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I'm quite sick at the moment, so no long-winded post from me this time around...

As Tyrone rightly pointed out, the words 'beginner' and 'intermediate' are nothing but words to help us sort levels in easier terms than 'level 3' or 'grade 5'. I simply decided that every four levels would take up a group (beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc). To me, Intermediate means nothing more than 'you are now decently confident behind the piano and are ready for things to get a bit more complex'. Added to that, what is intermediate to one individual can be entirely different from what's intermediate to another individual (I've seen people call Beethoven Moonlight Sonata Mov3 'early intermediate'). I'd also like to quickly note that my ranking is more on a book-to-book basis than a piece-by-piece basis. I would not rank that specific Kabalevksy Waltz Beginner / Level 2. Probably somewhere between levels 3 and 4, but I digress.

Being able to judge for yourself the difficulty of a piece relative to your own abilities is much more valuable than all the grading system lists and syllabi in the world.

Holly, practice methods are ever-changing, I've mentioned that multiple times here already. What works perfectly for me may have only mixed results for you. Keep looking to see what works best for you, but I would urge you to not throw things out of the window after one or two tough weeks. If the general way in which you practice is this 'practising baseline', then it really pays off to keep this more or less stable. Adding elements to or removing elements from this baseline is paramount. Completely changing your baseline, less so.

I'm not saying this because you're moving away from the practice method I advocate (which I've blatantly stolen from others, anyway), nor am I saying that you're doing it right now. Just something I think you should keep at the back of your mind. There have been multiple people on this site who'd completely change things every 3 months, basically every time they found a new 'wonder method', and they'd always swap again after another three months. The grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, and all that. If you're improving, trust the process and stay with it for the long ride. Don't stagnate by never looking for improvements or alterations, but also try not to doubt the process too much.

Again, I'm not pointing any fingers here (or not trying to, at least). Just something I think is worth saying; progress can be a lot slower than we'd like it to be, at times. In the long run, however, we'll always be much better than we were before.

Thanks Kesolo,

Most of the change will be a lessening of sheer volume of pieces by about 20-25%.

Fewer pieces to work through a day to feel like I'm keeping up without losing my beloved etudes,

and a raising of the bar difficulty wise for one piece at a time.

Also I'm more committed now to pursuing a dual path of classical and modern.

And if it all changes in three months I'll be fine with it as long as that is the result of around 120 hours of practice experience telling me it's time for a change.

You will do well Holly as you seem well prepared and grounded in your practice.

Sorry you are ill keselo, i hope you get better and i always look forward to your input.

Holly, it sounds like you've got your baseline and are making changes to see what works for you. Keep it up, I'm looking forward to your next entry!

Thanks dobro, I'm doing a bit better today, though I'm afraid I'll miss a couple more days being unable to play the piano. That's probably the worst thing about being sick...

For anyone interested my Master Diabolical Plan is as follows.

Year 2 serious practice Jul 2019-Jul 2020
(350 hours practice already under my belt):

Faber 4
RCM 2 and Snell 2
1/2 half Josh Wright Beginner Propractice
Mikrokosmos 2

Year 3 serious practice Jul 2020 - Jul 2021
(800 practice hours already under my belt)

Faber 5 (last of the series)
RCM 3 and Snell 3
2nd half 1/2 Josh Wright beginner
Mikrokosmos 3

At which point I will have studied Moonlight Sonata (1 movement)
and have 1300 practice hours under my belt

so I think I will realistically be able to call myself "intermediate" and proceed with RCM 4,5,6 along with 3-4 years of Josh’s intermediate program.

At which point, possibly in 2025, but maybe 2026,

I’ll be getting into early Chopin (again, hopefully),
have 3-4K practice hours
and ready to proceed to:

“advanced”: RCM 7 & 8 (8 being my original goal for RCM),
as well as an almost endless advanced repertoire with Josh,
and probably the ability to play just about all the Debussy, Satie,
Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Gershwin and Irving Berlin I want. I expect to
spend 3-4 years getting through 7 & 8, but...

By 2030 when this journey is 12 years in:
7K practice hours and no more "levels", etc,
and all the lovely, lovely, endless music to pursue as I wish
for whatever time I have left.

What terms to use can be debated endlessly, but I said somewhere in an earlier post: as long as my butt is on that bench and focused 10 hours a week advancement will be made.

We all have dreams, how we get there is up for endless debate in our off-practice free time. A plan is just that, a plan, not a pyramid set in stone for thousands of years. Life happens, lack of talent happens, sheer boredom or even inspiration can change the timeline or the materials used, but the dream and the pIan are the baseline, or True North as I call it. The compass needle always returns to True North. I have sincerely enjoyed all the comments since the last post and am tough enough to take it for disagreements or concerns or questioning my sanity.

