What Piece(s) Are You Working on Right Now?

Pallas · 2024-05-31T12:42:16+00:00

I've been posting my progress inside an Alfred thread for some time now, but I'm interested to know what other people are working on, not just us method book...

JB_PT

lilypad Very cool - I did this one time. It was SO hard to get up there and once I was done I couldn't remember anything about my performance. 😐 I'm glad I did it but not sure I could work up the courage again!

lilypad

JB_PT This just happened to me at the May meeting. I played Bach Little Prelude in C, BWV 939. It's just one page, but my performance seemed to be over in no time. I remember thinking. "Wait - did I play everything I was supposed to?".

lilypad

SouthPark Yes. That was quite the stretch piece for me. Thanks to someone on PW asking for fingering advice on a piece, I discovered another arrangement from that movie that is even stretchier. It's called "Welcome to Jurassic Park". Almost twice as long as what I played before and has more of the themes in it. I found the sheet music for it on musicnotes.com.

thepianoplayer416

Here is the first part of "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin:

Enjoy...

iternabe

iternabe I am just about to start The Carnival of Venice in Faber Adult AIO Book 1.

It has been a week. I am submitting my homework.

bwv543

Beethoven's op.14 Nr.1. And it is very hard for me, especially the speed factor - I 'm not sure I will be able to play it as fast as it's mostly played.

lilypad

Pallas > So I am considering adding an Ab scale to my Molly program. Surely I can treat a new scale like any other method book piece!.

Great idea! I haven't been sufficiently motivated to practice scales, chords and arpeggios except whatever new key I'm learning. The Molly Gebrian experiment might do nicely for learning new keys while also imposing a schedule to keep the old one in my fingers.

lilypad

Now that my community college class is over, I'm working on the following motley collection of 3 new pieces:

Nancy Faber's "Great Barrier Reef" 2-page piece from Piano Adventures Level 4 Lesson book.
Jacob Metelka's "Mouse Dance" 1-page piece from RCM Level 3 Celebration Series Piano Etudes
Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man" 3-page grade 3 arrangement from My First Jazz Standards Songbook.

plop_symphony

lilypad Metelka is fantastic. If you're inclined, I recommend looking into Metelka's full collections - "Modern Piano Studies" (which Mouse Dance and the RCM 6 Little Nocturne are from), "Little Virtuoso", "The Secret Garden", and "Illusions".

pseudonym58

3 Romances for Oboe and piano by Robert Schumann (my wife is the oboist).

A selection or two of Rossini's "Quelques Riens" (a few nothings) from "Sins of my old age". Right now #11 (Andantino).

Schumann certainly loves his octaves in the bass, and it's full of big chords and jumps. There's also the kind of situation where you have a melody in the right hand, a bass line in the left, and traded between both hands, a rolling accompaniment figure, often in triplets. It's challenging for me, anyway, especially at the tempos indicated.
It's the first time I've ever played any Schumann, with the exception of a couple of the "Scenes of Childhood" when I was a child myself.

TheBoringPianist

I'm in a weird post-competition spot where I'm trying to figure out my next milestone. If I decide to go to WIPAC, will probably try to resurrect one of the bigger pieces I've played before and whatever pieces I need to round out the program. If I'm done competing for the year, I'm definitely going to start chipping away at the Scriabin Fantasy!

In the meantime, have just been noodling on some smaller pieces that have caught my ear:

Bach-Petri - Sheep May Safely Graze
Fauré-Wild - Improvisation on 'Après un rêve'
Handel-Kempff - Minuet in G minor

TheBoringPianist

TheBoringPianist with competitions over for the year, finally getting around to some of the pieces in my backlog. I guess I'll usually have a larger piece that will take on the order of a month or longer to learn — in this case, the Scriabin Fantaisie in B minor, Op. 28. I'm still trying to even finish reading through this to be honest lol. I've got the exposition mostly figured out and can read slowly through most of the rest, but the recapitulation B theme and coda A theme are giving me fits and I just end up skipping them every time in favor of the "easier" (read: less insane) parts. I'll probably need to dedicate significant time to each one separately.

