Achievement of the Day or Week

JB_PT · 2024-06-25T18:07:48+00:00

There was a similar thread on That Other Forum...it was started in 2010 and has almost 11k posts! I thought it would be nice to have something like that here, where you can share something as simple as "I finally nailed that tough measure," or a feat truly amazing like "I managed to record an entire piece without my cat jumping on the piano." 😺 I'm at work so my only achievement today will be "I survived my Friday and now I have 4 days of piano to look forward to." Someone please kick this off with a more interesting achievement than that!

ShiroKuro

tszulc90 I just finished listening! Bravo!! And after only a short time learning, truly well done! That’s a great selection of pieces you’ve chosen. Also, what a nice space to have a concert!

tszulc90

ShiroKuro Thank you! Much appreciated. This recital is a big thing for me. The place is very nice, it is called Willa Lentza, named after famous and very successful person who build it (as a status for his achievements) for himself and lived in there.

pianoloverus

tszulc90 Excellent musically and technically!

thepianoplayer416

I've been putting off this Chopin Prelude at an intermediate level for a while. Got "The Big Book of Classical Music" a while ago with many interesting pieces including this. Decided to work on it for 2 weeks. Played on Piano de Voyage keyboard & Pianoteq 8.

JustinVG

lautreamont oh no! I hoop it will heal fast!

I was just reading this book about music practice with neuroscience proof about what works and why.

Book: Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician's Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing by Molly Gebrian

This week I read a chapter about the effectiveness of “Mental Practice”. It had a passage of someone that practiced a Concerto mentally when she was injured and couldn’t play.

See a quick photo of that part:

Get well soon!

JustinVG

tszulc90 one listener added! Very nice playing and well done! A recital is no small thing and a few faults are (almost) always going to happen with so much focus on you. The important thing is how you handle them.

I enjoyed listening and again, nice job!

thepianoplayer416

JustinVG
Guess a lot of people underestimate the power of visualization & mental practice. Beginners & lower intermediate learners generally are not able to read sheet music and know what is going on in his head without actually playing.

lautreamont

Thanks everybody. At my lesson, I decided to stay on, one handed, for the time being. My teacher said that we can use this time to level up my right hand. At the moment I'm back doing a little Hanon, this time with a lot more perspective on how to approach them, making sure I"m not just zooming through them but playing with good technique and with an ideal sound, doing a little Czerny op. 299, and I'm learning Chopin's Minute Waltz. My teacher also gave me the green light to work on a Chopin Etude (just the right hand) as well. But I'm thinking of alternatives to a Chopin Etude for moto perpetuo like allegro figurations, simply because everything I'm practicing is a bit repetitive, so I'm thinking of Bach's D major Prelude from the WTC or Bach-Busoni Nun Freut Euch Chorale Prelude. I was working hard on polishing a Bach piece before I got hurt, so it might be nice to incorporate his work in my speed studies. Chopin one day extemporaneously played several fugues by Bach for a pupil without a score, and he remarked that one doesn't forget Bach.

Since I was self-taught for so long, the real work is doing things the right way, and gradually ramping up the speed while leaning on all the tricks I know for relaxation and articulation. I'm focused first on proper technique and achieving the sound I envision, and once I get comfortable with a figuration to test out playing faster while trying to maintain form, noting what works and what I think needs improvement, then going back to slower playing to focus on those. There's a kind of heaviness when I play very fast that doesn't sound or feel particularly good, but with everything I've learned in the last few months, I feel like I know a lot more on how to fix that, with the goal being real fluidity and sensitivity.

lautreamont

This week has gone pretty well. I've learned the first section of the Minute Waltz. There's a tricky part on the descent after the primary figure, fingering wise with a mordent on a repeated note that I think I figured out how to finger today after trying out a lot of solutions. My speed isn't there yet, when I really go for it there are some unfortunate accents some of the time, but it sounds ok at a slower tempo, and I have a feel for the dynamics of the entire section. On the Hanon, I'm really working on articulation and dynamics, doing 2 a day a couple times for a warmup. For the Czerny I'm doing the right hand of a study for arpeggios with rotation and really intentional key placement, and it's starting to get up to speed and to feel good. I'm also doing the 1st Study of Op. 299, a little slowly as I'm counting to not lose place. The ascending scales, which have always been a week spot, have really improved in the space of a week, but they're still nowhere as fast or smooth as my descending rh scales.

