current state feels transitional and fluid, rife with possibility. The work with my musical history that I've been doing the past few nights has been rewardingly transformative, to the extent that I wake up each morning feeling like I'm inhabiting a freshly rejuvenated body. I feel a deep, quiet faith that one of these days I'm going to sit down at the piano and play like I've never played before -- if I can keep up the work that's bringing me there.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-57574928820007832010-06-30T13:25:00.000-07:002010-06-30T13:25:36.693-07:00Rhythmic PianoOne new thing that's been going on is that I've been exploring the piano as a rhythm instrument, as you can see by the very basic blues I've been posting (I've also been working on some more intricate composed pieces, but they're copyrighted so obviously I can't post them).<br />
<br />
I'm finding that this rhythmic piano practice has been really awesome for cultivating my physical/kinesthetic/rhythmic relationship to the instrument, to where I sometimes feel like I'm dancing with the piano. It's also bringing out subtler issues with my sense of timing in general, getting the music to swing nicely, that whole thing about playing sub-beats which are not evenly subdivided like when you're playing straight 4/4 time.<br />
<br />
This is something I had also been working on in my Irish music, where a standard double jig (in 6/8 time) has 3 unevenly-weighted sub-beats to each of the two beats per measure. it takes lots of careful listening and imitation of good traditional players to get it that uneven beat subdivision to sound authentic. Now on piano, I'm exploring the whole issue of playing with different amounts of swing, seeing what sounds better with which part of which tune, and also just working to control my degree of swing -- I tend to want to swing too much, or not at all, so I need to work on those subtler gradations.<br />
<br />
I've also been doing some pure rhythm practice, working out of _The Rhythm Bible_ by Dan Fox (I wonder if that's the same Dan Fox that arranged the Beatles songbook for easy piano I just bought...). When I was working from this in the fall, I was working on the basic rhythms in the front section, but this time I've started working on the first section on syncopation. I'm not sure why, but I find syncopation to be great fun. As I mentioned in another post, I've been working by tapping a steady rhythm in the left hand and the syncopated pattern from the book in the right.<br />
<br />
What I want to do at some point is to get the rhythm book in the same location as the piano, and work on turning some of these syncopated patterns into little snatches of (laborious) semi-improvisation (what notes might fit this rhythm?). But my habit is to do my rhythmic practice sitting in my comfy chair in my sunny nook, and my DP lives upstairs in my room, where I can practice in peace & privacy.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-88944528704828307602010-06-25T14:40:00.000-07:002010-06-25T14:40:59.890-07:00New Digital Piano!My Casio Privia PX-120 developed a malfunction, but I was able to return it to Costco for a refund (excellent reason to shop at Costco). So I got a Casio PX-330 instead, which has most if not all of the features I'd been vaguely wishing the PX-120 had. I went with Sweetwater because of their extended warranty and reputation for good customer service, since Costco wasn't carrying Casio keyboards anymore. I don't know if Sweetwater's regular free shipping gives 3-day delivery (instead of regular ground shipping which would have taken 4-5 days to the west coast), or whether they shipped it faster because we had a irritating little snafu with our credit card, but anyway, 3-day service turned out to be 2-day service and my new piano arrived yesterday!<br />
<br />
<happydance> :^) :D :^) :D :^) </happydance> <br />
<br />
In the interim between the time the old DP went away and the new one arrived, I was playing my old semi-weighted keyboard, and the weird, springy touch on that had not only been irritating, but it had also started giving me hand pain, to the extent that for a couple of days my main music practice shifted to tapping out syncopated rhythms in one hand against a steady beat in the other, away from the keyboard. So it was a special pleasure when the new improved digital piano arrived.<br />
<br />
