Week 4: Share It

Grace A great piece and I enjoyed your playing. Keep at it!

Andrew Smith  Thank you for your encouragement.  Your Rach was awesome! 

Noel Nguyen It worked for the movie Cloverfield!

Noel Nguyen 

Oh dear, my submission will have to wait for after the watch party, friends!🙁 Program crashed to desktop, probably from overly taxing the CPU. Thankfully I had saved my progress at 3/4 of the way but still, a bummer! Oh well, let's enjoy the party nevertheless. Shouldn't be too hard, considering all the excellent submissions. See you there then!

Noel Nguyen Hey Noel you're in good company if you want to post something after the event.  I've done it several times.

.. er, .come to think of it, maybe that's not such good company.

But regardless, don't deprive us, and post it when you get a chance.  

I only had about 5 days this month to practice seriously, so I consider my post to be a "Week 2" posting.  So maybe  I'll follow up with my Week3 and Week 4 posts also.

edited to say: it was more like 7 days, after further review.  But still not nearly enough!

Peter Golemme Yesterday was my first attendance of a community concert. After 5 minutes I immediately realized I was in the wrong room of pianists and should rightfully belong to the silent audience who dutifully applaud after each of the pianists. Everyone that I saw playing was a level 13+ ( LOL!). Being a level 2 myself.. Hence posting here or any of the pages even after the concert will be valuable to the very few level 2 players here  - as a learning experience perhaps. I am now going through the archives to see the previous concerts.. (The Mozart one is full of terrific playing! )

Peter William Hi Peter -- I think yesterday's featured an unusually high number of difficult pieces. Some of the other challenges/livestreams featured more pieces around your level, so please don't think twice about sharing your playing. All levels are nice to see and instructive. Happy playing!

Andrew Smith Thank you Andrew for your kind words. As a result of hearing the level yesterday ( 13+) I have imposed new rules on myself.  1. No need to comment on anything. Just applause from me will be just fine. 2. I continue practising with some new insights.  3. My work should be much smaller and simpler pieces ( not more than a page at a time) but done with much greater care and over much longer time .e.g Plan to share 1 page but practised for several months for the Dec. concert. 4. Attend more concerts and hear experts like yourself play - with applause offcourse . :-) 

Also I had a totally mistaken understanding of ToneBase as a platform. To be honest  - it is  a "Real Pianist's platform" not a standard "Beginner's piano platform".  But I will continue to enjoy whatever lessons that I can understand.

Peter William Hi again Peter. That sounds like a good plan. Piano entails years of learning and years of fun discoveries, so enjoy the ride. As for your rules, I agree with them except for no. 1 -- you have just as much right to comment as anyone else. There are pieces that are too difficult for me, but I know what I am hearing and can share what I am thinking/feeling. My dad never played any instrument, but he had a good ear and could distinguish a sublime performance of a classical work from a mundane one, so I think you can trust some of your instincts. Cheers

Andrew Smith I agree. Everyone can be moved by music. You don’t have to play any instrument.

To me, the best part of yesterday’s watch party was being in the moment with everyone, all listening to the same music, and learning from the chat how people were feeling. 
 

Of course, saying anything out loud would have ruined the performance. Chat messages were perfect.

This leads me to my “sublime” story. A friend of mine was at a table at the Blue Note in New York and had Ron Carter sitting across from him.

During the performance, someone else at the table kept leaning over to Ron Carter and saying, sublime!, sublime! Ron tugged on his ear to indicate that he was trying to listen.

So, my friend and I have this little inside joke in which he says, sublime!, sublime! :)

Yesterday’s watch party had many sublime moments. I am happy I attended.

Peter William While Tonebase is definitely geared toward the 'serious' classical pianists out there, I think it is still wonderful to have people from all levels and backgrounds in the community. Everyone is a student after all, just at different points on path! As Andrew Smith said, you should definitely feel welcome to comment and / or ask questions.

I do think your observation about practicing smaller pieces to a high degree of execution is great! This is a fundamental part of effective learning and skill-building. In this regard, I feel I should mention that even the 'easier' pieces on Tonebase's level system are often something that would take considerable time before they would be introduced in lessons. For example, the Tonebase Level 3 Prelude in C Minor (BWV 999) is something that the average student would play after 6-8 years of piano lessons. This is a generalization of course; some will advance more quickly and some more slowly but most learners will learn this once they reach around the middle of "intermediate" studies which commonly takes 6-8 years. Such students will have played several dozen complete pieces, most to a strong performance level, before reaching this point. 

