Sonata Pathetique

 

For my next project, I've chosen a piece I have played before -- the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata Pathetique.  

Why a repeat? I know, I almost passed it over because it kind of feels like cheating. 

But....

1) I *adore* this piece. I would seriously listen to it on a loop for hours. 

2) I needed a break after the fiasco that was my recent Bach piece, which there shall never be video of and of which we shall never speak again.  👀

3) It's the very first piece I was ever able to make it all the way through with my shaky hands when I first started dipping my toes into piano lessons and playing in front of my teacher.  My hands don't really do that very often anymore (took long enough!) and I have learned SO much since last time I played it. So now I'm excited to take it to the next level! 

After just a few days of playing it, I have gotten most of it back, thanks to the fascinating, lasting power of muscle memory!)  So now I'm focusing on dynamics and making it expressive. Hopefully will be able to post a video soon!

In the meantime, here's a super cool video about muscle memory. :)

3 Years, 1 Pandemic, and 2 Years of Piano Lessons Later.....

Wow. It's a little dusty in here. I forgot all about this space! Don't mind the cobwebs, I'll do some spring cleaning soon.

So, a lot has happened in 3-1/2 years. I did some zoom lessons during covid and then when the piano studio went back to in-person I started doing lessons here and there and trying to get over my nerves about it.  At some point during early 2022, I took the leap and started doing weekly in-person lessons. 

It has been a journey, but even when it's hard and I fail spectacularly, (and I do, quite frequently) that half hour is still an absolute highlight of my week. 

I'm extremely lucky to have a teacher (who has become a wonderful friend over the years) and is willing to push me when I need it, change things up, or just let me bow out when I can't handle a push on a given day. 

As I have learned new skills like how to use phrasing and dynamics, my tastes have completely changed. It's actually funny reading these old posts!  Early on in lessons, she handed me a Chopin Nocturne to try, and I was *instantly* a fangirl. I've been through three of his Nocturnes now and discovered several composers with similar styles I never would have thought to try.  I just made a list of my next four pieces -- three are Mendelssohn and one is Beethoven. A Bach piece I've been wrestling with for the last six weeks sealed the deal for me that I'm finished with him for a long, long while. 

Anyway, I'll get back to posting here again. I love looking back at the old posts and how far I've come, and, as I've said before, I love a good challenge and goal. So time to come up with something fun (or at least regular posts) for 2024! 

I'll leave you with a Mendelssohn piece I finished up over the summer. It's one of his Songs without Words (Op 85 no 4) and I loved learning this one so much that I'm actually practicing it again currently to try to get it back under my fingers. 

12 of 12!

Well, this is it. 12 of 12! This blog didn't quite go the way I intended.... but I did manage to learn 12 new pieces in 2020. (five of them were not originally on my list and all came from the same Andrea Dow books)

I learned a bunch of new things,  faced some fears, and played pieces I never would have had the courage to try before!

Ready to do it again, (bigger and better!) in 2021, hopefully minus a long pandemic interruption. 

Here is my last piece of 2020, mistakes and all because... tradition! ;)

Notturno Op. 54 No 4 by Edvard Grieg

p.s. A bunch of my videos from early on aren't working. :(  Hoping to get that fixed soon because it's kind of devastating if they're gone! All that work!  Using YouTube from now on to archive them! 

Piano Imposter Syndrome

In case the existence of this blog hasn't clued you in yet,  I 💜 piano.  Always have.... from when I was four years old and learning the little pieces out of John Thompson's Teaching Little Fingers to Play. (Fellow 80s piano kids, did a mental image of that iconic red book just appear in your head along with the words and tune to "Birthday Party? If so, you're welcome.)  One of my favorite things to do was to try to play all the way through the book perfectly, counting all the notes correctly and not making any mistakes, finishing up with Home on the Range, the very last piece, where you finally got to use two hands at the same time. LOL.  There was a certificate at the end of that I'm sure I filled out for myself at some point. 😂

As an adult, if real life didn't interfere, I would play for hours and hours a day and not get bored of it.  (Sometimes I do, at the expense of adult responsibilities.... 👀) My goal isn't to perform (shudder) or pass any kind of exam. Lessons add accountability,  help me get out of my own way and tackle things I was never comfortable with before so I can have more fun with it.  I just want to keep moving forward, collecting and learning new pieces along the way because playing makes my brain happy and calm.  Learning a new piece and being able to play it well is truly satisfying.  

In the grand scheme of piano learning, I have some knowledge gaps, but I'm probably solidly intermediate.

All that to say..... 

Absolutely NONE of the above truths about me change the fact that much of the time, I feel like a piano imposter. 

