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.

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.

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.

Therefore the sage, travelling all day,
Does not lose sight of his baggage.

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.

Rhythmic Piano

One 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

New 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!

:^)  :D  :^)  :D  :^)

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.

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.

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.

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...

More Basic Blues

First 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

So back to learning basic blues. First I worked on this:

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.

Next I started working on this:

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.