I'm still exploring its many features, manual in hand. The touch and responsiveness of the keyboard is much improved over the PX-120, as are the main piano sounds. I've found some good built in rhythms to play my blues and ragtime with. There are many buttons with multiple labels & functions, which are going to take me a while to sort out. <br />
<br />
I'm looking forward to being able load MIDIs into the piano. The plan is to scan in my scores via PhotoScore Lite into Sibelius, and then export from Sibelius to MIDI files, which, if I set them up right, can be used for hands-separate practice by the piano. This will be particularly helpful since I am working on pieces with syncopated right-hand parts, and it would be nice to practice the syncopated hand alone, but have the auditory reference of the steady left hand rhythm playing along. The manual says I can also loop parts of the MIDIs, which sounds like it will be very handy, since I do a lot of looping on troublesome phrases.<br />
<br />
So today's goal is to figure out how to connect the computer to the DP and transfer files. But first I've gotta dig out an blasted USB cord...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-24914431339569623682010-06-23T17:38:00.000-07:002010-06-23T17:55:30.206-07:00More Basic BluesFirst I procrastinated posting, because sometimes my brain can't handle words when I've been feeling musical. Last night I wrote a summary of what I'd been doing all this time, but then I managed to accidentally quit Firefox and lost the whole thing (and why wasn't blogger auto-saving?). Very annoying. I shall attempt to reconstruct, yet again, what I've been doing for the last couple of weeks... but I may break it up in to a bunch of shorter posts<br />
<br />
So back to learning basic blues. First I worked on this: <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5S1K0lDVs4ASUII86DG_4AUHGN2-AU3B4OGfPSgpPy70SX4xA2dAMlXM_mlxp2iUFj4l7Q9WzO5E8J3kufRSgDjfk22JjOKu60gjxdKMkLTTTc4WxOyB1sHVFGPYOZN79InMzc9rXNqo/s1600/myblues2.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5S1K0lDVs4ASUII86DG_4AUHGN2-AU3B4OGfPSgpPy70SX4xA2dAMlXM_mlxp2iUFj4l7Q9WzO5E8J3kufRSgDjfk22JjOKu60gjxdKMkLTTTc4WxOyB1sHVFGPYOZN79InMzc9rXNqo/s640/myblues2.gif" width="640" /></a></div>It took a while for me to get the left hand fingering smooth, then combine it with the right hand. But once I finally got it down, I found it to be lots of fun to play, particularly along with that "boogie-woogie" rhythm in my DP. <br />
<br />
Next I started working on this:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpEycFlNoS6vSIghNLViWXUPqNpMGQ9d1FgmVaiok42VrIA6CDNUrteks4u30PN-Xk-MVksEUCNnzwGaCHG4F3LvXJtkSIvpQhirpoyYg9GEWfDNXqNWkmqEXoEps0Z3Vfu_9lD33hsls/s1600/myblues3.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="404" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpEycFlNoS6vSIghNLViWXUPqNpMGQ9d1FgmVaiok42VrIA6CDNUrteks4u30PN-Xk-MVksEUCNnzwGaCHG4F3LvXJtkSIvpQhirpoyYg9GEWfDNXqNWkmqEXoEps0Z3Vfu_9lD33hsls/s640/myblues3.gif" width="640" /></a></div>This had a new fingering to figure out in my left hand, and it's a little tricky to get the pair of syncopated chords in the right hand timed just right within the long space between bass notes. I'm still working on that one, but it's also quite fun to play.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-33422535772933509212010-06-12T17:50:00.000-07:002010-06-12T17:52:12.707-07:00Starting out with BluesSo as I start out this project of learning to play some basic blues on the piano, I thought I should document my starting point, as your basic elementary pianist. I restarted my piano playing using traditional classical teaching repertoire, stuff around the level of the first half of Bach's Minuet in G, and this <a href="http://www.sheetmusicdigital.com/scorchitem.asp?id=GM10000690&Scorch=Selected">Telemann Gavotte</a>. I'm pretty comfortable reading music, though I'm no brilliant sight reader. I enjoy studying music theory, and then seeing/hearing it enact itself in the pieces I'm learning.<br />
<br />
