Practice piano every day. And remember to keep it fun!

I am working on baroque music on the piano. Which was of course never intended for a modern piano. And I’ve always wanted to try playing a cembalo, to experience what it’s like to play on an original instrument. (Well, not original as such, they are mostly copies, but the actual kind of instrument Händel would have played on). And the opera singer I’m dating says they have several cembalos at the opera, so he’s going to take me there so I can try one. Yay! Supexiting! Better practice Händels Pasacaille (which I’m still working on, very difficult) as much as I can until then, so I have something I can play! Fun!

Now that we’ve had a few lessons he seems less nervous about it, and things are going well! He’s very dedicated, and gave me some good advise about how to practice today. And he had gone through his sheet music at home and found something by Händel for me to play, since the first piece I had chosen was by Händel, so he thought I might like it. Which I do, obviously! This one is far more complicated than the first one. But the good thing is, it’s made up by a collection of very short variations, so I can learn them one by one, and then put it all together later. Working on the first now, it’s fun! And he keeps telling me how well I’m doing, which is of course makes him a popular guy ;)

The last teacher moved back to Sweden, and this was my first lesson with the new teacher. I’m always really nervous when I’m playing for a new teacher for some, stupid reason, so I was sure I would forget everything I knew and play terribly bad. Which I did. But then I discovered the teacher was actually more nervous than me! Quite strange, I think this must be his first teaching job or something. He had brought a million different sheets of music, to explain to his students that he has lots of fun things we can play in any genre, but he had brought so much he couldn’t find the things he was looking for and it was all a bit chaotic. So we decided in the end to just stick with the book of baroque music that I had brought and already started working on.
Then he kept making mistakes when he was playing it for me, constantly apologizing for his bad playing.

He was nice though, and super-encouraging, constantly telling me I was doing well, which is always nice. ;) And I think most of his mistakes were due to him being even more nervous than me. Plus, he said he likes baroque music very much, and had lots of it at home, that he could bring to lessons so I can have more to chose from.
So I’m thinking I’ll stick with him this semester and see how it works out. Very much looking forward to learning more about playing classical music!

I also told him about my main problem with reading scores, which is that I can’t do it while I play. So I learn things by heart, but then frequently forget where I am, and then I can’t figure out where in the scores I am, so I have to stop completely and look. He said “Oh, yes, I remember that, it is like “that for everyone in the beginning, it will get better with practice”. Yay! I was thinking it was some ADD problem that will make this difficult for me, but apparently it’s a problem for most piano students. He also said I could make it easier by dividing the music into phrases, and write A, B and so on in the scores for each phrase, to make it easier to see where I am when I forget. Will try that!

Written by my hero mr. Händel of course. I should probably mention that Bourree no. 1 is one page and arranged for easy piano. ;) Still, quite happy with it!
I have a bit of a problem with sheetmusic though. I’m just not used to it at all, all the time since I started playing I have only had a simple melody line written down, sometimes not even that, and then the list of chords. My big challenge with sheetmusic is that I can’t really look at that and play at the same time. I tend to learn it by heart and as I learn the pice better, I play it without looking at the sheetmusic at all. But then I do sometimes forget where I am and what notes to play next. And then I have no idea where in the score I am, so I have to stop completely and look through the scores again and try to figure out where I was, and then start over.

Hm.When that is a problem with one page pieces, it will certainly be a problem when I start playing longer and more complicated pieces. Even professional musicians have the scores in front of them and read it while playing, trying to play everything by learning it by heart and not being able to check the scores won’t work.
Maybe I’ll get better at it in time. I have a feeling it might have to do with my ADD though actually, attention is my problem, and focusing on both my playing and the scores at the same time is a bit much. But well, no excuses, I’ll have to try and figure out a way to work around that somehow. Hopefully I’ll get a teacher that I feel comfortable discussing that with, maybe he or she will have some ideas.

I´ve just had way too much to deal with, I´m not really motivated to do anything at all these days. But I do need something positive to focus on, watching tv all the time to get through the evenings just isn´t a good plan. So, in order to increase my motivation, I have moved on from Beethoven to my number one musical hero: Händel. Noone comes even close to Händel in my book, so I´ve decided he´s the guy to turn to. Obviously, Händel didn´t know what a piano was, so there´s not that much pianomusic available, but I have found some nice, easy solos to start with. I don´t know if it´s actually cembalo music or simply something originally written for a completely different instrument, but either way, I like it! Did some practicing yestereday, must do more today.

it’s a bit hard to focus in this hot weather, but other than that, I’m quite enjoying it! Plus, I went through my sheet music and discovered that I do have some nice music I can start working on pretty soon I think (I need to play some very easy stuff furst to get into the reading music thing a bit more, but I’m not that far away from playing a bit more complicated things I think).
Including, zonino, music from the Jane Austen movies! Yay! Had completely forgotten that I had even bought that. Must put on a bonnet for practice sessions to get into the feeling of it.

I also went through my old books of sheet music from when I was 13, I played for a couple of years. My mother has for some strange reason saved all my old music for me, no idea why, because when I started playing again, she thought it was a very bad idea and a waste of money. Anyway, I’m quite surprised to see what I was playing then, it’s pretty advanced! I only played for 2 or 3 years and didn’t pracice all that much, so I have always thought I must have been pretty crap at it. But looking at the things I apparently could play then, I must have been better than I remember! (that doesn’t mean I was playing it well of course, just that I was able to play quite advanced things, wether or not it sounded good will forever remain a mystery). Well, if I could do it then, surely I can do it again! :)

changing music genre now, and try to learn classical piano instead.
Piano just hasn´t been that much fun lately, and as a result, I hardly practice. Partly because my new teacher just wasn´t right for me. And partly because I´m just not getting anywhere with the jazz improvisation thing at all.
I think a lot of jazz pianists, the teachers I´ve had included, are classically trained first. Which means they have the technique, the understanding of music, they know the music theory, and then they move on to jazz. Starting with jazz on the other hand, has proved really difficult, and improvisation, which is essential in jazz, requires a lot of theory background and understanding that I just don´t have yet.
Plus, my teacher kept telling me to listen to more jazz. I did listen to a lot of jazz when I started playing piano, but then I discovered classical music, and after that, I have started listening to more and more classical music and less and less jazz. And learning to play jazz without listening to it is less inspiring and quite difficult.

