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..."
"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.
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.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Switch Back Rag
I 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.
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! :) ).
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.
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! :) ).
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.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Reading scale degrees
I 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.
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 space-space-space line-line-line space-space-space as the eye travels up the staff or ledger lines.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Activities to hone music-reading skills
I wrote this a couple of days ago yet neglected to post it (didn't feel finished? so what, post it anyway...):
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.
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.
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.
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:
* go through and just identify intervals as quickly as possible (like in hymnal or chorale)
* tap out the rhythms, one staff in each hand (in music with one voice per hand)
* 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)
* 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
* play along with a (slowed down) recording of a less familiar piece, concentrating on real-time reading -- prioritizing playing in rhythm on major beats
* reading along with a more difficult recording (just reading, not at the keyboard), following the rhythms
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
* go through and just identify intervals as quickly as possible (like in hymnal or chorale)
* tap out the rhythms, one staff in each hand (in music with one voice per hand)
* 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)
* 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
* play along with a (slowed down) recording of a less familiar piece, concentrating on real-time reading -- prioritizing playing in rhythm on major beats
* reading along with a more difficult recording (just reading, not at the keyboard), following the rhythms
* 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.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Trying to do new things
It 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
attempting to replicate my last good practice
Somewhere 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".
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).
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.
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).
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.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Dizzy again
I'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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