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!

thepianoplayer416

Half way through a Chopin Prelude. Also practicing a Bach Prelude in the same key: Em.

Slow and calming pieces.

lautreamont

thepianoplayer416

Congrats on working on new pieces.

I'm wanting to work on speed technique, so my teacher assigned me Mozart K545 which I learned several years ago as a self learner who was unconcerned with polishing. I'll try it out today and see where I currently am. At my lesson, my teacher impressed on me the need to play a bit louder (a running theme for me) in order to wring out more nuances. For the pieces I've been working on the Chopin Mazurka is coming along well. The B section had been a nagging problem for me, but it's taking shape now, and I don't feel as if I am far off from polishing it. The Bach piece is getting there, everything's there but consistency and bringing it up to speed.

I'm nervous about playing Mozart because I love the music and every defect in technique is glaringly apparent. There's something a little painful in playing things I really admire, because I have such a detailed standard of how I would like to play it, but I may be hamstrung by my current technical level, and my performance might be more heavy-handed than I'd like, as my leggiero and jeux perlé work is still very much a work in progress. But I am also more confident rhythmically than I had been when I previously worked on it, my fingers are more fluid on the whole, and none of the technique is new to me anymore. My work on Bach has helped me handle complexity more, and I'm better able to process music mentally, so I don't anticipate getting bogged down in my inner CPU as I did when I played it a few years back.

JustinVG

Today I’m going to play my pieces in public. Last lesson was the last time I could rehearse for my teacher. And for all 4 pieces played, she had only one little remark. I’m pretty happy with the results. I hope I could play that good this evening! But it’s always harder when 30 pianist are going to watch, my teacher will be there also.

So that means I’m (finally) ready to focus on new pieces after this. Added are:

Clementi - Sonatina in C mvt 3 (maybe I will play the complete Sonatina the next time in public).
Chopin Wiosna
Duvernoy Op. 176 No. 9. Already had this on the list but was not the main focus. We go through the whole Elementary Studies Opus.
A quatre-mains by Rowley I could play together with my teacher

In a few weeks there is a summer stop of 2 months. I asked if she would think on a summer project. Currently she is thinking on

Mozart Fantasia in D minor
Grieg Lyrischen Stücke
A nocturne by John Field (did a small bit last year but was to difficult for me yet)

This would be a level higher for me. Really curious what I can play next year 😇

ShiroKuro

JustinVG Today I’m going to play my pieces in public.

Wonderful! Please come back and let us know how it goes! It sounds like this is maybe a recital connected to your piano school?

lautreamont

JustinVG

Congrats, JustinVG. All of the potential new pieces sound fun!

JustinVG

ShiroKuro connected to your piano school

I’m not in a piano school, I have a private teacher I go to for a hour a week 😅 the public playing is for an amateur group some piano teachers organise quarterly.

I’m glad i’m not at school anymore at almost 40 😂

ShiroKuro

JustinVG the public playing is for an amateur group some piano teachers organise quarterly.

That's great! Are most of the other performers adults, or is it a mix of kids and adults?

Re the term "piano school," I used to take lessons at what I called a community music school just because I didn't know what else to call it. They organized recitals, but I ultimately decided I didn't want to do them because I was always the only other adult there. That in and of itself isn't necessarily bad, but I realized that I could feel that most of the kids didn't want to be there, and the other people in the audience were all parents who were only interested in their kid's playing. And because I have to combat some performance anxiety, I'm probably overly sensitive to that "atmosphere," and I found it to be horrible. I decided I didn't want participate in recitals with that school any more.

In comparison, earlier this year, I played at a local retirement center, and it was wonderful. I was the first performer of four, the others were all music majors at the university music school here, so practically pro level. The people who came to the concert all obviously wanted to be there. A lot of them were sort of dressed up too, which was sweet. The atmosphere was absolutely lovely, as different as night and day compared to the music school recitals.

Sorry, this is a bit of threaddrift here! Anyway, I hope your recital goes well! Or went well? How was it?

JustinVG

ShiroKuro Are most of the other performers adults, or is it a mix of kids and adults?

Sorry for the late reply, I directly went on vacation.