I started out by learning the following left hand patterns, and just practicing keeping a steady grove in the key of C (swung eighths). I found a rhythm built into my Casio PX-120 called "boogie-woogie" which works well with this sort of practice. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaVfqAtH3sEgbl09qssqTiu4fSeNR58ScfHOP7eviAuvdoGWiS_H_DDPDGCrLwFP6e09hitBW_xc3Zl7vsLTt5a0XUPuXGR1ipJnIPaIOM6thLauEoNgnGudqgC56cWBGqXtBePn9IGC0/s1600/first_left_hand_patterns.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaVfqAtH3sEgbl09qssqTiu4fSeNR58ScfHOP7eviAuvdoGWiS_H_DDPDGCrLwFP6e09hitBW_xc3Zl7vsLTt5a0XUPuXGR1ipJnIPaIOM6thLauEoNgnGudqgC56cWBGqXtBePn9IGC0/s1600/first_left_hand_patterns.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="83" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaVfqAtH3sEgbl09qssqTiu4fSeNR58ScfHOP7eviAuvdoGWiS_H_DDPDGCrLwFP6e09hitBW_xc3Zl7vsLTt5a0XUPuXGR1ipJnIPaIOM6thLauEoNgnGudqgC56cWBGqXtBePn9IGC0/s640/first_left_hand_patterns.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>It's kind of zen -- to get it to sound right, I need to get sucked into the rhythmic trance, but if I get sucked in too far some inner alertness goes passive, my beat falters, and my inner dancer stumbles and gets peeved. <br />
<br />
<br />
For the first few days I concentrated on this stuff, and gradually worked up to repeating some very simplistic right hand melody patterns while my left hand played the first of the four patterns above. This took lots of work for me -- I am still quite challenged by coordinating differing activities between the two hands. The other night I had a breakthrough, though, where I broke my melody/harmony snippets down into sequences of three eighth-notes (both hands together), and learned each one (not hard) then moved on to the next (overlapping) one. After doing that, they all came together into a whole amazingly smoothly. Must remember that technique. <br />
<br />
Yesterday I started learning the blues chord progression, played thus (more or less: I figured out a better ending, but haven't figured out how to write it down yet).<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0x_jU73u4z5Mu6rw40pjExZp_wL45MGzIm5E6Ssr-NgTVSEmwit_AgXIxGc0JBGp2yuIaPsU4A-xWBsKDSctSIuv5POOiSauZG3mPk_mgSwaAJnV_jevhK__K3WrpHBiLnSBDp7_GNns/s1600/first_blues.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="412" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0x_jU73u4z5Mu6rw40pjExZp_wL45MGzIm5E6Ssr-NgTVSEmwit_AgXIxGc0JBGp2yuIaPsU4A-xWBsKDSctSIuv5POOiSauZG3mPk_mgSwaAJnV_jevhK__K3WrpHBiLnSBDp7_GNns/s640/first_blues.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> I can play just the bassline at 105 bpm, but hands together I am barely half that speed, and I do still struggle to make the chord changes without losing my place with the piano's built in rhythm section. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0x_jU73u4z5Mu6rw40pjExZp_wL45MGzIm5E6Ssr-NgTVSEmwit_AgXIxGc0JBGp2yuIaPsU4A-xWBsKDSctSIuv5POOiSauZG3mPk_mgSwaAJnV_jevhK__K3WrpHBiLnSBDp7_GNns/s1600/first_blues.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-11441718598189823362010-06-10T15:44:00.000-07:002010-06-12T16:10:29.748-07:00I'm Back, with the BluesI've been off playing the tin whistle for the past 6 months (Irish traditional dance music), but I seem to have recently wrapped up a phase of significant musical growth there. I had a sense of things coming to a natural resting point, perhaps a back-door intuition that I need to set my whistle aside for a bit, so I can forget some of the bad habits I had found myself struggling against. <br />
<br />
It was an odd sensation -- I lost interest in music completely for a few weeks, while my brain spontaneously burped up a really nice plot arc for a fiction idea I had abandoned years ago (for lack of a coherent plot). So I worked on getting that outlined to the degree that my burst of inspiration had elucidated, clarified some logistical issues I needed to put on the back burner for my imagination to simmer up good scenes for, and looked around for my next project.<br />
<br />
And that was when the piano started calling. It told me it was time for us to learn some basic blues piano, which was unexpected, but it makes a certain intuitive sense to me now that I think about it. I want to learn to improvise, and it seems appropriate to do so within the boundaries of a traditional structure. And there's something earthy and primal about keeping a driving rhythm with the left hand, which I feel I'm over-ripe to learn.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-63015546309388656822009-11-15T08:05:00.000-08:002009-11-15T13:21:45.174-08:00I've got rhythm!Aaugh, just what I was afraid would happen. I've been having a very fertile musical period since I last posted here, but somehow good musical times somehow always seem to render me verbally inarticulate. It's quite frustrating, because I'd love to tell my friends about the fascinating time I'm having, but without the ability to articulate what I'm experiencing, it's all "like, wow, the dominant-tonic relationship, y'know, it's deep..."<br />
