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!)