Here is a sampling of things my dumb brain tells me on a regular basis: 

"What business do you have playing playing fancy pieces? Do you actually think you can make them sound good? Why are you posting videos? There are so many things wrong. You shouldn't bother!"

It goes on and on.  My brain is a jerk. 

Anytime I think about learning a piece that has any real expression to it, I truly feel unqualified to even TRY.  It makes me feel like big faker. "Look at you, thinking you can express emotion with your playing? Do you actually think you're a real pianist or something? STOP." 

I think this is probably why I like a lot of Bach pieces, especially his fast ones -- because they're very mechanical and as long as you play all the right notes in the right order, you can sound pretty competent. There is no pedaling or places where you're supposed to know to improvise the rhythm a little or let a note linger to convey something abstract like sadness or longing... or to build tension.  There are just notes, one after the other, like a music box. Playing one of those pieces well is so much more straight forward and objective. 

I do know I'm not alone in feeling like a big faker. A lot people feel this way about things they are trying to do or be. 

I'm a writer too. I've been a writer my entire life. Even still, it still makes me kind of cringe and feel weird to type the words, "I am a writer". What right do I have? I know... jerk brain. 

So, I have a new piece this week and at first glance it was a zillion light years outside of my comfort zone. The first time I listened to it, my thought was, "Well, I'll try it.... but this isn't going to be pretty. I'm definitely not good enough to play with all this emotion and nuance. It will be a miracle if I can pull this off. This is where I fall flat on my face." Suffice to say, it's not a piece I would have chosen for myself for all the reasons I've mentioned... 

....which is why it's actually perfect. 

I dove in and it's going much better than expected. I'm getting more confident that I might actually be qualified to play this. It's so pretty and I do hope to be able to eventually do it justice. 

Maybe it's time to stop feeling like a piano imposter?

I'm a sheet music hoarder. Our piano bench is overflowing and I recently had to add a crate next to the piano to hold more.  Anytime I hear a piece I like and might want to learn, I buy the sheet music.... or the whole book.... or .... every book I can find by the composer..... yeah, I may have a problem. 

Sometimes this works out, other times (more often than not) I realize I'm in over my head, get discouraged, and abandon it. 

So, I finished my Beethoven piece a couple of weeks ago and was searching high and low for something new to tackle. I went through ALL my books, searched the internet, scoured YouTube, listened to probably hundreds of pieces of music, and even played around with a couple I liked, but nothing really struck me. 

I decided to throw caution to the wind and just turn the decision process over to my teacher. I asked her to choose something that would be challenging and would help me work on something I need to learn.  I could SWEAR I heard an evil cackle when she realized the power she now wielded.  

I promised to learn and play whatever she picked.  Now, you should probably know, I'm  kind of a control freak (understatement) so this was BIG.  Despite my begging, I received zero hints other than it was fast and Spanish. I discovered when she said she wouldn't send it to me until five minutes before my lesson, she meant it. I literally brought it hot off the printer right over to the Zoom screen. 

C: (points to the image below) Now, don't freak out.

 

Me: (immediately freaks out)

I asked what skill this particular piece was going to teach me. The basic gist was to learn to read music that looks complicated and to not to give up a when notes are all standing close together and on top of teach other like they're at a pre-covid happy hour. 

(also chords, I think, because chords are not my forte. Ha. See what I did there?) 

Okay, so I'll be perfectly honest, I *definitely* would have gotten to this point in the piece and chucked it right out the window the minute I saw this mess.  BUT! After an explanation of what I was looking at, it turned out to be much easier than it appeared.  Also, with someone else having chosen it and also setting the goals, just giving up wasn't as easy.  Score one for accountability!

So off I went. Thankfully, I've had a lot of downtime the last couple weeks because we are back to staying home all the time again.  Many hours of practice later and a few back and forth video attempts, I was finally successful!  Pretty proud of this one because really, I NEVER would have stuck with a piece like this in the past. 

And yes, I'm totally wearing pajamas in this video because I definitely didn't think this was the final round.

I was expecting it to get kicked back to me with a new goal for the week. LOL.   Oops. 

Since this video has minimal mistakes, I figure I'll save myself the anguish of trying to record a decent play-through again! 

SPANISH DANCE No. 5 "Andaluza"—Granados

Ready for something new to round out this crazy 2020!  Stay tuned! (my gosh, the piano puns just keep coming!)

Time Spent with Beethoven is Never Wasted....

I started this piece awhile back. It's one that every time I heard it played on my classical station, I would remember I really wanted to learn it but never knew what it was called!

