A Not-So-New Regimen

I've structured my practice based on what has been working and what I'd like to accomplish. It's not really much of a change, just a solidification. I've done this for several reasons. Here are some:

• I needed to fit sight reading more securely into my daily routine, and at a time when I wasn't so tired I wouldn't want to do it anymore. 
• I needed to get on track to coverage of all the scales and arpeggios. This is difficult. I'm still working on getting the minor scales going. 
• I  read about the optimal time to spend working on a piece and stuff like that. If 15-20 minutes is standard, I thought my practice time could fit about six sections.  

So I figured I could sustain my own interest and momentum by segmenting my time thus:

This is the master. It will change based on the precise pieces I'm working on. Yesterday (Monday), for instance, I did the following version of this schedule:

• Major scales in all keys
• Menuetto (from Haydn's Sonata in E^♭)
• C Major Arpeggios
• Solfeggietto (CPE Bach)
• Sight Reading (JS Bach's Prelude in D Minor)
• Scarf Dance (Chaminade)

So hopefully this will get me somewhere tangible in the future. I managed to stick to it pretty well yesterday and finished everything in about 90 minutes, so there was wriggle room and everything! Fingers crossed it'll keep on working out.

February 26, 2016 and I think I'm finally making progress on these arpeggios, particularly the C minor and G minor types, but even the majors too. A lot more room for improvement though.

April 16, 2016 and I really have been keeping up with this regimen, although I haven't really been adjusting the chart. I do one group of notes per day: C Major and Minor in scales and arpeggios on Monday, D Major and Minor on Tuesday, and so forth. So far I haven't been doing all the minor scales. Mostly the natural and some harmonic. And the chromatics have fallen by the wayside (alas...). But the arpeggios are the scariest of all... and I've been doing them! I've even managed to get some contrary motion going in G, A, and E Major, so far. Hopefully this progress will continue and adding in the missing technique will be easier, not harder. (I'm acutely aware of neglecting the major, dominant and diminished seventh arpeggios, as well, but those too will come in time. Onward (like it's the first day) ...

July 29, 2016 - So, I've  pretty much been following a version of this since the original post (9/15/15) and today I thought I'd document feeling a new elasticity in my fingers and joints. I've felt this before, and after a few weeks found myself again disgruntled by the harshness of my tone and seeming rigidity of my fingers. It dawned on me today that whenever such a breakthrough feeling is followed by a contrasting feeling of dissatisfaction, it might be my ear and body and general aesthetic sensibility (proprioceptivity?) becoming sharper. So it might be a good thing that prompts me toward developing even more subtlety with my fingers. So I guess now I should be looking forward to becoming dissatisfied with even this newfound flexibility? Yay!

21. Octave Study (Etude)

This song was good for my left hand octaves. The right hand, too, got some practice.

20. Solfeggietto

Hmph! Now, looking again at the score and recognising that it begins in the bass clef, I'm wondering if I even started Solfeggietto in the correct register. (I did. Disaster averted!)

I was actually a little terrified to get to this song because I'd heard several renditions of it on YouTube in which the pianists play extremely fast! I wasn't sure I would be able to do that, so I panicked, but not enough to let it deter me. I guess I secretly figured that since Alan Chan didn't play it so ridiculously fast, those persons were either just showing off, or playing it at a level higher than expected of me at this stage. Of course, prestissimo doesn't mean "go slow,"if you know what I'm saying.

It turns out that this song is perhaps easier to play fast than it seems. The scales are mostly shared between the hands and, along with the arpeggios, are usually descending. This makes a huge difference regarding difficulty, since it is much easier to play runs going in the direction of the thumb than toward the pinky.

This isn't to say Solfeggietto is easy. On the contrary, it's been quite a lot of work getting the passages even. That's what I've been focusing on: evenness. My fingers tend to go fast when they are out of control. So I use slow playing (and it take lots of it!) to try to get some control over my fingers so they don't just do whatever they want. It's been a journey, and I'm nowhere close to being finished.

Right is one of the earlier passages of the text. It completes the first phrase's repetition, with a full 11-note run down the keyboard. You play the ascending form of the melodic minor backward, and it is the first of several. The patterns are usually the same, though executed in different keys. This one is in the home key of C Minor. I had trouble with getting the final three notes even. Getting from that F over the E^♭ hump took some work. It's funny because even though you put in the time for precisely that (and other) reason(s) while doing scales, it seems refinement is always necessary whenever actual pieces require those techniques.

