“Heart’s Wounds” by Edvard Grieg (1)

Just got the first two bars down last night. It’s a lovely piece, and I should be able to add more to it during weekends, although my next few are quite busy with work-related issues, sadly. It also seems (at least within the first two bars!) to wander fairly freely between Cm and EbM just as “The Last Spring” danced between its major and relative minor. I’m very glad that I looked through the collection of Grieg pieces that I have … that I didn’t even know I had. It’s a bit bashed up as well, so it’s been in my collection for ages, all of which I ignored but none of which I parted with for 18 years. I don’t even know how the Grieg collection got there, when I got it, nor who gave it to me, but it’s going to be a real treasure to me. I’m even happier that he did the arrangements himself, since there is more dissonance in his arrangements than another person would have felt comfortable putting in there (several instances of notes a half-step apart being struck at the same time, even in legato chords), and the dissonant bits are very interesting. I don’t think another arranger would have been daring enough to do that. I’m used to cringing at a half-step (most people are), but he manages to make them very beautiful.

I imagine I’ll be happy to work my way through Grieg for some time and need not spend any time with Chopin, Beethoven, or Mozart at all anymore; I know Chopin is a favorite for many pianists, but I just spent too much time on him and was too unsubtly pushed toward him when I was younger. He’s wonderful, he’s very well understood, and he’s played to death by people of greater skill than I. Let them do it. I don’t have to spend my time there, nor with Ludwig nor Wolfgang. The shamelessly sentimental yet bizarrely dissonant Edvard Grieg it is.

Other than that, I’ve ordered an enormous collection of ELO from Amazon.com and plan to start work on more of Jeff Lynne’s music as well. “Twilight” continues to interest me, but until I can take the time to begin writing down parts of it, it will always be in the “noodling around” stage; I’m eager to do just that and at least work on writing a ragtime bass down. I’ll probably revisit it and others time and again to see how else they can be interpreted and hope to settle on a good, faithful interpretation as well.

Meanwhile, “The Last Spring” continues to go well, with several stubborn land mines buried in the terrain that are proving remarkably difficult to dig up and throw away. Measures 4 and 8 will be bugbears for some time to come (especially Measure 4, which I wouldn’t have guessed), and for some annoying reason I continue to have difficulty eradicating every vestige of a roll in some chords. There are probably tips and tricks that would help, but I’ll just have to suss them out on my own.

“Twilight” by Jeff Lynne/ELO (2)

Hm. It makes quite a nice rag in the middle.

And I seem to be working a bass up to Journey’s “Lights” in my head as well. I haven’t a clue what the melody will be; as I’ve said, it’s so relentlessly vocal that it will prove a massive challenge for a piano. A duet with piano and flute-or-violin may be as close as it gets, and at the moment I’m uninterested in playing duets although I may score one at some point provided I can work my notation abilities up to par.

I think I’ll practice with the left hand in the ragtime-”Twilight.” Ragtime bass is usually a fairly standard oom-pah type of thing, and that should give me a bit more structure to hang the dotted thises and thats from in the melody.

I also need to work on my “penmanship” in notating music. Right now, it looks like an old Scantron test with little blank and filled circles.

“Twilight” by Jeff Lynne/ELO (1)

A beautiful lightshow-rock classic. Wonderful chord progressions although between this and “Come Sail Away,” I’m beginning to think that any rock song that’s written in CM probably began its life on a piano (or vice versa).

A challenging set of chord progressions to work out, but one that I’m proud to say I did without any recourse to guitar tabs or any outside assistance at all. Several lessons learned on nonharmonic tones — telling the difference between a G7 and an Em can be a bit of a climb for someone who has never done this before when an E pops up apropos of nothing, and FM and Dm seem equally happy to occupy two sides of a spinning two-headed coin much to the confusion of the amateur pianist.

My adaptation is of course sounding a bit andante/legato, but I’m hoping to be able to make it a bit stronger as I become more and more comfortable with it.

I’m also still amazed at the complexity of chord changes and timing in rock and pop as opposed to most classical music, especially the classic classical (post-Baroque). I’ve always been ecumenical in my love of music, but I must admit, Muzio Clementi is a piker compared to Jeff Lynne. Good popular composers don’t get the respect they deserve from the classical world. It would be interesting to score this straight (all those eighths and dotted scotch skips in place) and put it in front of a typical classical pianist who hasn’t heard it before and see if they can sight-read it.

Also, I think I have “The Last Spring” down to the point where only Measures 4 and 8 require real attention. Everything else I either have down well enough to satisfy me, or else well enough that satisfaction is a matter of paying secondhand attention. Very pleased!

