One of the reasons I signed up for piano lessons was because I’d flipped through the Alfred Adult All-in-One Piano Course Level 2 book and found myself skipping pasts songs I didn’t recognize. Light and Blue? Theme from Solace? La Raspa? Mexican Hat Dance?

I looked up Youtube videos of people playing. So, this mysterious La Raspa?

And the Mexican Hat Dance?

Is it just me, or were those in Looney Tunes or something similar?

I may have wasted hours of my life watching cartoons as a kid, but if those memories now encourage me to get through all these piano pieces, maybe they weren’t such a waste after all. =)

Then there’s the link between Looney Tunes and opera… I wonder what surprising connections these childhood pastimes will make?

My last piano lesson is on Thursday, so I’m thinking about whether or not to sign up for more lessons, take lessons elsewhere, or do something else.

Benefits from the past three lessons:

• Motivated to practise daily because of accountability and because I was paying for lessons
• Picked up new exercises (two-octave scales, triads)
• Paid more attention to dynamics, timing, and staccato
• Got through pieces at a faster rate than I might have on my own
• Worked on to playing staccato with one hand and legato with the other – shifted to listening to the music and imagining what I want it to be
• Dealt with some more nervousness

Costs:

• CAD 20-25 per 30-minute lesson
• Time for actual session (30 minutes + 20 minutes of walking total)
• Practice time (30-60 minutes each day, or 3-6 hours)

Considerations:

• I’m only interested in playing casually, so I don’t mind not doing dynamics or a lot of other things. I just want enough music to relax my brain and nudge my imagination.
• I might focus on learning chords and favourite songs instead. The things I’ve been learning in class didn’t really get me closer to playing Still Alive, but I can learn that by patience and careful practice.
• I’m actually not that keen on my goal to finish all the exercises in this piano book. It would probably feel good, but I don’t mind putting this on hold and focusing on other interests such as writing and drawing

Options:

A. Finish this set of lessons, then switch to learning on my own. I can find Youtube videos of the pieces in my piano book, which will help me with timing. I may also try different pieces. I might continue my experiment with regular practice times and see how far that gets me.

B. Give the lessons another month. Possibly talk to the teacher to see if I can refocus the lesson on the parts that motivate me more.

C. Shop around – try different teachers. Can do this, but I’m less inclined to do so.

D. Dial down piano and dial up a different interest. Writing. Drawing. Latin. Volunteering. There’s a lot I can do with time and a little money set aside for learning.

I’m leaning towards D with a touch of A, maybe practising every other day and working on other interests the rest of the time. Blogging it here to remember my reasons for decisions. =)

2011-08-09 Tue 20:25

I’m starting to get the hang of the first part of the overture from “Raymond” and this bluesy sort of piece from Alfred’s Basic Adult Piano course. It’s a bit mind-boggling, trying to figure out how to play staccato with my right hand while playing smooth, connected notes with my left. I find it helps to stop thinking about the music and start listening to it. Obvious, you might think, but I have to work on figuring it out. Or on not figuring it out, and going with the flow.

J- is also learning how to play the piano. She’s starting in grade 1 so that she can practise reading the notes. J- plays the piano like I type QWERTY: untutored, we hit the keys with whichever finger is closest, which is fine for pecking things out, but which can be limiting. I fixed that on the computer keyboard by switching to Dvorak and going through self-paced training exercises. Since you can’t exactly re-layout a piano keyboard to rejig your mental connections, there’s nothing to do but to unlearn those habits and then learn new ones.

I’m working on dynamics, tempo, and getting the hang of thinking in these different keys. I play the piano like I program. I get carried away by the fun and easy bits, and then I slow down for the parts I have to think about some more. One of the tricks with piano is to slow down even for the parts that you’ve figured out so that you can play at a sustainable pace throughout. Hmm. Maybe that’s like life, too.

Good mental exercise. Glad I’m doing it. Going for lessons (actual paid-for lessons that take up a chunk of my day, with exercises and homework I’m accountable for!) looks like it’s helping.

