learn to play musical instruments

My teacher says I’m ready to start playing in public—not recital type of public, where everyone is required to appreciate and applaud. No. Judgmental public, where people might look up to see who let their child play around on the piano before the third meeting and discover that it’s me and wonder what I was thinking. =7

Yeah, that’s right: she wants me to play prelude music at church! I don’t want to do it. She told me by summer, if I’m not ready, she’s going to call someone and ask them to have me do it. Aaaaaack!

At my lesson yesterday, I asked my teacher a question and told her that I had been trying to figure out a few things about one of the pieces I’d been playing. We launched into this huge discussion about modulation, which I’m not sure I completely understood, but when she asked me specific questions, I got the answers right.

In the middle of our conversation, she very excitedly exclaimed, “I can’t believe I’m teaching stuff this hard to one of my students!”

All her other students are kids and this was college-level theory, so she was really happy and it made me feel musically intelligent.

Anyway, this week, I have to study the modulation of one of my pieces and be ready next week to discuss it with her. Yikes!

The song I wrote about in my last 2 entries is the Christmas hymn, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. I finished my own simplified arrangement for it tonight. It’s really not so easy to make something simpler.

A while after I started working on that one, I found a book of recorder music for a collection of Disney songs. I liked the way Beauty and the Beast sounded on the piano, but the music only had one line, being for a wind instrument.

I had to invent a left-hand part for the entire song. What a great sense of accomplishment! Now that they are written, I am getting BOTH songs ready for the recital the 1st week of December.

The music I wrote about in my last entry was too hard and I scribbled all over it to remind myself how to play it.

After my lesson, my teacher put me on her computer, opened her music-writing program and told me to write my arrangement for printing so it would be easier to read.

I have been getting better at reading chords and inverting them, so this was my chance to write them out.

The big challenge is going to be playig my own arrangement in public! Exciting. :)

I found a Christmas song for the recital, but it’s really too hard for me to play the way it’s written. I’ve only been taking lessons for 8 months, after all.

The song is O Come, O Come Emmanuel, which is a song I have always loved. The top part is easy enough to follow, so I decided to re-write the left-hand arrangement to fit my skill level.

I will show it to my teacher on Tuesday. If she says it sounds good, then I have about 8 weeks to perfect it for the recital at the beginning of December.

I understand them now.

It’s a breakthrough.

Hmm. =]

Well, I may be playing it in our next recital.

A simplified version of it is in the lesson book and we’re just getting to it. My teacher says the kids always hate it because of its rhythm issues. Probably, they don’t have any frame of reference for how it is supposed to sound. I sight read it today!

Its RH part was actually the first thing I EVER learned to play – on my neighbor’s piano when I was 7 – so now my teacher says I should play it for the recital. It’s not until December, so at least I have plenty of time to prepare!

Everyone else my teacher teaches only has 4 songs a week to practice. I have 7. SEVEN.

That takes a lot of practice, so I have assigned myself a schedule to practice BEFORE breakfast, BEFORE lunch, BEFORE dinner, and BEFORE bed. That’s over an hour and a half of practice every day.

No wonder I’m the one with 7 songs…

Today my teacher told me I have a good ear!

She noted how I can always tell when I make a mistake just by the way it sounds. I thought everyone could do that, but she said not everyone has intuitive recognition of intervals, so sometimes they think a song is just supposed to sound like that if they play it wrong. Hm.

Yay! Another little gem of “Go Me!”

My favorite composer is Dmitri Kabalevsky. I have a couple of excerpts from some of his work in my big lesson book. My teacher says her students (mostly all children) have never sought after classical music and she thinks it’s funny that I want to play it.

She has never had any classical sheet music on hand because her other students have never wanted to play it. I figured once I got pretty good, I’d go to the music store and get a piece or two by Kabalevsky, but I didn’t have to wait that long.

Yesterday I went to the thrift store, looking for a saucepan (which I found) and wound up in the book area (of course!). They had tons of sheet music yesterday. Lots and lots of stuff for Christmas, but it was either too hard or too easy, so I moved the Holiday stuff out of the way and found something close to miraculous:

A whole book of Dmitri Kabalevsky’s music with simplified arragements. Thirty songs! Not too hard or too easy! Well…most were too hard, but I’ll get up there eventually.