Last Saturday was for adults only. It's organized by a group of piano teachers because (as you said) a lot of recitals have a lot of children. This groups is especially for adults by adults, playing for each other, talking, and drinking coffee, thee, juice or wine 😂

The second one (tomorrow) is an organized end-of-the-season recital by my teacher for al her students. Here friends and family are also welcome. So I'll bring my wife and daughter. There will be a lot of children but also adults, she teaches them all. She gives private lessons but also teach on a music school. I expect there will be like 100 people 🫠

ShiroKuro Sorry, this is a bit of threaddrift here!

I really don't mind. Actually, I really appreciate you took the time to write a larger reply instead of just press "like".

ShiroKuro I hope your recital goes well! Or went well? How was it?

Thanks! It went a bit different than I expected. I got a scheduled time to try the piano before it began. That was 1,5 hours before the doors went officially open. I was glad that I had others to talk with. The tryout went OK-isch. One of the 3 pieces went wrong (Schumann - Melodie) and I really had a "why does this sound bad, I have no idea why", turns out I pressed one note wrong and it threw me way off. Funny that you can play a piece 100 times right and when it really counts, it fails. Lessons learned.

I was the second to play on the recital and It went OK, Melodie was not as good as I know I can play it, but the others (Tchaikovsky - Old French Song / Morning Prayer) went really well. We are always the toughest critics for ourselves. My teacher also played with another student and had a nice quote of someone I can't remember. I'll try to paraphrase it as good as I remembered: "I always practice to know the piece for 120%. If I perform the piece, I'm glad if I reach 80%"

Another funny story of the recital: I like to say something about the pieces before I play, instead of just playing and be done. It also helps me to get a little comfortable with the public. I talked about that I would play 3 pieces. One from Schumann's "Album für die Jugend" and two from Tchaikovsky's "Children's Album". the Album für die Jugend is wildly populair but the Children's Album of Tchaikovsky a lot less (at least with people around me). In early letters, Tchaikovsky wrote that he would want to contribute to write piano pieces for children because there is not that much yet, "like Schumann did" he wrote. In the earliest the collection even was called "Children's Album, a collection of pieces for children ala Schumann".

Anyway, I was the second to play and after that everyone thought you had to say something before you play. Almost everyone did, even if they just made it up on the spot! It was fun.

lautreamont

My big achievement this week was a eureka moment for technique. While I was playing a Bach piece in a lesson a couple weeks ago, my teacher gave me some tips to make the arpeggios more fluid and nuanced. He demonstrated it for me, but it looked to my untrained eyes like he was just using rotation, which I do already, and trying to get my hands to look exactly like his felt awkward. I was playing Mozart K545 yesterday, which I learned a few years ago and played roughly through sheer force of will back then, and I remembered a Denis Zhdanov video on scales where he demonstrated a subtle in/out movement of the hand for scales that I had tried at the time but utterly discarded since it felt awkward and mechanical for me to try to reproduce. But yesterday the two bits of advice fused into one while I was working on passage work, and suddenly it felt so natural, and my hand tension just evaporated, even for things that have always felt incredibly awkward for me (like the left hand arpeggios in K545 in sixteenths in G major and C major 6/4 after the series of scales that had always felt so tense and hard for me to do, that through sheer willpower I could sound brutally at tempo).

Going back to the Bach piece, applying the technique alleviated virtually all the tension that was resulting in my playing sounding stiff and a bit rough around the edges. I'm playing a bit more slowly, since I have to be a bit intentional at this juncture to what I'm physically doing at all times before the technique becomes second nature. Thankfully I'm working on Mozart, because his works are like basic technique masterclasses, and I have plenty of music to go over while trying out this new technique, so I'm not repeating the same four measures of Bach till I develop a migraine. When I played K545 a few years back so much felt bad in my hand, and I thought that maybe that's just what playing fast feels like, and I've pretty much avoided all fast music since then, but now I feel like it is possible to be comfortable and controlled while building up faster repertoire.

I'm kind of over the moon about this development. Now the last bastions of tension for me are trills, chordal tremoli, and double notes, if only I could get epiphanies and melt those issues away too!

KevinM

lautreamont you give me hope that I can have such an epiphany.

Technique and reducing tension I know are the answers but I am yet to find my own answer.

Things have definitely improved recently for me and at times I am now also limited by the speed my brain can process the info, but I think that will resolve itself as the neurons find more efficient pathways.

