My Piano Update: 7/26

As I sit here pondering on the level of progress I’ve made with my piano studies, I naturally have some positive and negative insights. On the positive side, I find that I am, at least gradually, becoming more comfortable playing while reading the printed music. In doing so, I am beginning to look ahead on the page while I play to see how to reposition my fingering for upcoming notes. I also seem to have better concentration and results when performing during my weekly class time with my piano teacher. But there are also many areas that I need to work on to meet my own standards as to where I want to be with piano. For one, I want to master playing (while reading the music) in ANY key, not just with C, G, F, D, and A (major keys, along with their corresponding minors) as I do so far. Also, I am simply not putting in anything close to the hands-on practice time I need in order to come to regard the keyboard as “second nature”. Third, I have done very little in the area of “playing from memory”, where I could tap into the vast treasure of musical memories I have and adapt them to piano. I want to adopt a policy of learning pieces by heart so that, when presented with future opportunities to play for others, I’ll have a repertoire to draw upon. And, as piano teacher Dan Starr has suggested on his blog, I need to learn to feel more comfortable looking down at the keyboard as little as possible during my playing. Finally, I need to practice playing faster and more boldly if I ever want to be able to play at a level that people want to listen to.

I’ve seen, by laying out more of a structured schedule for my running a week ago and then publishing it, that I actually adhered to it faithfully. So I’m going to do the same with piano practice and see what happens. Except that my piano study is a seven-day per week process! On Mondays, the day of my piano class, I will devote my homework to studying theory and deepening my knowledge of musical notation, keys, and chords. Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays I will devote to practicing and memorizing my class assignments. And on Wednesdays and Fridays I will “struggle” to painstakingly generate melodies on the keyboard from my mental song archives. Should be challenging and fun!