Encouraged by my teacher, I'm trying out some Chopin Etudes, just the rh while I nurse my left. I'm using the Cortot editions that have a lot of preparatory exercises for each study. My focus is mostly on 25 no. 1 and 10 no. 5, playing mostly without the pedal to be assured of my articulation and dynamics. My teacher underlined the fact that choosing works like this, they'll always be the sorts of pieces I'd like to play, so they're a good choice to grow with, and the speed will come in time. My method is to practice at a moderate tempo, probably 1/2 or 2/3 of virtuoso tempo cleanly, then to try it out at tempo, diagnose it there in terms of sounds rhythms and hand feel, take it down really slow and focus on grouping, articulation, and hand choreography, and go back to moderate tempo. Nothing feels unplayable, which feels great. I've been so in a routine for the past week that I've ignored the Mazurka I had been working on before my injury returned. Because the left hand is just bass and chords I tried it out today and played it better than I ever have, way crisper with some of the more filigree figurations and more decisive with dynamics.

pianoloverus

lautreamont There's a tricky part on the descent after the primary figure, fingering wise with a mordent on a repeated note that I think I figured out how to finger today after trying out a lot of solutions.

I remember trying out a million different fingerings at that place also. I don't think I remember what I finally chose.

lautreamont

pianoloverus
It's such an innocuous moment but maybe the trickiest part of the piece to me, especially because it's just a part of a transition back down to the main figure, so you don't really want to bring too much attention to it.

The one I had been using the most up to yesterday was 4 on F, then 2 on Eb, then 3-4-3 for the mordent, but it felt iffy doing the grace note with a weaker finger at tempo, one of those things where 7 out of 10 times it works fine but I'm always a little stressed about it. Now I'm doing 4 on f, 3 on Eb, then moving my hand slightly deeper on the keys, and then 2-3-2 which is more fluid. Without moving my hand a little in it feels too awkward and cramped. There are other ways, like having 2 for F, which allows for some experimenting (like 1 on Eb, 2-3-2 for mordent), but I try to avoid overcomplicated fingering or things that would require a lot of fine tuning for relatively simple music.

lautreamont

This week was fairly good, with work on Chopin's Minute Waltz and Bach's D Major Prelude from WTC 1, and a little supplemental practice on Chopin's Black Keys Etude. The Minute Waltz is coming along fine. The hard part is not pressing speed. I'm trying to get it absolutely smooth and controlled, and then I'll gradually ramp up the speed so I'm not contending with sloppiness down the line. The Bach feels like an etude for fingers 4 and 5 to me, which are probably the things I'm most self-conscious about at the piano even after putting a lot of work into them, and before my lesson I had no clue how to phrase the constant flow of sixteenths. I had been phrasing practically beat by beat, which was maddening and inappropriate-sounding, but my teacher said that aiming for the first and third beats would allow me to have more of a sense of direction, so I'm excited to try that.

These are my first moto perpetuo type works, so there's a lot to learn on sustaining speed and remaining smooth, a lot of trial and error and observing my physical movements in problem areas and detecting what's not optimal when something goes wrong, then finding a solution. My eureka moment last month has been of great help, but I'm still in the acquaintance stage of utilizing all of the motions available to me, where I need to work less effective technique out from the physical states that repetitive use of less than adequate technique has done to my hands to get a truer sense of fluidity, even though I now have more of a glimpse of what that would look and feel like.

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