I am really pleased for you though these step change moments are big.

lautreamont

KevinM

Thanks, Kevin! I'm sure it'll come for you. Reducing tension has come in a few (steep) steps for me, after years of self learning driving in bad habits. With each step comes a little reassurance, because things feel better in the hands. But I'd been feeling lately like I've plateaued, getting better and more fluid at a lot of small things, but still not able to get to that extra gear without heavy and rough sounding exertion. I guess just showing up, day in day out, listening and being open to input, willing to try new things and tinker a bit, can really do the trick in the long run.

I get what you're saying about the processing. I think most of my work in the past year has been on that front, working on counterpoint and pieces with double notes, just to be able to mentally process music with a lot going on in the sound and in the hands. It does get easier.

lautreamont

With the new technical approach, I've been mostly taking things slowly and trying to naturalize the technique to my playing. For the Chopin piece there's not too much to be changed, just a slightly different feel to the leaps. For the Bach piece my playing is now a lot smoother and controlled, but it's a lot to process hands together, so the new approach is slowing down my polishing of the piece, since I don't want to press tempo, preferring to make sure I'm not slipping into old habits and reinforcing the good ones. In the Mozart piece I'm doing an odd thing in relearning the piece in playing chunks almost like technical practice after going through the period up to the cadence after the runs. The piece no longer feels difficult for me, but there's one run in the left hand whose fingering I can't find a fit for, where I think I need to settle on one way and drill it.

I've also been testing my new handfeel on fragments from pieces I've wanted to learn but I've had too much tension for. I've tried out Bach's C minor WTC 1 prelude, which now feels better in the hand, but there's a lot to keep track of with the new technique mirrored in the hands at such a rapid pace. I've tried out Mozart's K 570 first movement, a favorite of mine that I learned a few years ago but which was technically too much for me back then in the relatively brief sections with sixteenths but which now feel pretty doable. I tried out a couple Chopin Valses, Op. 34 no. 3 and 64 no. 1; the Minute Waltz is continuously faster than things I've played but the basic motion finally feels smooth in the right hand. I also finally have hand choreography for the Prelude of the Tombeau de Couperin that feels nice, although there's not much pearliness and the speed might be a tad slow. Technique practice-wise I'm doing a little five finger work again at the beginning of sessions, incorporating a little movement when I used to do it with more or less static hands.

The general difference, visually in my playing is more of a subtle wavelike motion of the hands when I moved almost precisely linearly before. In trying to understand why this is better, beyond the fact that it feels (and sounds) better, I noticed that when I've played in my former way, when I'd do scales or passagework, I had a lot of difficulty with rh ascending and lh descending. For thumb under, I just found out, because I played close to the bottom of the keys when I tucked or moved my thumb in during the shift in hand positions, I would also flex the IP joint, fairly close to 45 degrees, to retain accuracy on the key, which adds a bit of tension to almost pendulum like motion it takes to "tuck" the thumb. My largest problem with scales was the transition of hand positions, and that IP bed probably contributed to the difficulty. Now when I do it the new way I notice that the IP joint doesn't bend at all, which allows for a less impeded range of motion. The other benefits that I can see is that somehow releasing keys in faster passagework is easier and that I can also rotate more fully and consistently, which has led to added firmness in 5th finger playing.

ShiroKuro

JustinVG Last Saturday was for adults only. It's organized by a group of piano teachers because (as you said) a lot of recitals have a lot of children. This groups is especially for adults by adults, playing for each other, talking, and drinking coffee, thee, juice or wine 😂

Sounds wonderful!!

The second one (tomorrow) is an organized end-of-the-season recital by my teacher for al her students. Here friends and family are also welcome. So I'll bring my wife and daughter. There will be a lot of children but also adults, she teaches them all. She gives private lessons but also teach on a music school. I expect there will be like 100 people

Yikes!! How many of those 100 people will play? Anyway, let us know how it goes! I enjoyed your recital report, sounds like it went really well!

JustinVG I was the second to play and after that everyone thought you had to say something before you play. Almost everyone did, even if they just made it up on the spot!

😆 Of course people shouldn't feel like they have to say something, but I personally like to as well.

JustinVG

ShiroKuro 😆 Of course people shouldn't feel like they have to say something, but I personally like to as well.

Of course! But I must admit, a lot of people had something interesting to say.

ShiroKuro Yikes!! How many of those 100 people will play? Anyway, let us know how it goes! I enjoyed your recital report, sounds like it went really well!

