: The wrongly-forgotten pursuit
Sometimes I wonder if The Search* is in fact a distraction, and that my real priority in a musical sense this year should be piano. (And getting somewhere with Alice would help too, but that be mutually exclusive from singing, and piano fairly obviously isn't.) Failed attempts at finding instrumentalists to work with have reinforced this; my current thoughts about my musical path are much in line with my thoughts about my general self-development path from twelve months ago, i.e. utterly dominated by the desire for self-dependence. Which, to all intents and purposes, means becoming a functional pianist so that I can accompany myself.
With all that in mind, the first piano lesson of the academic year was something I was very much excited about. A new space for it; my teacher Alex (an Electrical Engineering student, actually) was once in halls and booked the hall's piano room for our lessons, but now he's living in a typical student house and his room is the home of the lessons. The most obvious adjustment here is that we are now dealing with his digital piano; non-trivially different in feel, but perfectly usable. (And both similar and superior to my MIDI keyboard.) The bay window provides a certain link with the old music room, a strange 'round' room with carpeting seemingly as old as the concrete the room was weirdly propped up on (bikes are stored underneath here). Fortunately, very fortunately, this room seems to be a more comfortable temperature than that one.
We start off where we left off, with something by Regina Spektor. In the intervening period, I've heard the original, realised it was faster than I'd learned it, and have been unconvinced it works better at such a fast tempo. Perhaps faster than I'd hitherto played it, but not that much. That differential, and no more, was pretty much covered today as my fingers somehow cooperated with my brain. They didn't with a slightly different pattern that crops up near the end of the song, which I was taught for the first time today, but then a little later they did.
To-day I'm going to be properly dabbling with piano arrangements, possibly creating a chord sequence based on one or more of the inadvertent mistakes I made that produced something that would work in some other context. (For example; the two main themes start Db3-F3-Ab3 and F2-F3-Db4 (I think it's in that octave anyway; I was playing it at one end of the keyboard so that my teacher could demonstrate anything at the other, and we swapped at one point); mixing the two up for some reason, I ended up playing F2-F3-Ab3. This did trigger me and Alex improvising from there for a minute or so...
Alex suits me perfectly as a teacher; he sees where I'm coming from and his approach seems to match that, and there's far less room for damage and error teaching someone piano (or clarinet, come to that) than there is teaching someone singing. (There is a reason the vast majority of my musical expenditure is on the singing lessons even now. And that is it.)
Sometimes I wonder if The Search* is in fact a distraction, and that my real priority in a musical sense this year should be piano. (And getting somewhere with Alice would help too, but that be mutually exclusive from singing, and piano fairly obviously isn't.) Failed attempts at finding instrumentalists to work with have reinforced this; my current thoughts about my musical path are much in line with my thoughts about my general self-development path from twelve months ago, i.e. utterly dominated by the desire for self-dependence. Which, to all intents and purposes, means becoming a functional pianist so that I can accompany myself.
With all that in mind, the first piano lesson of the academic year was something I was very much excited about. A new space for it; my teacher Alex (an Electrical Engineering student, actually) was once in halls and booked the hall's piano room for our lessons, but now he's living in a typical student house and his room is the home of the lessons. The most obvious adjustment here is that we are now dealing with his digital piano; non-trivially different in feel, but perfectly usable. (And both similar and superior to my MIDI keyboard.) The bay window provides a certain link with the old music room, a strange 'round' room with carpeting seemingly as old as the concrete the room was weirdly propped up on (bikes are stored underneath here). Fortunately, very fortunately, this room seems to be a more comfortable temperature than that one.
We start off where we left off, with something by Regina Spektor. In the intervening period, I've heard the original, realised it was faster than I'd learned it, and have been unconvinced it works better at such a fast tempo. Perhaps faster than I'd hitherto played it, but not that much. That differential, and no more, was pretty much covered today as my fingers somehow cooperated with my brain. They didn't with a slightly different pattern that crops up near the end of the song, which I was taught for the first time today, but then a little later they did.
To-day I'm going to be properly dabbling with piano arrangements, possibly creating a chord sequence based on one or more of the inadvertent mistakes I made that produced something that would work in some other context. (For example; the two main themes start Db3-F3-Ab3 and F2-F3-Db4 (I think it's in that octave anyway; I was playing it at one end of the keyboard so that my teacher could demonstrate anything at the other, and we swapped at one point); mixing the two up for some reason, I ended up playing F2-F3-Ab3. This did trigger me and Alex improvising from there for a minute or so...
Alex suits me perfectly as a teacher; he sees where I'm coming from and his approach seems to match that, and there's far less room for damage and error teaching someone piano (or clarinet, come to that) than there is teaching someone singing. (There is a reason the vast majority of my musical expenditure is on the singing lessons even now. And that is it.)