<br />
"Switch Back Rag" has continued to inspire and challenge me. It's quite simple, mostly staying pretty close to the C major 5-finger position, but that's good because it enables me to concentrate on the ragtime trick of having the steady beat in one hand and the syncopation in the other. <br />
<br />
Inspired by this syncopation, I got out my rhythm reading books and started practicing rhythms & syncopations on my little drum-let (kind of a tambourine without jingles). In fact, I was having so much fun with it that I went out and invested in a set of bongo drums, so that I'd have 2 different rhythmic tones to play with, and I have to say, the bongos are a most amusing toy. I'm not even attempting to play them in any authentic fashion, just using the deeper tone to mark the downbeat while exploring the various quarter-note/quarter-rest pattern-options within a measure of 4/4 time.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-73565275722386161122009-10-31T19:24:00.001-07:002009-10-31T19:24:54.312-07:00Switch Back RagI feel that in the last two days I've finally found my groove again at the keyboard, for the first time since I came down with the flu a few weeks ago. The trigger has been finding a piece that's just plain fun to play. <br />
<br />
I tested out using my demos of Sibelius First and PhotoScore to scan in some sheet music so I could play it back and hear what it was supposed to sound like (a process that went remarkably smoothly, once I got past the recalcitrant scanner). One of the pieces I listened to was called Switch Back Rag from First Ragtime Pieces by Dennis Alexander, and since it was catchy enough to get stuck in my head, I decided to learn it. It's at just the right level to be challenging yet doable, but longer than anything I've learned thus far (two whole pages! :) ). <br />
<br />
The challenge for me seems to center on the areas where the left hand is playing a normal 4/4 background while the right is doing something syncopated. My usual strategy of learning HS and then putting them together isn't working as well as usual because part of the time the melody moves from hand to hand, and then when they're playing together the individual parts are straightforward enough -- the whole problem is interweaving them effectively.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-80620262835311243892009-10-25T13:54:00.001-07:002009-10-25T15:35:07.234-07:00Reading scale degreesI have been having a very rewarding week as far as music theory awareness and depth of music reading skills go, but I haven't been playing a lot of piano. Though I've been good about practicing my sight reading daily, that's been about all the time I've spent at the piano.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH3hnZLAoKpymHv23xZF9MF-qkvs_jgOPwoRbulSq_rHZckdHmCfJHvhLK2117H8T6cGKlPRNRJCUMElU9GLxs2jDdPAe6WTQ6JvR9NugHuoMAofx3mMFPyaaVr9sTXP6aAbnwyIiGl08/s1600-h/C_chords_bass_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH3hnZLAoKpymHv23xZF9MF-qkvs_jgOPwoRbulSq_rHZckdHmCfJHvhLK2117H8T6cGKlPRNRJCUMElU9GLxs2jDdPAe6WTQ6JvR9NugHuoMAofx3mMFPyaaVr9sTXP6aAbnwyIiGl08/s320/C_chords_bass_3.jpg" /></a><br />
</div>But meanwhile, I've been playing my late-beginner repertoire CDs and following along on the score, but all of a sudden there's a new dimension of depth, because my brain has figured out how to see each note's scale degree based on the way the notes of the key's tonic triad line up on the staff (i.e. the way they alternate being line-line-line <skip> space-space-space <skip> line-line-line <skip> space-space-space <etc.> as the eye travels up the staff or ledger lines.<br />
<br />
This new "x-ray vision" is, I think, a result of the time I've spent trying to make myself read intervalically when sight reading, helped along by some odd little flash cards I made to help me develop an eye for where the tonic triads of each key lie on the treble or bass clef. <br />
<br />
It feels like I'm doing a bit of math when I look at the notes on the staff and figure out the scale degree -- I'm not conscious of doing the calculation, but it doesn't happen quite instantaneously. But it's clear that practice will improve velocity, so I've continued to quiz myself with my flash cards, and work on recognizing chord patterns in the sheet music as I listen along.<br />
</etc.></skip></skip></skip>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-47574232155903235582009-10-22T19:35:00.000-07:002009-10-25T15:34:42.511-07:00Activities to hone music-reading skillsI wrote this a couple of days ago yet neglected to post it (didn't feel finished? so what, post it anyway...):<br />