Happy Practice!

True North. The needle returns there. Well put and something good to think on today.

A great plan and equally great dreams. I am rooting for you!

Easing into Spring…
with some help from Bela Bartok

Spring comes slowly here in the upper Midwest giving us snow and budding daffodils in the same week along with wind to knock a person over. All in all, it seemed a good week to stay inside on the piano bench.

The daily routine this week shook out as predicted in the previous posts:

Sight Reading (15 minutes)
I used Alfred’s AIO Level 1, but baulked when I got to The Entertainer towards the end. Just a mental block that I could sight read such a known piece, even the easy version. So, I marked the page and put the book on the bottom of the sight-reading stack. (Great tip, Animisha!) Finished up the week with the RCM Prep A and delighted myself playing these well with three run throughs.

Sight reading is a skill to hone, to be sure, but here and now the pay off in confidence boost is well worth it.

Technique and Exercises (30 minutes total)
D minor this past week, and A minor this week, 10 min/day, doing 1 octave, 2 octave, chords, triads, harmonic and some finger exercises.

Mikrokosmos #32, 10 minutes a day going into its second week. This really helped with the Turk piece in the repertoire practice. Doing hands going in different directions and intervals in the same measure and so forth is much more doable with some Bartok under one’s belt. Steady Mikro practice made the Turk piece a simple two week relaxation piece instead of a lot of frustration like it could have been.

RCM Level 1 Etude: Detectives by Christine Donkin

The etude isn’t challenging since it’s at a slow tempo, but it’s left hand staccato notes with a line of shifting legato thirds in the right. Lots of dynamics to pay attention to. The ten minutes goes quite quickly.

Repertoire and Faber 3B Lessons (75 minutes)

Lesson 1: Dvorak’s Finale to the 9th Symphony from a lead sheet. I would never have believed I would get the second variation of the chords down before moving on, but it went well. Helps to love the piece and I do!

Lesson 2: Baroque Dance – Daniel Speer (1636-1707)
Four short lines with a trill at the end. The trick will be keeping it frisky and light as the tempo comes up instead of rushed and anxious.


Lesson 3: Cat Patrol by Nancy Faber – Thoroughly modern, it fit in with all the staccato from the etude just perfectly, but that dreaded word: vivace.

Lesson 4: Legend of Madrid by Nancy Faber – This piece is quite lovely, but stands testament to being VERY careful selecting YouTube videos of method book pieces. The one I first heard did the piece at roughly 142 miles an hour. I completely doubted myself in simply READING the score’s tempo, so I called my mother and ran it by her. We concluded the YouTube version was about TWICE as fast as what was being suggested in the lesson. The lesson tempo I could get section by section with a couple or 3 weeks practice. That video could have undermined my confidence the tempo was even achievable.

Dance - Daniel Gottlob Turk (1750-1813) From the Snell Essential Repertoire Collection. I really enjoyed working this early classical piece next to a Baroque piece. I personally thought it leaned Baroque, but had less of a tinkling quality that I associate with Baroque.



I’m setting aside the Dvorak piece, since I’m pretty happy with it.
I won’t be starting anything new this week though I am working on the technique exercises for the next Faber Lesson Piece on the agenda: Phantom of the Keys.

I was so happy to read this! I have to keep reminding myself though: if it is a struggle, it is not sight-reading, move on to the next book.

On Patience and Frustration


Patience is not something I was born having in abundance. At 50 I find it much easier than at 12 surely, but when faced with a new piece to learn Patience runs laughing down the hallway calling over her shoulder a gleeful, “You’re screwed.”

Surely.

This week, however, I managed to drag the little wretch back to the bench with me by means of a checklist for new pieces. (an idea gleaned from Philip Johnston’s Practiceopedia)

What could be so hard about opening a score, listening to it, marking it up, trying out hands separate and then together and so forth? Well, without Patience twiddling her thumbs on the bench with me, I tend to want to go from first listen to hands together at half tempo in about 10 minutes.

As all of us here know, this does NOT lead to excellent playing or even mediocre playing. It leads instead to errors of rhythm, notes that spill from one’s fingers in their own mad dance of delusion making no attempt at accuracy and Frustration standing there with his hands on his hips pleased he’s won the round. Poor Patience must be is assisted weeping back to the bench to try to fix the hash up I’ve made of things.

But not this week.