I do not say this to discourage anyone from trying to play these pieces sooner! Just know that the lower levels of Tonebase are very skewed. Beginner and intermediate piano are massive fields / areas of learning. Together they span about 9 years of instruction for the average learner yet they are only represented by levels 1-4 in Tonebase's system. If a person doesn't know this, Tonebase's level system at the lower end may lead to some discouragement if that person does not have a teacher to provide context.

Dustin Anderson I noticed this skewing towards intermediate and advanced players. 

I think ToneBase is an amazing resource but I do not believe it replaces a teacher.

A lot of my frustration stems from the fact that my teacher doesn’t seem to have time for my lessons.

Peter William Hi Peter, I agree with everything stated above by Dustin & Andrew. Tonebase is a community of pianists, of all levels.  Nobody is judged by the level they are at, and there are some beginners who regularly participate in Community Concerts.  Keep in mind, this most recent event was not actually a "Community Concert".  It was a Workshop for pianists with "Unfinished Business".  So it attracted several more advanced pianists, who probably always have some piece they are working on and eager to finish.  The advanced pianists do appear in the Community Concerts also, but so do several in the earlier stages of their development.

I've said this before, but I liken ToneBase to a virtual conservatory campus, where all kinds of pianists are walking around campus and you socialize & interact with and learn from them constantly while each of you is off to your separate classes and practice rooms.

In my day job, prior to retirement, I only very rarely got to interact with musicians and really missed that.  Being a member of this community of piano players is one of the things I enjoy most about Tonebase.

Dustin Anderson ah yes Dustin ! you have made some great points. I am delighted to be part of this wonderful community of pianists. Yes I get it - this challenge brought out all the former silent conservatory students. I guess Dominic was just encouraging me to be ok with playing in front of such accomplished players. So Thank you again. To be honest I as a listener would not listen to my recording as a player. LOL! even for 2 minutes. But we all have to start somewhere.  This happens to everyone who has heard the CDS of Horrowitz/Richter/Brendel.. and so on.. The players who played were nothing short of outstanding!. I did learn a lot just by watching, the playing, the choice of pieces, etc. To your comment on the C Minor Prelude I had not even heard it once ever until Saturday before ( 6 days before)  and saw a fellow Tonebase pianist post a slow version of it on her practise page and so tried it. I had only played it a total of 8 times at home with varying the speed and some other experiments. (mainly identifying Angela Hewitt and KonstantinLifschitz playing it - at rocket speed - faultlessly). Then saw the class on TB - So will continue to polish it. Maybe it will get a bit more fluent after a few weeks. 

Tonebase has given me a lot more fundamentals than I ever knew about and also lots of teaching channels on YT ( but there is a lot of sifting to do on YT on what can work for my level ).  A personal teacher is definitely the way to go from what I have heard but have not done that experiment yet. Need to find that grad school student - who is willing to take a look at my repertoire list of maybe 10 pieces of varying difficulty from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin and who can help me  fill in the technique/harmony gaps that I will need to fill in. That is a project in itself.. Right now I can only practise in the evenings after work - for an hour max. In a year or two- I should be able to put in 3 hours a day and a teacher should get me ready in a year on the 10  pieces is my thinking. I have done a lot of the homework on those 10 pieces. :-) The long way.. I am afraid. LOL!. 

Peter Golemme Yes Peter the real Pianist !! :-) . Your playing was quite spectacular of the Rach prelude.  Thank you for the encouragement. Looking at that piece I have safely assessed that I may never play it .. :-).  There are lots of simpler pieces that may be playable for me.  Thank you again. TB is a virtual conservatory and I have a ton of stuff on my plate to learn. After retiring my first order of business would be increase the practise time a lot more and systematically start perfecting the simplest pieces first for community concerts. 

Peter William The amount of piano music that exists is vast, and there is a lot of music that would be easier for you to play and would improve your skills.

I don’t think you should limit your piano study to ten pieces by the greatest composers. This is a reductionist approach that leaves much to be desired.