J- and I have started piano lessons at a nearby music school. The teacher evaluated her as Grade 3-4, and has assigned her some pieces to work on. Me, I’m slowly working my way through Alfred’s Adult All-in-One Piano Course Level 2. 

I was nervous. It was hard to remember to hit the keys and breathe. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of both over time.

My homework: the first part of the overture from the opera “Raymond”. This is the part that sounds like this:

… except I sound more like clompclompclomp-“How do I get my right hand to play a slur while my left hand is playing staccato!?”-clompclompslurclomp-WHEEZE-“Right, must remember to breathe”-clompclompclomp-“Oops!”–clompclompclompclomp.

Well, everyone’s gotta start somewhere. =)

J- and I have signed up for half-hour piano lessons on Thursdays. The lessons are well-priced and the studio is a short walk from the house. She’s been teaching herself lots of music – Fur Elise, Moonlight Sonata, Still Alive. No substitute for lessons, though, and it would be good for her to develop her technique and get better at playing both hands smoothly.

Music is like math or programming or language: a game of practising seemingly disjointed pieces that slowly come together into fluency. She practises on her own, running through the melodies of computer games and classical music. She’s starting to get those experiences of flow, I think. Sometimes I take a break to help her through a difficult chord or play a sequence for her, and then she’s off again.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why people encourage kids to get into music – those early experiences of being good at something, being able to turn imagination into experience. 

Me, I wouldn’t mind brushing up on lessons and getting better at playing. I sometimes help J- with the tougher parts of music, and I do enjoy being able to play some of my favourites. Looking forward to sharing stories!

I’ve been teaching myself how to play the piano, and I really enjoy it.

My parents arranged piano lessons for us when we were kids. I didn’t enjoy that nearly as much. The pieces were unfamiliar, and the rules of piano-playing seemed so strange. Read the notes, play the drills, curve the fingers. One piano teacher kept scolding me because I didn’t read the notes–but that was because I had figured out the pattern of the simple exercises we were doing, and my restless eyes couldn’t keep still.

Fast forward a decade or two, and now it’s one of the things that makes me smile. I like being able to play simple arrangements of Moonlight Sonata and The Entertainer from memory. I’m currently working on learning Prelude: Op. 28 No. 6 by Chopin (PDF, Mutopia link). It’s one of W-‘s favorites. I’ve been looping over his CD of Vladimir Horowitz (A Reminiscence) playing that and other beautiful pieces, and I’ve been slowly making progress on learning the piece. I can do the left hand with a few pauses, and I’m learning the right hand chords. The timing reminds me of The Entertainer, although the prelude is more complex and it’ll be a while before I can do the proper dynamics.

What I enjoy the most about learning how to play the piano is being able to chunk more and more complex segments: first notes, then chords, then phrases, and then eventually even the pattern of a piece. I love the instant feedback of knowing how close you are to doing things right, and the gradual improvement of playing a piece very slowly and then speeding up as I become more familiar with the way my hands must move. It is a welcome break after work, or even sometimes during the work day if I need to perk myself up. Playing the pieces that I’ve learned reinforces that feeling of competence, while working on the piece that I’m learning reinforces the joy of experimentation and growth.

Another reason why I enjoy playing the piano is that I also end up inspiring J- to experiment with it, to play music and to play with music. When I sit down at the piano, she invariably comes to listen. I move to the left so that she can sit on the piano bench, and I help her practice a few pieces she wants to learn. I mostly just point to the notes on the sheet to help her keep track of where she is, and sometimes I’ll play passages for her. This turns it into a bit of a memory game, too.

She told me I’m a better music teacher than the last one she had. Me, I just want to help her get even deeper into the joy of learning. =) And it pays off. Sometimes, when W- and I are working in the kitchen, we hear the faint strains of someone figuring out a new piece of music–from one of the piano books lying around, or from her memory.

These experiences would be much more difficult to have if we didn’t have a piano in the house. Now that I’m starting to get the hang of it, I wish I’d opened up and let myself try it sooner, on the piano in my parents’ house. But maybe I needed to listen to a lot more music in order to enjoy playing it, and now that I can play a little bit, I’ll enjoy listening to music even more.