<br />
One thing I've been doing is mentally breaking down the skills that get called upon in reading music, whether a prima vista or at one's leisure, and figuring out ways of honing these skills individually, with computer/internet trainers, and by creatively different ways of approaching and learning from the variety of sheet music & recordings I have floating around my life/computer. <br />
<br />
There's a lot of interesting material at PianoWorld and elsewhere on the internet about the characteristics, actions & perceptions of skilled and unskilled sight-readers, from self-reports to outcomes of studies. Having recently figured out that musical literacy seems to be a primary goal of mine, I've enjoying reading them and trying to extract an awareness of the many skills related to fluent music-reading, and think of ways to isolate these skills in order to practice them individually. <br />
<br />
Perhaps it would be optimal to hone them all at once by doing infinite sight reading (though I'm not sure about this), but I find that merely accumulating sufficient "fodder" for prima-vista perusal imposes a financial limitation. But in addition, I find that my attention span is extended by cycling through different learning/self-testing media, and I think there's perspective to be gained by viewing a task from a variety of different angles -- correlating the perspectives re-enforces basic patterns, if that makes any sense. <br />
<br />
As examples of the kind of things I'm talking about, there's of course Practica Musica and the various web-based trainers I use. But I was thinking of things like taking the sheet music that's too hard for me to sight read, and doing things like:<br />
* go through and just identify intervals as quickly as possible (like in hymnal or chorale)<br />
* tap out the rhythms, one staff in each hand (in music with one voice per hand)<br />
* look at a measure, then look away and see how much of it I can reconstruct from memory (practice for reading ahead when sight reading)<br />
* play through an unfamiliar piece at the keyboard, not sight-reading, but letting rhythms slide a bit, repeating bits as necessary to achieve musical sense, and focusing on hitting correct notes<br />
* play along with a (slowed down) recording of a less familiar piece, concentrating on real-time reading -- prioritizing playing in rhythm on major beats<br />
* reading along with a more difficult recording (just reading, not at the keyboard), following the rhythms<br />
* reading along with a recording (not at keyboard), looking and listening to be aware of what scale degrees the music is moving through, as well as listening for the melodic & harmonic movements that correlate with the patterns of theory visible in the notes on the staff -- which entails recognizing intervals, chords, broken chords, etc.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-3613380466142809692009-10-18T22:07:00.001-07:002009-10-18T22:07:38.042-07:00Trying to do new thingsIt seems that being sick has allowed my practice habits to waste away to the mere act of warming the bench daily for some scales and/or sight reading. Looking back, I'm unsure about the value sticking to my practice-every-day commitment when I felt so crummy, because i now have an image of practicing as desperately hanging in there while feeling like crap. I feel like I might have been refreshed by taking a vacation while I was sick -- but really I need to finish out the year of practice-every-day before I judge the value of sticking to it no matter what. <br />
<br />
In the meantime, I'm going to go with yesterday's plan and shake things up a bit, trying to do new things, or old things new ways. <br />
<br />
Something I'd been completely neglecting was my repertoire maintenance, so yesterday and today I went to back to brush up on some older repertoire, only to discover that my smoothness with it had entirely evaporated. It all seemed familiar enough, but my fingers had lost their coordination. This was unfortunate, because I'd been feeling like playing something easy and just making music -- which is where I used to be with the pieces in question, but sadly, that is no longer the case. <br />
<br />