These two-note slurs represent a transition from the first C-Minor section (which had terminated in a group of eight 4-note arpeggios) to a similar passage in G Minor. I worked long and hard on that arpeggio section along with this pictured here. I'm still working on it, even, because before the speed can come, the precision and the evenness have to be there. That takes time... for me, anyway.

It took some work to get my fingers to these broken octaves (played first in G and immediately after in C). It's a bit of a jump. The hand positioning causes some difficulty as both hands are in the treble clef and the left hand must get out of way in order to allow the right hand access to its notes. And vice versa. Such rapid threading of hands and fingers requires some manoeuvring and precision that I first had to figure out and then try to replicate over time. I think I've finally found a way to do it.

These arpeggios flank the broken octaves. I find it interesting that they begin as ascending-to-descending chords in the minor mode, then reverse their directions and convert to the major mode. It's as though they're being turned inside-out! And it doesn't even sound weird switching modes in the tonic like that.



This marks the transition to an interesting portion of the text. Arpeggios in various inversions of F Minor "walk" the piece down the keyboard. The D♭ octave changes the character of the melody (and harmony). It represents a true key change: a dramatic one you can really hear, and not just some adjustment to a dominant or subdominant key. The accidentals are a tell-tale sign. 

Some fast finger work follows. I haven't really applied myself to the work of mastering this part yet, as it's near the end of the song. But I've played it quite a few times and done quite a few reps. The "finger work," in actuality, isn't really faster than the rest. The entire text is in semiquavers. But here much of the burden is placed on a few fingers rather than being spread evenly over all five (in each hand). So it feels a bit like more work. Note the group of five semiquavers at the end of the bar. There the fingers have to move a tiny bit faster than they have for the whole piece. Luckily, it's the work-horse fingers 1, 2, and 3 that bear this burden. They're equal to the task, and that's probably been the easiest part of the piece for me so far! After this, there's another bout of broken octaves, a descending C-Minor arpeggio in two inversions, and then it's a return to the opening run. Halfway through that run, the piece ends.

Alternatives
This piece was originally written to be played with just the left hand. I checked, and it's feasible. Maybe I'll try it some day. Also, an alternate ending exists in which the original C-Minor run is executed all the way through and ends on Middle C, I think. That's two octaves lower than the one pictured. I've heard it once, and I don't like it. Glad J. T. chose this version for his text. 

Alan Chan's rendition

19. Ay-Ay-Ay (Creole Song)

This song holds no charm for me. But I read through it a couple times. It's complicated enough to pose a helluva challenge for me in that respect, so I used it for that. I think it also would have provided technical challenges, but I still couldn't bear to spend the time memorising it. It's got a lot of staccato going on and sharing (semi)quavers between hands. 

Repetition, imitation, and unison

Syncopation and rhythm shared between the hands










This gapped chromatic passage that jumps between A and C







The ending that skips down by half-octaves.

Alan Chan's rendition

18. Prelude in B Minor

That word assai doesn't seem much like an Italian word. Why not molto. Is it French? It's about as inelegant as any word from a Teutonic language. Anyway, Chopin's Prelude in B Minor is to be played very slowly, and I guess if this is the case, it indicates that the piece is to be played with the utmost grace and fluidity. And pathos. Apart from the left-hand melody, repetition characterises this piece. The right hand's job is to accompany and tap out a steady(ish) rhythm upon which to build the melody. My RH fourth finger is perpetually en garde. An interesting thing happens at the hiatus between pedals. I had to develop a special rhythm to get the left-hand finger off the D in time to get the right-hand thumb onto it without a hiatus in the actual melody. It has to do with getting the pedal down again just before lifting that left-hand off the semi-quaver (D). Practice made almost perfect, but even that'll improve before long. 

Pictured right is an interesting passage with a lot of chromaticism going on in the chords. They change by semitones one at a time. The sound is a bit difficult to learn, but very compelling because unusual. It teaches you about tones and the way harmonies can be squeezed out of unlikely (too-close) tonal associations. 

The continuation of that passage moves a tiny bit faster down the keyboard, as the note changes are a bit wider at times and sometimes even double up. It requires some rigid fingering and subtle wrist/palm movements to get it just right. The triad in the middle of the first bar is built on F#. It moves from the dominant to the subdominant with a minor 7th added. Then it's got a difficult acciaccatura that crushes into two notes (F# and C#), not just one, as it was in the good old days. I'd been getting some practice with that in Hungarian though. Still working on that bit as well. 

