Well, 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.
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!
Friday, August 16, 2013
Monday, July 29, 2013
One step forward, two steps back
I'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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Friday, June 29, 2012
Reading about Sight Reading
I'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.
Here are a couple of theses/dissertations on the subject:
Here are a couple of theses/dissertations on the subject:
- 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
Scott Dirkse M.M., University of South Carolina, 2009(h/t Veelo on PianoWorld.com) - A Theoretical Model of Piano Sightplaying Components
Dneya Bunnag Udtaisuk, Ph.D. University of Missouri-Columbia, 2005
- Performance without Preparation: Structure and Acquisition of Expert Sight-Reading and Accompanying Performance
Andreas C. Lehmann & K. Anders Ericsson, Florida State University - Sight-reading Ability of Expert Pianists in the Context of Piano Accompanying. (p 186)A.C.Lehmann & K.A. Ericsson
- Sight-reading (Chapter 32 of The Oxford handbook of music psychology (2009))Andreas C. Lehmann and Reinhard Kopiez
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Migraines
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.
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...
... 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.
But when it fades out for a day or two, playing the piano is a joyous experience.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Ch-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.
A year and a half ago I was happily involved in learning piano, until I quit smoking, after which I suffered a severe and persistent deficit of musical motivation. Even a year later, I was experiencing periods of active revulsion from my instrument.
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 :) "
Yes, you saw it. My inner critic even smiled at me.
A year and a half ago I was happily involved in learning piano, until I quit smoking, after which I suffered a severe and persistent deficit of musical motivation. Even a year later, I was experiencing periods of active revulsion from my instrument.
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 :) "
Yes, you saw it. My inner critic even smiled at me.
Monday, August 1, 2011
All roads lead to Rome...
I thought I should probably link to a thread on PianoWorld that I started about some of the issues I've been having as I return to piano, rather than recap everything here.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Therefore the sage, travelling all day,
Does not lose sight of his baggage.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Working on my piano comeback
I'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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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