“The Last Spring,” by Edvard Grieg (7)

Things to remember and keep in conscious thought while playing — bolded items are more of a challenge:

Measures 3/4 and 7/8: Hit the chords evenly (no roll), look to the left hand to hit the wide reach when the right thumb goes down, then mark the top note of the following RH chord well.

Measures 11/12: Mark the right hand well but quietly. (Don’t overpedal.)

Measure 16: Put the eighth notes back in.

Measure 17: Concentrate a bit more on your index finger to keep from rolling.

Measure 20: Put the middle C back in the left hand.

Measure 41/42: Concentrate a bit more on your index finger to keep from rolling.

Measure 48: Mark the high notes in the octaves well. (The E at the top of the ninth stretch can get lost.)

Measures 61/62: Keep your head and don’t get lost!

Measure 64: Roll lightly and with great delicacy.

(It’s all so much easier to type than to do, isn’t it?)

Practice should consist of moving with conscious deliberation toward a better execution and thinking before you play, not simply playing a part over and over and being satisfied that one occasionally plays the section correctly at random. There is no reason to trust to randomness, and it’s no guarantee of playing it correctly from start to finish. Play consciously; don’t just toss baseballs down a carnival runway at the Coke bottle and count it as a success if one happens to hit it.

Virgil Fox and the Gigue Fugue

I laugh at my attempts at notation.

– which apparently consist of writing down the notes in order in little dots that resemble an old-style scantron test, where a filled dot means “short” and an unfilled dot means “long.”

And very little else. Ties? Slurs? Bars? Dots? Rests? Nowhere to be found.

It mystifies me how I can sight-read (and if slowly, quite accurately) and yet remain at the level of a child in terms of notating music. Reading and writing are not the same skills. Granted, I’m still working out how I’d like the adaptation to sound, it would be nice to be able to write music as more than a memory jog. I imagine practice is the only thing that will help. Thankfully, it’s quite fun.

I’m also surprised at just how complex reading music notation is, really. I started so young that I tend to forget just how much information (and its variety) that is set down in your typical sheet music. I’m also surprised at the amount of tacit knowledge that a sheet music score assumes its reader has. Sharps and flats are added in a proscribed order (and why they are added in that order). Time signatures (“four beats to a measure and a quarter note gets one count”). The concept of the circle of fifths and how you add sharps and then flats as you traverse it. Relative major and minor keys, and how to tell which one you are in. (Although that can be a bit dicey sometimes in a piece like — surprisingly enough — “The Last Spring,” which seems to wander between Em and GM pretty ecumenically.) The positioning and duration of certain notes. It’s all rather a lot of information. Much of it I have without realizing; I never realized until recently that I was subconsciously just expecting 12/8 to be 4/4 in triplets until an idle browsing through Wikipedia brought it home that that’s precisely what it was. Perhaps I just unconsciously realized that every time I saw an 8 in the basement of the time signature that triplets seemed to be in the offing, I don’t know.

It comes across to me sometimes when I am forced to notate music instead of reading it and when I am forced to confront a new symbol, like the peripatetic alto clef. I am constantly forced to think consciously about the thing when I see it, and this must be how people who are learning to read music for the first time feel when they confront the treble or bass clef, or any other musical symbol. The difference in fluency for me is provided by the fact that I pick up languages and orthographies very quickly as a rule, and that I began to learn to read music when I was very young (before I began to study piano, if I recall correctly). I must have picked this up before I realized how much information it was, and it must have been presented smoothly. I have a new appreciation for music teachers, particularly mine for all the pedagogical gulfs I’m finding in adulthood. I can’t even remember how and when she presented this information to me.

Don’t schools teach “every good boy does fine?” as a matter of habit anymore?

The Grand Machine — Piano Problems

Not problems with my new piano. It’s behaving nicely, except for the slightly rattly damper pedal, which I’m fairly sure I can deal with myself with some folded up kleenex or something similar.

I’m thinking of problems with the instrument in general. I’m beginning to be reminded of a few issues I had when I was younger and at my peak. To put it simply, I don’t care much for music written specifically for the piano, which together with the paint-by-numbers aspect of my study made it hard for me to see why I should keep playing it. Now, the piano has a lot of advantages: it has an enormous range that encompasses almost the entirety of the orchestra, it’s a very full and complete performance unlike any other single instrument with the potential for more tonal richness than many orchestral scores, and it comes with Western music theory built right into it (a mixed blessing but in general a great convenience).

