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Good luck, wouter! and make beautiful music!

Cathy

Thanks for the support people! I believe it helped.

Had a flawless performance and my teacher was very happy. Said I played very clean and well controlled. I'm very happy that my first performance was a good one. The applause by the audience is certainly something I could get used to :-D

Wouter.

Well done.

Cathy

my teacher is suggesting I start preparing for the next Cliburn for amateurs... he thinks is a good way to raise the bar of training. O_O;

Great!!!

My teacher keeps mentioning things like that. I look at her and say, "Have you actually watched their performances?"

"Oh, they aren't so good ... they do this and that and the other ..."

I have to laugh some times!!!

My AOTW: About to finish the method my teacher uses for the basics. 6 books in 3.5 months, quite happy with it.
Will switch to "The Essential Keyboard Repertoire" of Freeman Olson.

@Wouter Congratulations! must be fun!

Woo hoo! Congratulations Wouter D'hoye! That is a great accomplishment, and should give you confidence for the next live performance. It sounds like you did really well!

Yay! congrats

Ataru074 - that's a nice compliment! Good for you!

Wimpiano - congrats on your progress!

Wouter ! What a wonderful successful first recital! I'm happy for you!

wouter,

Congrats on your fine performance!!!

Ambivalent about this 'achievement' because I should have known earlier. I usually pay attention to only the notes and obvious rhythm notation on a piece and try to delineate the subtle aspects of dynamics and so forth after I get the piece sort of under my hand so to speak.

What I mean by obvious rhythm notation is whatever beat it is in, attention to the half notes/quarter notes/eighth/sixteenth/ etc and basically just try to understand and 'fill in' the rhythm from what I hear from let say a CD or qualifying youtube performance of the piece and take it from there.

But what I never paid attention to were the subtle notations regarding rhythm that is just as important, nuances that add or basically 'is' part of the piece that I neglected on perhaps all my pieces I have played thus far.

example like, a chord that is part set to group of eighth notes let say, but part of that initial chord does not have a line attached to it; it is a quarter note, but because it looks same as the eighth note (black note without the vertical line extending to it) I just played the whole chord as if it is a eight noted chord and progress with the other eighth notes, rather than playing the quarter note chord piece sustained for the proper length , along with the following eighth note, then letting go that note, for the rest of the eighth notes....do you know what I am saying?


other things as well.. like small rest notations that I just ignored; I would either sustain through the rest notation or hold a key(s) through it a beat or two past it sometimes without even caring to really delineate that

also never cared to understand the tuplet notation. bracket with a '2' or '6' etc on top I just played through it properly but never really understood the definition behind that nor cared to look it up till now

basically, lot of nuances of rhythm I had never bothered to learn I just went through a whole set of google research to see what I was missing or doing wrong and thus comes along with wrong fingering due to the fact that I never bothered to sustain that particular note for an extra eighth or sixteenth beat hold and so forth.

basic piano theory !!


edit... also unbelievable, I never really noticed the bars differences when broken up let say a few notes in eighths and then the single line is broken at the end to reveal a double line very short to show it is a sixteenth to be played in beat. That I never really paid attention to.
Basically all I knew at the time was that the positioning of the eighth notes were spread out more within a measure and the last note was more cramped toward the end of the measure so I just knew it was a sixteenth. not really reading it properly using the single bar and double bar notation. wow basica piano theory.

Good thing is , now I feel more 'armed' about my knowledge of music now. I guess it is just a continual learning process (even though I should hae known this since childhood)

I kind of have a AOTW this week.

For the longest time I've had a Keith Jarrett version of "Its all in the Game" running through my head. It has this haunting left hand figure running throughout most of it that I just love.
Anyway I got to noodling on a lead sheet of the original song (not Jarretts arrangement) and trying to figure out that baseline. I heard it as root - fifth - 10th - 9th - octave.

I showed it to my teacher and she asked me to send her a link to the Jarrett performance. I found it on youtube, plus I found an actual transcription of Jarrett's performance here

Turns out old tin-ear had it pretty much right, although it does vary just a hair throughout the piece. Now I've got to figure out how to play KJ's arrangement, which looks very hard to me, and which he makes sound so easy.

2 years and some from now... 1 year to get the repertoire under the finger... 1 year to let it mature... why not?

Fur Elise- right hand only :-)

AOTW is that my teacher has blessed me starting Liebesträume No. 3. Gulp! This will definitely be the hardest piece technically I'll have done. Not the main theme - that will be "new" for me keeping a melody shared between the left and right hands. But voicing won't be much different from the Tchaikovsky October.

But those Cadenzas? Yikes!

While she was looking through my "pieces to learn spreadsheet", instead of saying things like, "Oh, that's too hard - a few more years" she said, "Oh, yes Chopin Ballade #1, that's good ... you should add some more harder pieces to this list."

Never mind, I'll keep the spreadsheet handy so we can go back to those pieces after I fail miserably at making Love's Dream a dream ...

I had my first lesson with a teacher last week. Not really much of an achievement and I'm a week late in posting but it was exciting! It was more of an interview to allow her to get acquainted with where I am and how I'm learning. It was my first time playing in front of anyone. Needless to say, I was sweating bullets and botched phrases and bars that I thought I had memorized perfectly. I played her a little hands separate exercise, Greensleeves (the version corysold played for the last recital) and Minuet in A minor by Purcell. Her summarized take on my very beginner playing:

I had good natural hand shape and posture, but I was a little too rigid and fixed in that posture and hand shape so lose some tension and let it flow more. I had solid rhythm and tempo in the pieces I played for her, and must have had a good start and discipline practicing for my month or so of self teaching. I may be trying to progress through pieces too quickly, though, without fully developing the necessary early foundation including technique and sight reading (may be partly due to the book I'm working through).

It was a mixed review but one I pretty much agree with and am thankful for. She gave me extra exercises and pieces to practice that are at or near my level to reinforce some skills. Due to time and money constraints, I will continue to do the majority of my practice and learning by myself and have lessons with her every other week or once a month to check in on my progress and get some helpful feedback.

Quick bit of info so you guys understand where I am and what she saw: Decided to start the piano journey while I'm in a gap year between undergrad and grad schools. Bought a digital piano and The Piano Handbook (Humphries) around mid-December and have been slowly working through the book and supplementing it from various sources here and all around the web. I was hoping to be able to record Minuet in A minor by Purcell for the recital but couldn't get everything set up for a good recording. I'll be better prepared for the next recital.

Sorry if this doesn't exactly qualify as an achievement but I was excited and encouraged from actually playing in front of a teacher and receiving some feedback about my playing. Even the not so positive feedback was exciting

N17, congrats!

Hey, that's great that you started lessons. From your recap I'd say you are headed in an excellent direction. Don't worry too much about not being able to have more frequent lessons....the fact is, even if you see a teacher every week, most of the learning occurs without the teacher present...it is great that you will have periodic guideance and a check on your progress.

Thank you, JimF! I'm hoping this will be the start of many more achievements. It's certainly encouraging checking in here on the AOTW thread and reading everyone's progress and where they've come from

congratulations N17, this sounds very encouraging. I remember my first lesson 14 months ago and how wonderful and terrifying it was at the same time. Would definitely agree with JimF that all the learning is done away from the lesson. A disciplined student and motivated doesn't need a weekly lesson.