Changing genre means I´ve wasted a lot of time though. My practice until now have not been a waste either way of course, any kind of pianoplaying is good to learn any genre. But it is very different. I for instance can´t read sheet music at all, and I mean at all, I am used to simply having the basic melody lines and list of chords, and playing from that. And none of my teachers have ever been very interested in teaching me tecnique, they focuson the creative playing from chords only. While classical music of course requires music reading and tecnique to play it the way it is supposed to be played.

Hm. Not sure about this though. I am a very enthusiastic sort of person who gets all excited about new interests. Two years from now, I may have moved on to being superenthusiastic about pop or rock or whatever, and I can´t keep changing genres, learning one is hard enough.

The good thing is, there aren´t any lessons until mid august anyway, and then I will get a new teacher. So this is the perfect time to try it. I´ve just been to the library to borrow some sheet music. I went for seriously easy stuff, to easy really, but I figured it would be more fun if I can start playing right away instead of struggling with something too difficult. And then we´ll see. If I do find it more fun, I´ll change. After all, I´m not going to be a concert pianist either way, it´s all about having fun, so if I´ve wasted some time on other things, who cares really. And if I try it this summer and realize jazz is actually more fun anyway, I´ll keep doing that.

Pianolessons aren’t going well at all these days. I’m supposed to be improvising, but it’s really hard! Mainly because there are just way too many things to think of at once, learning the chords and playing them while improvising, constantly changing the scales I’m improvising in as I change the chords, keeping count and knowing where I am in time, and trying to play something interesting and jazz-sounding at the same time. It’s just too difficult, I feel like a complete idiot for not being able to do it at all, and then practising is no fun really, so I’m not playing much at all.

So today I explained all this to the teacher, and asked him to give me a seriously simple tune to play, with seriously simple chords, so I could try to focus on the improvising only. And he did, he gave me some blues chords, just three chords and one blues scale to play in the whole time. So well, I really have to give it a serious effort now! I’m sure it will be fun again once I get over this stage, I just have to be patient and try to work more on the improvising now that I have a very simple set of chords to work with. Plus, I’m definitely investing in a new metronome that has a different tone for the first of 4 beats (or 3 or whatever I’m playing in) which should make it a bit easier to know where I am in the song.

I think the main thing holding me back when it comes to improvising, is the fact that my improvising just doesn´t sound like jazz. When jazz pianists improvise, they can sometimes play really simple things, but it still sounds cool and jazzy. My improvising on the other hand, sounds like some pathetic childrens tune.
Today, I had a temp teacher who I have never met before. He asked me to improvise, which I found extremely embarrasing, so I went into a long explanation about how my playing doesn´t sound like jazz at all. And he said “Well, jazz piano is my profession. If you could play jazz improvisations after a few weeks and make it sound like cool jazz, what would that say about me?”
Ahem. Good point. Even though it sometimes sounds simple, people practice for years and years to make it sound like that. I simply need to practice basic rythms, themes and variations for now. And stop expecting it to sound like jazz. Which will hopefully take the pressure off and make it easier to do it more.

are extremely challenging these days, I have to say. The new pianoteacher simply does not believe in sheetmusic. He just writes down the chords for me, and shows me how to play the melody of a song, and then expects me to remember it and go home and learn the song. I don´t remember it at all, and it´s all total chaos. Plus, I´m used to learning the rythm of songs and finding out exactly where the chords are played by reading the sheetmusic and counting, to learn it properly first. Without anything written down, I´m lost, I can´t figure out where there are pauses in the music, how long they are, what notes are longer etc. My old pianoteacher used to write everything down for me, then I learnt the melody, rythm and chords, and then he added more to it afterwards.
I have spent four weeks now trying to get “Have you met miss jones” right, which shouldn´t have been that hard. And the whole thing makes me feel pathetic and completely untalented. Which I explained to the teacher today, and he then spent the rest of the lesson explaining that I´m not pathetic and untalented, and every time I did something wrong, he said “Relax, relax, breathe, it´s ok!” So I guess I must have seemed seriously frustrated about the whole thing.
Argh!
I do see where he´s coming from though. He says that playing jazz is very different from classical piano, it´s all about listening and improvising, and if I get used to just playing what others have written down for me instead of learning to listen to the music and learn it that way, then that will be very limiting and it will be hard to learn how to improvise. Maybe he´s right, and maybe I´ll get the hang of it. He says I´m just struggling now because it´s just a completely new way of learning for me, and that it will get better.

I do feel that my ADD might be part of the problem here though. It´s hard for me to really concentrate enough when he´s teaching me the songs, and so I have forgotten half of it by the time I get home. Which used to not be a big problem, I could just figure it out for myself by reading the sheetmusic when I got home. Now I have no such cheatsheets.
I will give it some time though, and see if I get the hang of it. I loved my last piano teacher, but he never taught me to improvise at all, which is after all what jazz is all about. So maybe all the frustration right now will pay off in the end.