My oldest son was learning Moonlight Sonata recently, so our Beethoven book was open on the piano. One night, I sat down and started fiddling with the piece on the next page... realized quickly it was the piece I've always loved!  It's the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata Pathetique. Musical mystery solved. :) 

I tackled the main theme and was immediately in love. It feels AMAZING on the fingers, the way the it flows and the way hands move back and forth. Hard to describe but it's just soothing to play. 

The rest of the piece wasn't as easy, at least partially because I found it less interesting and my brain was like, "nah, let's just play the fun part again!", but also because I struggle with "decorative rhythms" sometimes and also with chords played quickly.  These are the kinds of things that used to make me give up on a piece. After watching my kids take lessons for a few years, I know now why this is. I never learned certain things and I'm having to fill in those gaps now.  It's a challenge sometimes to balance and push through feeling fairly competent in piano in some respects and completely like a beginner in others.

I loved this piece enough though to persevere through it, and, perhaps most importantly, ask for help when I needed it.  This piece is the first one I made it all the way through semi-successfully in a lesson. My hands didn't shake... my leg did for awhile but eventually it gave up.... perhaps the positive of a longer piece? LOL. 

Anyway, so I'm seeing a light at the end of the anxiety tunnel, which is a huge relief because now I feel like I can actually make progress piano lessons instead of just trying to spend the whole time just battling crippling anxiety.   Virtual lessons have actually been a huge help with this. I turn the face-to-face camera off and just leave on the overhead camera, so I can kind of push out of my mind that anyone is watching. If getting my quirky kids through school has taught me anything, it's that you can always figure out creative ways of working around, pushing through,  and accommodating struggles and disabilities, anxiety included!  (special thanks to my teacher, Cecelia, for always helping me work through it however I need to! :)

I finally was able to play through this piece with no mistakes yesterday and I was so excited to take a video. But of course, the camera running always messes with my brain. Ten takes last night and I gave up. Back at it this morning.... managed this version with a few silly mistakes, but we're calling it good enough because perfection wasn't the lesson here.... perseverance was. :) 

 

A Little Haydn for Father's Day!

When I was around four or five years old, my dad was going back to school to become a music teacher.

He practiced piano non-stop back then and there was this one piece in particular he played over and over over for months.  He made up words to it, we sang it in the car, we sang it at the piano. I would dance around the living room when he played it. It's completely etched into my brain.

I had tried to track it down on and off for years. I finally remembered to ask him about it a couple years ago and he told me the name, but of course I forgot to write it down.

Then, about a year ago,  I inherited all of my grandmother's photos and scrapbooks and among the treasures was the program from dad's senior recital in college.

As luck would have it, I had also just recently snagged a Haydn book from our piano teacher when she was cleaning house and giving a bunch of music away. I immediately flipped through it and lo and behold, there it was!

MYSTERY FINALLY SOLVED!

It took a long while for me to tackle it. I kept opening up the book and then putting it aside again. It didn't even make the cut for my initial 12 Pieces in 2020.

I finally got down to business early on in quarantine when it became clear I would have loads of time to kill for the foreseeable future. It was initially visually overwhelming,  so I would do a little and, since I'm an instant gratification addict, I would move on to easier pieces I could learn in a day or two.

That made for slow..... going, but I slogged through it as best I could.

A few weeks ago, I realized Father's Day was coming up and it was the perfect motivation to wrap this up. I shot a bunch of questions off to our piano teacher and she helped me through the parts that I had been fudging my way through because I couldn't t execute them correctly or they were confusing. (Sidenote: it's amazing how things suddenly make a whole lot more sense when someone who actually knows what they're doing shows you. LOL! Thanks, C! 😊💜)

Unfortunately, I thought the part I wanted to learn was only two pages, but I realized about a week ago it's actually more like six.  (insert deflating balloon sound here)

The good news is that though I'm not totally in over my head. To continue with the with the deep water metaphor, it's more like I'm five-foot-two, standing on tiptoes with my chin just far enough out of the water to be able to yell, "Hey look! I can touch out here!!"

Seeing as how Father's Day is today, it's time to post. I'll preface with the fact that I'm a little embarrassed by this recording.  I still have some work to do on the piece anyway and you add in my ever-present performance anxiety and it's a recipe for a thousand takes, of which *this* was, sadly,  the best one.  Camera off? No mistakes. Camera on? It's like my fingers are tied together.

But! I did it! And now I'm partway through learning the rest of it. (but you'll have to wait awhile longer for that.)  :)

Lucky for you all, though I have performance anxiety playing in real time, I seem have basically zero shame about posting videos on the internet. (No, I can't explain that.)  So here it is, in all its mistake-riddled glory.

This piece is SUPER fun to play (when I'm not recording myself) and I can't wait to learn the rest of it!