This week that 10-minute dash to disaster was tamed by a check list of 20 levels of my own choosing that take a new piece from opening the score to accurately played at 75% tempo with basic dynamics in place. In other words, “lesson ready”. That magical place somewhere between “new” and “learned”, when you can confidently sit down to it and get on with actually making it something you’re proud of, hopefully before it reaches the “sell by” date of can’t stand the bloody thing a single more run through. (I mentioned before I wasn’t born with an abundance of patience. Wasn’t kidding.)

With my nifty new checklist there are 15 levels (19 if you count 15a, 15b, 15c, and 15d) to get to the 50% tempo spot. It’s awfully silly to think one can get through 15 anything in 10 minutes. To keep myself honest, I went to a stopwatch timing for a new piece, took Patience’s hand in mine, and proceeded to work down the list with determination as our guide.

And wouldn’t you know, that brand new piece was accurate at 50% tempo in about 30 minutes? Making getting it to “lesson ready” by the end of the week a fairly doable goal and leaving its second week on my schedule a wide-open plain of possibility for making it something to be proud of before moving on.

Patience isn’t sure about staying on the bench with me as the park outside our window is calling her name, but I’ll be printing a checklist with columns for each new piece I’m starting for the foreseeable future. Maybe between the two of us we can send Frustration home to pout for a few rounds.

Happy Practicing Everyone

This week:

Sight Reading: 15 minutes
RCM Prep B Repertoire and Faber lesson 1/days


Technique: 30 minutes, split 10 each
C Major scales

Etude: Drifting Clouds by William Gillock (1917-1993) focus on arpeggiated chords divided between the hands

Exercise: Czerny #15 Vol. 445, focus on accent on the second beat



Lessons and Repertoire (1.25 - 1.5 hours divvied as needed):
Faber Lesson Pieces: Starting The Bear and Humoresque
Continuing Phantom of the Keys and Legend of Madrid

Snell Essential Repertoire: The Sheppard’s Flute by Tat’iana Salutrinskaya (1903-1969)*

Very irritating that she’s the only female composer in the book and the only composer not listed under composer biographies at the end of said book. Bad form, M. Snell.
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I am coming to the realization that what you express about Patinence and Frustration might be a bigger factor in our success than even having a teacher or not! I actually stopped practicing for 5 days because of my own impatience with 2 outside the method book songs I have been working on for so long (well, it's alot longer than it takes me for the method book pieces). So what you are discovering for yourself is a nirvana of sorts for efficient practice. Kudos to you! I guess it is normal for the first couple years to search for what works best for us. Maybe as you get it refined you can share the details.

I have been integrating the VERY slow practice into my practice sessions and I (and my teacher) really like it. My teacher is very good at explaining to me how to think about various note combinations - and this works well in my mind with the slow practice. Thanks for the update - Namaste!

I agree patience is perhaps the most important thing. I have got better at patience with time. I suppose I’ve done this by no goal. I’m quite content now to work on the same thing over and over. my own experience is that progress gets slower with time. I seem to spend longer on pieces. I have played one piece and the other two are still on going. This is difficult at times. Now I tend to persist until the piece is ready. I have a group I play at now which helps. I only play 2 pieces there so I don’t need to rush to get pieces ready as can always play an older piece. It seems to come together in the end if it’s a reasonable standard piece, I have lessons and practice but it is very slow. I believe strongly that the performance not the piece difficult is the most important thing. Practice patience! Good luck

Finding inspiration…

Mostly this last year (which finishes up July 15) has been a journey of finding a methodology that keeps me coming back to the piano readily while simultaneously guiding me up the difficulty scale.

A few dips into boredom sped things up. A few brutal self-assessments re-calibrated my standards for progressing. And finally, in these last few weeks letting go of how I started to move forward with new methods that match where I am now has my technical progress skyrocketing.

The goals I started with were about RCM testing and having some external standard to give me credibility in my own eyes. As the year progressed, I began to care less about passing tests and more about the music I wanted to be worthy of playing. I started out ready to play anything and everything to get a sense of just what I might enjoy playing. While I still enjoy hearing new composers, I’ve recently been dealing with some frustration in the music selections of my “teaching” program.

I’m talking about what I referred to in my last post as “expiration dates”, which I define as when a piece reaches the point where I can’t stand sitting down to it anymore. Ideally this point happens somewhere AFTER I’ve met my goals for the piece. Lately, it’s happening somewhere around the point it would be ready to show a teacher to start polishing it. Little early.

I spent this last week mulling how far I have to take each and every piece in my “teaching” program to progress in skill towards becoming the pianist I want to be. Somewhere in all this process there are going to be pieces I’m pleased to play for people and pieces where I simply get the point of it all and want to move on without bothering to polish a piece that frankly isn’t “performance” worthy from inception, but was on my list because it had something to teach my brain or fingers.

Which are which?