Also to shift things around a bit, I decided that having been playing without looking at the keyboard had been a good exercise, but what I want to start doing instead is to alternate playing while viewing/memorizing the pattern of my hands on the keys, then playing again without looking, but visualizing the keyboard under my hands as I play. The goal is to develop here is a more convincing "inner keyboard", using both my inner eye and my kinesthetic sense. Also, the shifting of states makes me more alert, less likely to get hypnotized by repetition.<br />
<br />
Today I also did something which I had been meaning to do for ages, which was to practice playing the melodies of my piano pieces on my pennywhistle. I've actually done it before, but, oddly enough, only when I'm "out in the wild". When I arrive someplace ahead of schedule, I sit with my whistle in the parking lot, and do my bit to keep Portland weird. Because the melodies of my piano pieces often rattle through my head, I had figured them out on my whistle. Yet for whatever reason, I'd never actually practiced them on the whistle at home -- I'd always practice the piano version instead. <br />
<br />
What I discovered is that I really need to do is scales on my whistle. In each of the two major scales available on the whistle, there is an awkward patch of fingering where the lower and upper registers of the instrument's range meet, and it's particularly inconveniently located in the scale I need for my piano melodies. Whenever I go a while without practicing my whistle, this is the first area to fall apart.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-78193168080314591482009-10-17T23:05:00.000-07:002009-10-19T08:05:16.968-07:00attempting to replicate my last good practiceSomewhere among the many sticky-notes on my computer desktop, there's one that says "When my music practice isn't working, it's time to try something new". <br />
<br />
I do have a tendency to try to reproduce the most recent good practice session I've had, instead of letting each day be open to the development of its own unique themes and techniques. Somehow it seems like the obvious thing to replicate the approach which worked last time (and then feel musically impaired when it doesn't work as well as it did before). <br />
<br />
I think that's an unconscious (as in non-mindful) extension of the mental habit one can get into when doing a lot of the repetitious splinting, smoothing and polishing kinds of practice. I think it would help if I could get myself to remember to look at he lists I've gradually accumulated of different practicing strategies and areas to focus on. While there's a set of practice tasks that need to be attended to daily (or at least regularly), there are many different approaches toward each of them.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-254116085994237002009-10-13T23:18:00.001-07:002009-10-13T23:18:54.205-07:00Dizzy againI've been having good to very good practices for the last few days, so it was kind of a disappointment when tonight's didn't go as well. Maybe it was just that I had such nice practices yesterday that my expectations got raised, but I felt pretty let down when, in the middle of working on my Telemann Gavotte, I started feeling dizzy and nauseated again. So I quickly phoned in my mandatory pages of sight reading and called it a night. Now I'm drinking strong ginger tea, which seems to help with the nausea. <br />
<br />
My practices have been simplified because of the BPPV, consisting of some major scales, hands together and eyes shut, then work on the Telemann and that little "Starter Rag", and finally recycling some easy sight reading, but using the metronome this time around. I think that the sight reading is actually more fun with the metronome, but perhaps only because this one-hand-at-a-time stuff would be mind-numbingly easy without the metronome to spice things up. <br />
<br />
I'm having trouble finding sight reading fodder that's focused at the level where I need work, which is playing hands together, but in a very, very simple way. The sweet spot is what the Hannah Smith book does at the end of each of the beginning sections. where she switches from hands playing in unison to having more notes in right hand, with fewer long notes in the left hand. Most of the sight reading fodder seems to progress too quickly past this stage to where it starts having unpredictable or irregular note patterns in the left hand (though still fewer in the left than in the right). What I seem to need is for the left hand to be rhythmically very predictable while I simply get used to reading and playing different notes with both hands simultaneously.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-62098551813534843252009-10-11T00:55:00.001-07:002009-10-11T00:55:40.650-07:00Back to work...I feel like tonight was my first real practice since coming down with the flu almost 3 weeks ago. Though I nominally haven't missed a day on my MOYD/sight-reading commitments, really all I've done is a few token pages of sight-reading per day. With the exception of the few good days between the end of the flu and the onset of my BPPV (during which I started this blog), I've been too exhausted and apathetic to focus very well at all.<br />