It went pretty well! Better than last week. The heat here is just awful but the room was cooled. I didn't want to play with shorts, so I brought long pants. The attendance was less than last year. I think there were around 50 people and around 10 played. The turnout was less and 2 that wanted to play, cancelled.

I played 4 pieces, the same 3 as last Saturday and my own composition in D. I really got a lot of nice comments about my own composition and that I played that that the nicest. I think It pays off to know every note of your own piece 🙂

The piano played nicer too.

ShiroKuro

JustinVG sounds like a great event and a huge success! Well done!

lautreamont

It's the opposite of an achievement, more like a mini disaster. I have an athletic injury from a couple years ago to my wrist, that has affected the thumb of my left hand a bit. While playing Mozart a couple days ago it really started to hurt for the first time since it healed. I've done light playing in the past couple days, but what aggravates it the most is opposable-thumb-type movements, like scales with tucking, tremoli, and certain kinds of fast thumb-heavy passage work. I have a lesson tomorrow, but I think it's going to be my last one for a while, unfortunately, as I can't really afford to take lessons for basically one hand.

I'm definitely scrapping the Mozart and the Bach that I've been working on that both have passage work that is likely harmful to me right now, but the Chopin Mazurka seems to be fine in my hand, with just playing mostly armweight chords on the beat in the lh. I guess this gives me the excuse to work on Czerny rh-centric studies finally, which I've been considering lately, but the turn of events has been quite the blow and I'm pretty down about it, as I've figured out a lot of things in my last few months of lessons and have felt on the edge of really interesting repertoire, the most confident technically I've ever been, and, with my lessons, musically aware of a lot more than I started off the year aware of, and finally having insight of the process of building a refined interpretation for performance and how to bring that about. I'm pretty depressed about it, but it gives me a chance to pour more focus into the rh and spend a bit more time in the study of counterpoint, or maybe to work a little on voice.

ShiroKuro

@lautreamont I am so sorry to hear about your thumb troubles!! Have you been back to the doc since the new(ish?) pain started?

Do you have soft tissue damage, and/or tendon, ligament strain? Have you considered contrast bathing?

lautreamont tucking, tremoli, and certain kinds of fast thumb-heavy passage work

Are there pieces you can play/work on without pain? If so, perhaps your lessons could focus on those?

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!

lautreamont

I think it's a tendon or ligament issue. Yesterday I scheduled a doctor's appointment, but the earliest availability is the middle of July. I'm being extra cautious now, so I'm just trying to focus on things with just chords in the left hand, things like Chopin Mazurkas, which are pretty gentle and don't require any real thumb action. Even with those I'm doing it with more concerted RH only practice than hands together work. And I'm finally doing some dedicated Czerny work. My lessons are really expensive since I live in a large city, and I'm an unemployed academic whose field's job market is really bleak at the moment, so I feel like it's a reasonable time to take a pause while I heal up and regroup. It's a bit sad, though, and today's probably my last lesson for a while. When I originally injured it it took about three months to feel comfortable. Right now it's uncomfortable in a light way, where there's no loss of function, more of a phenomenological issue.

ShiroKuro

lautreamont I think it's a tendon or ligament issue.

Oh dear, I'm so sorry! You might read online about contrast bathing, the idea is that it facilitates good circulation and circulation is essential for healing. But tendons are slow to heal, so you may just want to give it time.

My lessons are really expensive since I live in a large city

Ah, yeah, then it makes sense to take a break!

I'm an unemployed academic whose field's job market is really bleak at the moment

I'm sorry about this as well! I'm also an academic and I know that job markets in some fields are indeed bleak. Best of luck to you!!

tszulc90

This week, after 2.5 years of total practice including 1.5 years learning with my teacher I performed three pieces on a small recital organized by my teacher for their students and their family. It is huge achievement for me. There was 10 players and around 40 listeners. I played on Steinway&Sons B-211 that I barely touched before (30 minutes two weeks ago) so it was challenging. Usually I perform for my kid and wife or my teacher, so now it was real test how I'd perform under the stress and with bigger audience. Players were aged 7-15 old and I was the oldest one, 35 🙂 Anyway, I think it went very well. I made few slip-ups, but nothing critical, that was purely caused by the stress. Lesson learned. Can't wait for next year recital.

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!

pianoloverus

tszulc90 Excellent musically and technically!

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!

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