January Challenge!

On 12/7, I started Bach's Sinfonia 15 in B-minor. I found it the way I often find pieces I end up wanting to learn, by watching super-talented little kids play the piano on YouTube or Facebook. In this case, a mom in one of the educational groups I read posted a video of her 9-year-old son playing it.

(I find that, for me, nothing is more motivating than watching a child, whose feet don't even reach the floor when they sit on the piano bench,  nail a complicated piece of music. It's the biggest kick in the pants ever.)

I immediately liked it because I'm always drawn to fast pieces where both hands are busy and where the notes fill up the whole space. Wait, I'm probably not saying it right... no rests? That might be a better way to say that in actual musical terms.  ;)

I also love that it sounds like the tick-tock of a clock. In fact, it reminds me of another piece I've played er.... tried to play and only gotten halfway through...  Le CouCou.  

I love how the melody gets effortlessly passed back and forth between the hands. It's just a lot of fun to listen to and I KNEW it would be equally fun to play if I could master it.

Now, one possible advantage (?) of never having taken real lessons is that I basically have no idea what pieces I should or should not be able to play. While I do have a general idea of where I am level-wise,  I usually just choose pieces based on how much I enjoy listening to them. Then I either stick with them or I don't, depending on my ratio of motivation to wanting to bang my head on the piano keys.

I did have a moment after I got my hands on the music to this piece where I considered that perhaps it wasn't going to work out between Bach and me this time.  Almost immediately, my fingers revolted somewhere around the 6th measure when this mess came on the scene. 

I took it with me to my son's piano lesson and his teacher helped me by adding some fingerings and cautioned me to be meticulous and consistent about them because that's how Bach rolls. 

Actual photo of Bach taunting me from the grave

She also suggested perhaps I should start with the Two-Part Inventions first before I tackled this one, a Three-Part Invention. (She's right, of course,  there are 15 Two-Part Inventions and 15 Sinfonias and the Inventions are definitely meant to be learned before the Sinfonias.)  So I came home and considered that option for several days...

....  but I am horribly stubborn, so I ignored that sage, professional advice and plowed ahead. 

About a week or two in, I could mostly play the first page, not well, mind you,  but maybe to like a C+?  Naive piano soul that I am, I gleefully started on the second page and that's when things came to a screeching halt. 

My video explains the rest....

I made that video about a week ago,  and since then, I've improved page 1 and have actually learned page 2, though there are some killer arpeggios involving crossed hands that still trip me up. (WTH Bach? The crossed hands are really just unnecessary punishment.) 

So, the actual challenge going forward is to finish the piece by being able to play it beginning to end, no stopping, with the metronome set on 160. 

Right now, I can do the first page at that speed no problem, but the second page is at about 132.  Honestly, when I have gotten pieces in the past to this point, I've called them good enough and moved on. So this really WILL be a challenge for me.  (I'm kind of the queen of "good enough' which is why I have an entire repertoire of pieces that are 80% learned!)

So, welcome! Thanks for joining me. I hope to learn some things about piano and life this year. If nothing else, it should be entertaining watching me laugh at myself, because I'll be doing a lot of that. (and also being irreverent to dead composers.)

Good stuff....

While I'm in Christmas limbo waiting for the 2020 to begin so I can get this blog project underway, I've been doing lots of research on piano challenges, piano practice, choosing pieces, and really just anything I can find to help wrap my head around what I'm taking on.

In the process, I stumbled on this Youtube channel, PianoTV. I was instantly hooked.

She has videos for everything piano-related you can think of and this particular set of videos caught my attention because, while I am not an adult "beginner" per se, I relate to a LOT of these exact struggles. (I just discovered she even makes the same vegetables analogy I made below! LOL!)

Anyway, worth a watch if you have the time, especially if you are on a similar journey!

I think I've got it....

I know from experience with other "big ideas" I've had, that I need to keep this realistic and within reach. My motivation to finish things is often fragile at best. I'm great at coming up with big ideas,  positively awful at executing them to completion.

SO, after tapping into the brains of two piano teacher friends (whom I have now also drafted semi-against their will as my unofficial expert consultants), I've decided the theme for the project is going to be GRAB BAG!

I know, this kind of sounds like cheating. "BUT, ERIN! NO THEME IS NOT A THEME!" That's my impersonation of you yelling at your screen right now, which I'm sure you aren't really doing because you aren't that passionate about my crazy project and you're only reading this because you clicked over from Facebook for something to read while you drink your coffee.

Hear me out though. I'll be choosing each month's piece from one of my original theme ideas. This will keep some variety in the mix and also allow for some flexibility. There are definitely months I won't have as much time to devote to this as others. Most importantly, this keep me from potentially hating any one composer. I'm a huge Mozart and Bach fan-girl and I would hate to spend a year with either of them and ultimately decide we can no longer be friends because they made 2020 miserable for me.