Meanwhile, have been working through some smaller pieces as well over the last couple weeks:

Blumenfeld - Etude for the Left Hand Alone, Op. 36
Medtner - Fairy Tale in G# minor, Op. 31 No. 3
Scarlatti - Sonata in G Major, K. 14

lilypad

plop_symphony Thank you for the tip on Metelka. I listened to the first 2 studies from "Modern Piano Studies" and liked them a lot.

I don't take exams, but I use exam board repertoire books to find graded music for my level. I've really enjoyed discovering modern composers that I find in their books.

plop_symphony

Earlier I posted that my piano teacher wanted me to work on a Debussy piece. She changed her mind and said it might be best to leave that for later, and gave me Cecile Chaminade's "Idylle", op. 126, no. 1, to work on instead.

She also wanted me to find something from the Classical era, but I'm not a huge fan of the easier material from the stalwarts of that era (Mozart, Beethoven). Haydn is a possibility. I found a Sonatina in A minor by the Czech composer Jiří Antonín Benda's (1722-1795), one of 34 sonatinas he wrote and somewhat of a fixture on syllabi, so I might tackle that too. Piano lessons are going on summer break for two months.

danno858

Schubert Sonata #18 in G Major D.894 - just the first movement so far

Adagiette

@"plop_symphony"#p688 Oooh, I like the Benda sonatina! I'd never heard of him, am going to look it up. Every time I log in here I find another piece to distract my squirrel brain.... 😆

lilypad

Well, I finished the motley group of 3 pieces I started in early June and started another motley group:

"Manhattan, 1928" from Piano Adventures Level 4 Performance book.
Beethoven - Ecossaise no. 4 WoO 83
Miles Davis' "All Blues" arrangement from "Jazz Easy Piano Solos" book.

I'm also relearning Burgmuller's "Limpid Stream" from Op. 100 for a fast pieces recital on "that other forum". It's currently at a very sedate 72 bpm.

Player1

Fiesta Espana. in my Faber 3B book is on my music desk. Yuck. Seriously, yuck.

Still working on Wolf but going to put it down for a bit because I need a break. I might pick up Beautiful in White but I'm still just thinking about it and haven't decided.

lilypad

Player1 My memories of "Fiesta Espana" aren't good either. Both difficult and and possibly a least favorite piece in the book.

After two not very inspiring pieces in the Level 4 book that teach E major chord inversions, I'm working on a piece from the Performance book of the series that I absolutely love, "Manhattan, 1928". It's like Nancy Faber has somehow channeled George Gershwin to write the piece. It's not easy with lots of jumps, hand-over-hand, etc., but worth it in the sound that comes out. Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger?

Player1

Pallas

I couldn't take it anymore so I did a Bob Seger and "turned the page." It's just a rehash of syncopation anyway. Most of this book is going to be review and filling in the theory gaps that Faber Adult book 2 didn't include. Both book 2 and 3B end with Cannon in D as the last piece, and some of the other pieces are repeated verbatim, so at that end point you're at the same place regardless of which book you use.

Next new piece is "Snowfall." It looks playable. Haven't checked it out at all yet so I could be wrong.

I can play Wolf with pedal (poorly) all the way through and it's memorized because I've played it so much. My tempo for the jumps is still off but I'm setting is aside for now rather than work on it any more.

I have 4 books of music to pick from and I don't seem to want to play any of it. I really want to learn Beautiful in White but the version I want to play doesn't have sheet music so I'll have to transcribe it from a video. Do-able but tedious and that tedium is the reason I haven't transcribed Ailein Duinn and Smoke Rings in the Dark yet. (Not that I'm ready for either of those.)

I will find something to learn but right now it's back to lessons.

Player1

lilypad

Just watched it, definitely a drowsy blues piece. You'll do fine with it because you're more than good enough.

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