However, it’s an unnatural instrument. The most natural instrument of course, and pretty much the only true musical instrument on Earth, is the human voice. Everything else is an approximation of that. After the voice, there’s the violin, which was developed by tweaking the viol family of instruments specifically to mimic the sound of the voice. Propping it on the shoulder, making it smaller, using an overhand bowing technique … that was all done to enable it to compete with the voice for purity, range, and sustain. Violins and voices are the instruments that can make people cry.

After that, you have the wind instruments, which musicians must put their mouths on to play, and breathe into. Plucked string players must sit their instruments in their laps like puppies and embrace them to play them. Even drums are evocative of the sound of the human body, with its drumhead of the upper chest stretched between the shoulders that adds power and “belt” to a voice.

In comparison, the piano is both distant and unnatural. It strikes metal strings, a strange way to play a stringed instrument although there are others that do the same, but in order to play it, one doesn’t even hold it. One sits at it, like a machine operator.

It’s also an overpowering instrument. More than almost any other instrument, the piano is a post-Industrial Revolution machine. Prior to the advent of modern materials, constructing a piano would not even have been possible; the tension on the cast-iron harp of a typical concert-sized grand piano can top 30 tons. No period material could handle that sort of stress. And with the size of the instrument comes its characteristically loud voice — big, booming, and just generally too large for an intimate setting. It can be played softly of course, but its top or even middle volume is far too great for anything but an unamplified performance venue. All in all, it’s just too much.

Again, the advantages are vast and more than enough to make the piano an indispensable instrument and the perfect one to support nearly all varieties of Western music. It’s both singer’s and composer’s best friend and effectively a one-person orchestra. But the problems I’ve listed above are there, and a pianist had better be aware of them.

What this means to me is that a great deal of music meant to showcase the piano’s unique abilities can often simply magnify its mechanical nature and turn the musician into a glorified, deft machine operator. It’s taken me a very long time to realize that I’m just not fond of Chopin. (Joplin seems to be the only composer for piano whom I like unreservedly.) I’m not fond of music with a pretty main theme which then wanders off into technical prowess that shows off all the buttons and levers simply for their own sake. Even the technically adept piano music that I like calls to mind other instruments for me.

In short, I like playing music that wasn’t originally written for the piano, and my favorite piano music is music that reminds me of other things. Perhaps it’s the translation aspect that I find enjoyable. I’m not sure.

So for the moment, Frederic and Wolfgang are going to have to sit back, along with Bach and his well-tempered clavier. I hit it lucky with Grieg in that his elegaic melodies were not written for piano but were transcribed by him for it, so they are at least a composer’s translation. I’d like to seek out other things like that if possible, and otherwise poke at DeYoung, Shaw, Jeff Lynne, Steve Perry, and similar composers to see if I can make their music work. I suspect Shaw’s ballads may be my most profound surprise, as they could be very successful in the style of a soft grade-5 lyric piece. (I sadly suspect that Perry’s work may prove the most difficult to work with since its most powerful impression is not complex chord changes but burning vocal sincerity, which as I stated before makes the piano the wrong instrument to carry it.)

Haendel of course gets a free pass from me for his operas. Neither pianos nor anything like them were around in his time so most of his music is not intended for the instrument, but neither did he transcribe his music for it so I’ll have to see what I can work up myself.

In other news, I did a bit of fiddling around with Jeff Lynne’s “Twilight” (from his time with ELO) and it’s a great deal of fun. I’ll have to print some staff paper up for myself eventually, I suppose, or else I’ll never remember what I need to in order to work on this. I suspect that, like DeYoung’s “Come Sail Away,” it was written on a piano for the simple reason that it’s written in C, which is not a key that most guitarists would pick out of a hat. I feel a bit silly hitting the back button on my iPod two dozen times to listen to a particular bit, but I find comfort in the knowledge that Eddie Van Halen did the same thing with Eric Clapton’s cadenzas for most of his youth — and he had to lift a needle to do it. This is simply what musicians do. It’s strange that after years and years of musical training, I had still to find this out. I wish I’d felt more freedom in sounding things out by ear when I was young, but I suspect I would have gotten a definite message from most of the authority figures in my life to stop wasting time and practice the pieces I was told to practice. Well-meaning advice and not said in a scolding way, but … all the same. I intend to continue adding pieces to my repertory (mostly Grieg and Joplin, I suspect), but will likely spend more than half my time working out things I know and love that are particularly amenable to it and musically rich.