In other news, I bought myself a Christmas present today!

It was pointed out to me that there are 12 scales and that maybe learning all 12 scales, arpeggios, inversions, and broken chords would be an idea for a theme.  What a great idea, right?

Spoiler alert: I HATE SCALES. 

After some thought though, I did realize it will make a nice addition to the 12-month-challenge.  I have never had any kind of formal piano lessons and thus, I have never spent any time on scales because scales are BORING. However,  two of my children can now play circles around me with scales and inversions and it feels sort of hypocritical to constantly be nagging at them about their fingerings when they can already play them a million times better than I can.

So this will be the musical equivalent of the kids eating their vegetables. I know it will be good for me, but I'm not going to like it and I'll probably whine a lot.  Consider yourself warned.

A year, a piano, and an idea I haven't yet entire figured out....

My brain is ALL over the place. It struggled to focus before I had kids and then one by one, my three boys came along and pulled it in even more directions. Now, not only am I trying to keep *myself* together, I'm also thinking for three junior humans and a husband.

I have lots of hobbies. (Professional Dabbler, Master of Nothing is what I often call myself.) Only one of these hobbies actually completely silences the constant chaos in my head -- playing the piano.

Now, occasionally I CAN hyper-focus for long periods of time on a project I'm really interested in.... but piano.... piano is foolproof and it always has been, as long as I can remember. When I want to feel truly focused and calm for a stretch of time,  I'll just sit down and play. It doesn't matter if I'm playing through old pieces that I've known by heart for nearly my whole life, or if I'm slogging through a brand new one that challenges and frustrates me. For me, fingers on keys = focus.

I wish I could explain it and I'm positive there is some fancy neuroscience behind why this works for me.  I suspect it's something to do with playing the piano requiring multiple parts of the brain to work together simultaneously and so it occupies the parts that normal wander off and get distracted by, for instance, a recipe for Russian teacakes. (which actually happened while I was typing this)

Sidebar/Tangent/Fun Fact (an ADHD specialty): If you don't know what it's like to never have a quiet brain and then suddenly have it be laser-focused and calm, the best way I can think to describe it would be like this. You know that moment the power goes out in your house and you are acutely aware of all the ambient noise the various electrical things in your house had been making until that very second?  The hum of the refrigerator, the buzz of the lights, the quiet whoosh from the air vents.... all this NOISE was all around you and then....suddenly.... true silence.  It's such beautiful relief! (until you realize everything in your freezer is going to have to be thrown away.)

So a couple weeks ago, I started thinking about a way to really capitalize on and channel this focus I only feel when I play --  something with a measurable goal and progress I could document.  Sort of part personal challenge, part philosophical project, and part neurological experiment rolled into one. Here's what I came up with:

Currently, I'm thinking I'll tackle a new piece from start to finish, twelve in all, though not sure of the criteria I'll use for choosing them yet.

The frontrunners are:

- 12 different types of pieces

- 12 pieces I've started but never finished (story of my life)

- one entire piano book of music, not allowing myself to skip any (again, story of my life.... I was always skipping the pieces in my books that I thought looked boring or seemed too difficult when I was a kid)

- 12 pieces chosen by my piano teacher friend, again not allowing myself to skip or substitute any

- 12 pieces that cover some piano skill I haven't learned yet/haven't felt like tackling/missed in my self-taught/scattered learning over the years

- 12 pieces by a single composer

- 12 pieces I simply love listening to

-12 of Bach's Two-Part Inventions

-12 Pieces of Disney music

The goals are numerous:
- for fun, duh!
- to challenge myself
- progress with piano and in the process, fill in holes I have in my skills
-learn to play more music I love
-to step out of my comfort zone
-to write something meaningful about the experience because, ultimately,  I'm a writer, not a pianist
-persevere with something for an entire year
-to be able to ask for help when I need it to get through frustrating parts (it's really hard for me to ask for help)
-to be able to play in front of my kids' piano teacher when I ask for said help (this is a lofty one... but I'm throwing it in there because since I'm making this a bit of a self-improvement project, we may as well face some anxiety too)

I don't ultimately know what the take-aways from the project will be. I'd like to think it will be a story of personal growth with a touch of drama and bravery for good measure.

But, I sort of suspect, like any good, open-ended project, a story I don't yet know about myself or life in general will slowly begin to emerge as I delve into the 12 pieces.  Or maybe I will fail spectacularly? Even that has its own lessons. :)

Who knows?

Stay tuned.... (haha, you see what I did there?)