This long, long arpeggio is really a C-Major chord inverted and dragged out for two octaves. I like to play it. It feels cool moving my hand with ease such a far distance across the keyboard. And I get to do it twice! It's interesting that they modulate to C from B minor. I could hardly tell anything strange happened, as you usually can. But I guess all those weird, narrow chords in the earlier phrases prepared me enough so that C doesn't seem too far afield. I really need to analyse that modulation. 

Then the fun begins: an intricate manoeuvring of chords (and repeated high-notes) in the right hand with the most lugubrious part of the melody in the left. I try to play it especially lento and make it all dramatic, but there's nothing but piano and sostenuto indicated. Does sostenuto grant the freedom to do all that? Perhaps.

The ending is a return to the beginning that adds a couple extra notes at the end. Forlorn.

17. You

This animato piece is in the Habanera style. The telltale sign is in the tree semiquavers closing bar two. I read through this piece a few times and the rhythm is where the technical lessons reside. 

A case in point is the triplet and (semi)quaver combination. It sounds really latin-folky. It's the best part. Interesting to learn which note groups combine to form that rhythm. 

This was the most difficult part, but it's wasn't too bad. The slanting, contiguous notes are difficult for my dyslexic mind. I tend to play high-to-low when the notes go low-to-high. And vice versa. I also get visually confused about which notes the accidentals truly modify: before or after, line or space...? Yeah. But it helps that this molto allargando is indicated here. It gives me time to get everything together, and delays don't sound like errors. 

The end is very interesting. Each hand does a wide chord, contracts to hit a note in the middle, and then widens again to hit another chord to the left/right. It's a bit like a see-saw. Notice that treble clef that sneaks in between two semiquavers on a beam! Very tricky. I caught it in time though. However, there's an even bigger trick of this sort that shows up in Ay-Ay-Ay. That messed me up bigtime once. 

Alan Chan's rendition

Perspective: A Note on Levels

Henle Verlag classifies Bach's Musette at level 1 of its grading system. It places Chopin's Prelude in B Minor at level 3/4 and Prelude in E Minor at level 4. If this is true, I have gained 3 of their levels in 10 months. What it's worth is that my work hasn't been utterly futile and there's an end in sight to the period of preparation before I can play some of the songs I've been looking forward to. For example:

• Raindrop Prelude is given a level 5 rating. I really want to play that song. I love it. I am also patient enough to wait till I'm ready. 
• Nocturne in E-Flat is 5/6. It's in the last 1/3 of the John Thompson Grade 5 book.
• Minute Waltz is 5/6, too. It's in the first half of the John Thompson Grade 5 book. 

I'd like to play Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# Minor too, and it's given a level 6 rating. So I wait. He's pretty tough, of course. He shows up for the first time in the John Thompson series as the penultimate piece in the Grade 5 text, and consequently in the entire series. The piece is Melodie, the third piece in his third opus (Op. 3, No. 3). By comparison, Chopin (who is also tough) shows up as early as the Second Grade Book: his Prelude in A, Op. 28, No. 7.

In about late January / early February 2015, I tried out Chopin's Waltz in B Minor, Op. 69, No. 2 (Posth.). I acquired the score in the text shown here containing Chopin's most accessible works published by KJOS. I was playing the notes of the piece, but they didn't feel very comfortable under my fingers, so I put it away.  Yesterday (Aug 5, 2015) I picked it back up just to try out those first few bars again. I had forgotten the notes by then, but the only delay I found was in re-memorizing them. That took less than five minutes (just the first two bars). Playing them was not hard at all. It only took six months, haha! But at least it's progress and I'm glad to see it has occurred. I attribute much of this progress to the Theme from Second Movement of Beethoven's of Fifth Symphony and Scarf Dance, which are both in A-flat Major and gave me practice balancing my fingers on all those narrow perches (aka black keys). I also think some of my progress is due to the fast fingering of Curious Story, Petite Russian Rhapsodie, Eflin Dance, and Hungarian.

Overall, I think the jumps in level (Henle, RCM, ABRSM, or any other grading system) are geometric rather than arithmetic. Kinda like the levels of the Richter Scale. It'll probably take me as long to get from level 4 to level 5 as it did to jump between the first and fourth levels. Rachmaninoff by December 2016?

(btw... Happy Independence Day, Jamaica!!)