“Boat on the River” by Tommy Shaw/Styx (1)

I think I’m in love with the chord progression on the B theme. Unsurprisingly at the moment, I seem to be doing a John Field on it. For some strange reason, the guitar tabs I’ve found online are a fifth off but otherwise beautifully accurate. I’m not sure why the makers of the best tabs seem convinced that the song is in Dm.

The progression that I’ve found (and I’m doing this from memory without a piano in front of me) are: Gm, Cm, D7 for the intro.

For each verse:
Gm Gm FM D7
Gm Gm FM D7 Gm

For that lovely little B theme:
FM D7 Gm CM
Cm Gm A/A7 DM

The analogous use of the FM and D7 chords is quite fun; I’m not sure if this would work if it weren’t in Gm — specifically if it weren’t in G minor, where the seventh (the F) can be arbitrarily bumped up a half-step anyway, thus enabling both chords to serve a sort of V7 type role. The end of the song shows that nicely, where the final line — “And I won’t cry out anymore” — is repeated three times, as Gm FM Gm for the first two times, and then Gm D7 Gm for the third.

I can’t wait until I start diving into Haendel. I don’t think Tommy Shaw ever envisioned Baroque interpretations of his music, although he’d probably be fairly at home with a chitarra in his lap.

*strange facial expression

“The Last Spring,” in Grieg’s own arrangement, is apparently ABRSM Level 8. I think.

*odd facial expression*

I shouldn’t be at ABRSM 8 after an 18 year hiatus from the piano. I certainly shouldn’t have had the first page memorized after one night.

I could have had this piece down in one week if I hadn’t had to work a fulltime job. Or less.

Honestly, I’m not an ABRSM 8. I can’t play anything else right now. But it’s still extremely weird and heartening at the same time.

Update: Apparently, it’s ABRSM 6/7. That makes a bit more sense since 7 is roughly where I was when I stopped, but it’s still a bit strange.

“The Last Spring,” by Edvard Grieg (6)

Fine! At long last!

I only had to cut down one eleventh reach and kept another somewhat catty-cornered almost-tenth with an inconvenient Bnat in there, so I’m pleased. Now it’s just a matter of doing it a million times to engrave it on my convolutions. I think I’m content to say that I can reach a tenth depending on the bits in the middle, and leave it at that for now. We’ll see how that evolves. I find myself having to tell myself, “Reach! Stretch your hand and work for it!” (I’m very glad that I have large hands, though. I haven’t the slightest idea how Montero manages what she does; her hands are quite small, but she can do things I can’t dream of in a million years.)

It’s a great piece — nice and cantabile, enough of a challenge to keep me from getting bored (although I did have to shave off a few corners), pretty enough to keep me happy (and any audience should I ever decide to allow anyone else to hear me), but simple and andante enough to allow me to settle into it at my own pace. Had I not been distracted with mere working for a living, I would have had this piece down in less than two weeks, which makes me very pleased considering it’s the first thing I ever attempted after an 18-year hiatus.

I’m also happy that the octave work doesn’t intimidate me, whereas when I was younger, it would have done so. I may have lost some of my precision, but I gained something very valuable simply by dint of aging. That’s a stunning revelation to me. I’m very glad that my favorite type of music is more tolerant of the middle-aged and elderly now. I wish rock were more so, although it’s not as bad as it could be, at least for men. Women are still hooked off the stage at 40, unfortunately. If Martha Argerich has worthwhile things to say, it’s inconceivable that Ann Wilson and Deborah Harry wouldn’t.

I’ve printed a few nice things from IMSLP in the meantime and may work on John Field’s Nocturne #5 after this. I had played that when I was very young and remember it being, like “The Last Spring,” pretty enough to impress people, cantabile enough to make my happy playing it, andante enough to not present insurmountable challenges, and without the knuckle-cracking reaches that surprised me in the Grieg piece. (I may go on a Chopin strike in fact, simply to prove a point and to distance myself from my youth. They say that progress lies in the direction you haven’t gone before.)

Then, it’s music theory tomorrow, so I can start recognizing what I’m listening to instead of poking around randomly on the keyboard trying to find a modulation that I know is there but that I can’t find for the life of me.

Eventually, I’d like to begin working on some Styx (the more heavily DeYoung-influenced stuff) and early Journey, but the Journey may prove difficult since it’s so strongly vocal. The piano really is the wrong instrument to carry an entire song by Journey, although it can support it very nicely (Rolie and Cain both did and have been doing it for decades). But in terms of carrying the entirety of anything by Journey, a small chamber group or string quartet really is the ideal means once one moves away from the standard modern-band-plus-voice. It should prove interesting.