<br />
So perhaps today went well because I was able to resume with lowered expectations. I started out with hands together scales in C, G, and F, which went better than expected. Before I got sick, I had recently had a breakthrough with my hands-together scales (which had been a particular nemesis of mine), and even graduated to doing them with eyes shut. The muscle memory seems to have been stored in brain cells which survived the flu, because these all came back nicely. I decided not to push my luck, and didn't try D or Bb. <br />
<br />
Then I decided that I had pretty much sleepwalked through all the sight-reading I've done while sick, and not really gained much skill from it. So I decided to go back to the beginning of the John Kember book and start over, only playing with the metronome this time, and being stricter about not "stuttering" back to fix mistakes. Playing with the metronome was kind of invigorating, and definitely helped with the stuttering, I used the metronome built into the DP, which has different meter settings so that the downbeat of each measure gets a bell tone instead of a click. That way, if I stuttered i would lose my place in the metric pattern, which proved motivational. Did quite a few pages, but it was pretty easy stuff, being the beginning of Book 1...<br />
<br />
I also tried to focus more on reading by interval, which doesn't come naturally to me -- too many single-note flash cards, perhaps? It was hard, though, because there's a lot more space between the notes in each measure in the Kember book than there is in Hannah Smith, so the eye has to travel further without losing track of the lines & spaces in the (melodic) interval. Also I had the metronome set a bit faster than I should have, so I was scrambling to keep up, and often didn't have time for scruples about how I was reading, just needed to get the next note under my fingers.<br />
<br />
And then I put in some more practice on my little "Starter Rag," which was fun. Somehow I forgot all about my little Telemann Gavotte, which I have been shamelessly neglecting for weeks...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-33352547847670617182009-10-09T22:57:00.000-07:002009-10-13T23:20:44.514-07:00First Fun with RagtimeAt 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. <br />
<br />
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"). <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-212827545737621921.post-30490515830715724642009-10-06T23:10:00.000-07:002009-10-06T23:18:23.674-07:00Ugh! I feel horrid...Ugh, I had wanted to try to post daily, but I seem to be relapsing with the flu, or having some strange post-flu complications. I remain remarkably stupid, and am having vertiginous dizzy spells along with headaches, a stiff neck and general backache, with vague nausea as a cherry on top. The voice of hypochondria diagnoses viral meningitis, but I see a real doctor in the morning. <br />
<br />
The upshot is that I haven't been playing much piano. As I did during the flu last week, I've been doing a few pages of sight reading a day, to meet my MOYD daily practice commitment alongside my promise to myself to do some daily sight reading. <br />
<br />
Unfortunately my sight reading books are progressing while my mental capacity seems to be regressing. If I don't get my brain back soon, I may backtrack to the beginnings of my sight reading books and start again, working more on my intervalic reading. It's not as if any of this sight reading fodder is so musically memorable that I can't recycle it, particularly seeing as my musical memory is pretty lousy to begin with.<br />
<br />
Two different batches of sheet music I'd ordered with budget (slow media mail!) shipping finally meandered in today, and I felt to crummy to even gloat over them properly. The normally exciting new-book-smell just made my stomach lurch. Phooey! Stupid flu...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0