I am reminded of a cartoon that shows a regular guy sitting down and trying to understand Einstein’s theory of relativity, something he does once a year.

I have gone back to the twenty five studies of Bergmūller. Try some of those. They’re relatively short and catchy pieces.

I have tried more modern works, like pieces by Max Richter and Philip Glass. They’re simpler than the classical works but evoke a strong emotional response.

I have a simple transcription of Bill Evans’ Peace Piece. I could play the repetitive left hand all day.

This pianist/educator is so good,. Here, he talks about Peace Piece, 

https://www.instagram.com/daniel_anastasio_piano/reel/DO_JOuBjqmu/

Leave yourself open to all types of music, of all levels. A good teacher can bring such pieces to your study.

Larry K Hi Larry, and Peter William too, I'm only an Unfrozen Barrom Piano Player, but .... I think everyone who is serious about developing their piano skills should force themselves to try to learn at least one piece at a time, that is realistically within their reach, note-perfectly and up to tempo, from memory. 

I say this because you learn so much when you put yourself through this exercise -- about music, about your piece, about yourself, your limitations [usually discovering that they are not as limiting as you thought] and your technique [among other things] --.  It doesn't have to be every single piece you are working on, or to occupy all your time, but it will definitely enhance your learning process for all your other pieces.

Of course folks like you and me, who have suffered through long, demanding careers outside of music and reached the nirvana of retirement ('semi' in my case) have earned the right to choose whatever we want to devote our newly-freed-up time to.  It's evident from your posts Larry K that you've got LOTS of interests you're working on in parallell, which may not leave you with enough time to devote to exploring a single piece in such great depth and detail.  That is a perfectly valid choice of course.  I'm just saying that if you chose to put yourself through the torture & exercise of trying to learn a piece PERFECTLY, I can guarantee that your overall piano playing would improve. 

Peter Golemme I agree with you!

I don’t think I can achieve memorization on long difficult pieces but perhaps it is possible on short less difficult pieces.

I went back to Bergmüller because I used to play some of them quite well a few years ago before I got lost in a thicket of much more difficult pieces.

I even sang a little of the opening of one to my wife and she said she used to like listening to that one when she was cooking. It was the L’Arabesque. Of course, you know it, Mr. Unfrozen, and you could play it with fire!

If you have an audience of one, well, you still have to try to play for that audience.

At one point, I rented an acoustic piano with a silent feature. After a few days of playing that, my wife begged me to play out loud, as the clacking of the action was driving her crazy.

Larry K My approach on piano playing is a little different. Without writing a treatise after not playing at any decent level LOL ( Just for Beginners ). In short it can be summarized as follows.

1. Listen to lots of music that one likes

2. Look at some scores -since one has learn't to read.

3. Try a few simple ones with a couple of pages and complete it !. How? Take the score ( e.g. Bach Prelude in C minor).  Hear a great pianist play it at full tempo- here at TB or YT (endless examples -then at 1/2  or 0.70 tempo - Use YT settings.

3. Get a metronome - start playing it a line at a time.

4. In a few small sessions - you will get to the end.

5. Now most important - I was not doing this until now - Start memorizing like crazy.  

If you want to see how this is done in real time ( not a recording - a live session ) I am happy to demonstrate this and you may like what you see and not feel lost in the woods of piano music.  There will be incremental amounts of progress.  I did a crazy project for nearly a couple of years on a very difficult piece and it helped my reading quite a bit. That piece is at an incredible tempo -which I cannot reach without injuries. ! lol! 

If you have access to a teacher that moves you forward you can happily skip 1 -5 above.  I will invite you to my practise session for 10 precious minutes of your time and you can see the varied levels of music I try to play without worrying about a darn thing. At the moment on the piano - There are 3 pieces of Bach, 1 Sonata of Beethoven 2nd movement , 2 of Mozart and a Chopin Nocturne in C# minor that is completely accessible to have fun with at very short notice. 

There is 0 intent to play it as a performance piece for any audience. In truth it may not be possible to reach such a level for me.

Peter Golemme I like your ideas in para 1 and para2 in your advice to me above. Take 1 piece. Please see my note above to Larry K  on what I do. If you do add any other pieces of advice I am totally happy to consider it seriously. I saw you play and know what you can do. LOL. ( My assessment - I may not reach those levels of playing - but am very happy trying my accessible pieces)