Yes, I know teachers excel at making these decisions. Let’s not go there.

I think I’ve put off making ANY selections on the “polish and make repertoire” list because not much has come my way I cared enough about to work with that long. After all, despite my obsessiveness I am only approaching Level 2 RCM currently so there’s not exactly a lot of breathtaking literature to be had down here.

By dividing my work recently into:

Sight Reading
Technique (scales, exercises, & etudes)
Repertoire (easy, medium and hard)

I was able to speed up my lesson work by dividing the “hard” repertoire time into time for 2 extra lesson pieces. This had the unintended effect of making MOST of what I was playing pieces I simply don’t care to polish.

Not working on anything to make performance ready has jarred me out of my rut though. I mean, frankly, I wasn’t polishing anything to begin with. Waiting to do my Propractice “hard” pieces until July when I start Level 2 has had me in a holding pattern of material I selected last year as a total beginner anyway.

While the technical progress all these lesson pieces has provided has been gratifying, it’s a little soulless, truth be told.

But I can’t really add any “hard” pieces until July or it will throw me off schedule, maybe slow down the technical progress…

And around in circles my crazy little brain went as it usually does when I’m heavily involved in reinventing the wheel, until one day when I was sitting around…

Listening

While playing silly phone games and jerked my head up to make sure I caught the title of what was going by on Pandora and could give it a thumbs up.

What caught my attention was a lovely, haunting little piece, “The Lonely Ballerina” by Michele MacLaughlin. And, unlike my usual thoughts of, “someday, maybe,” I thought, “well I won’t know until I see the score.”

So, I ordered the sheet music.

And maybe became, “Oh heck yes.” (If this is PG13 language, blame PW)

Not in a few years, but NOW, I am working on a piece of music, in original form, that I liked enough to stop what I was doing and note the name and composer.

How do I “fit it in?”

I don’t care.

This piece has nothing to do with progress or lessons or anything at all, but “I want to play it and I want to play it beautifully.” That may take a year or six months, though definitely more than a month. And it doesn’t matter. I’ll keep dragging it out when my “work” is done to bring me joy and to be, for now,

Inspiring.

Happy Practicing Everyone.

Thanks for hooking me onto this piece of music. I looked on musicnote.com and they had the piece of music so I was able to print out the first page to try. Nice little piece but I would say a little tricky with the finger independence needed to have it sing. Take your time and enjoy the journey. By the way Holly I love reading your practice diary

I've really appreciate reading about Holly's journey. It's like observing the piano journey of an "Everyman" over time, with its twists and turns. I have to say that I've personally like this category of literature, whether it was James Herriott's All Creatures Great and Small, Anaïs Nin's journals, or Perri Knize's Grand Obsession. Sometimes, it's not that one would take that particular path of the diarist that makes it interesting; on the contrary, it's that one would not ever take the diarist's particular path that makes it an interesting window into another life. (I would never desire the life of Anaïs Nin, yet I read on!)

Keep up the journalling, Holly! There are those of us who are very interested in your path.

Thanks for sharing Holly! I echo the other's sentiments about the value of this thread and am likewise adjusting my learning approach. Actually, over the last the 3 months I have gone from 90% Method Book/10% non-Method Book and flipped it around so I am only doing around 20% Method Book now. Part of my non-Method are 2 songs requested by loved ones that I will play for them at the end of Summer. That's a good motivator for me. It is way more difficult than the Method Book approach and I could not do it effectively without a teacher who can pick a good arrangement and help me with fingerings, etc. I think this is a great journey!

I really enjoy reading this thread. Very useful and educational!

EPW - thanks and I hope you enjoy your snippet of the piece. Those 16th note stretches have me a little intimidated, but after a few dips of the toe into the waters I'm thinking somewhere between 12 and 20 weeks. Which is ideal as I'll have it ready next time I see my mom...who dislikes anything after Chopin...and especially "modern" sounding pieces...oh dear...

Tyrone - I adore All Creatures. The closest I've found in the music world is the book Mozart in the Jungle by Blair Tindall, from which the Amazon series is based.

Picture here Wayne and Garth chanting, "I'm not worthy..."

I just enjoy having a regular time and place to reflect on the process and have a record of it. Thrilling to have you guys read it anyway!

Progman
This approach will almost certainly drive me into the studio of some poor, unsuspecting teacher sooner rather than later. These last couple of weeks the fire is lit again and the feeling of my fingers doing what I tell them to do is exciting, but I couldn't keep this massive lesson ratio going if I didn't know it would come to an end in July when I switch over to a repertoire heavy focus.

Of course if you've read many of my entries you know I rarely make it a month on a plan before changing things up so to see where it all goes tune in regularly!