Piano Proficiency (iv)

In addition to the general excitement of working towards something new, my piano adventure presents the opportunity to explore two very interesting questions of interest to any music teacher. First off, while I'm one of those twenty-somethings who doesn't quite feel like the word "adult" legitimately applies yet, the truth is that I'm undertaking this project well after science tells us it starts to get harder for people to acquire new muscle memory. Of course, I've dabbled in keyboard technique since I was that young, but none of it was focused or consistent, so while I have some important basic skills (as well as all of my musical experience as a tuba player) to work with, I would expect that if there's something to all the talk of brain cells changing after adolescence, that I'll be facing that challenge as part of this process.

To go along with that, the truth is that while I've become motivated to practice in a way that is focused and goal-oriented rather than aimlessly noodling, I still don't have time to do it every day. I don't have a keyboard at home, and while there are places I can go to use one, making a special trip every day just isn't going to happen with everything else that's going on. Even if I did have one at home, I'm still not sure it would become a daily thing. Hence, while you could say I've been consistent, it has been on a less-than-daily basis.

I experimented on and off for about half a year with practicing tuba only every other day. It worked better than I could reasonably have expected before trying it. Part of my theory was that the extra rest would keep both my chops and mind fresher, hence enabling longer practice sessions on the days that I practiced, which would add up to something close to the total time I was practicing already. While I can't say that my technique stayed right where it was before, it certainly didn't suffer too much, and I made great progress in learning new repertoire, since I was able to focus rather intensely on it one day, and then let it percolate for an extra day before coming back to it.

For better or worse, I could never get away with this now simply because I have to play almost every day either in a rehearsal or gig, which wouldn't allow either for the day of intense practice, or the day of complete rest. However, by default, this is essentially the approach I'm taking to the piano at this point. I'll be curious to see how far I can get this way before I have to make it a daily thing.

Piano Proficiency (iii)

When I first started composing as a teen, the medium I worked in exclusively for the first several years was essentially the school band medium that I had been exposed to as a budding euphonium player. Even after I became involved in jazz as a player, it wasn't until several years later that I made my first attempts to compose in that idiom, and they were quite awkward and unsuccessful attempts, even in comparison to where my playing was at back then.

As I became more engrossed in jazz, I became more fluent as a jazz composer, and eventually spent some significant chunks of time writing only jazz compositions. Occasionally, lead sheet tunes would just come to me and I would write them down, but most of what I wrote early on had significant structural wrinkles, even if it was not truly through-composed. Coming from essentially a classical music composing background, I often had very specific ideas about how I wanted certain chords to be voiced, too specific for standard jazz notation, and certainly more specific than most players would want to put up with. In short, what this led to was either very dense harmonic structure (i.e. lots of chord symbols changing quickly), written out piano voicings and bass parts, or a combination of the two.

If I had been happy with the results, I would have persevered with this sort of concept, but eventually I became disillusioned with the results anyway, and seeing that they were, on top of everything else, rather unattractive if not downright unapproachable to many players (including myself at times), I began to think twice. My work has definitely become more polished after realizing this, and yet I still can't shake my attachment to very specific voicings, especially in the piano. In fact, even before I had a chance to play many of my tunes with real live people, I considered the piano to be the most important part of the ensemble, I had the most specific idea of how I wanted it to sound of any of the instruments in the band, and I would be apprehensive to bring in a tune of mine at all if there was no pianist in the group.

Similarly, I've often thought that if I, as the composer, could play the most important part in the band, that this would be most conducive to achieving fulfilling and accurate realizations of my tunes. That motivation to clean up my piano playing has always been there, and it remains the strongest motivation that I have. What I have been doing the past several months is mostly learning to play the tunes of mine that I feel will benefit the most from having the composer at the piano. It's quite a roundabout way to catch up on general technique, which is really what I need to do, but to be honest, the copious scale and arpeggio exercises used in traditional piano technique are the kinds of things that would make me absolutely hate to play, and given the fragile balance of circumstances that has inexplicably gotten me motivated to practice piano seriously for the first time, I feel like it's best to leave those alone.

Originally, I was a self-taught tuba player, but I can't really claim to be that anymore. I didn't have much help early on, but eventually I ended up taking quite a few lessons from a variety of tuba teachers with a variety of approaches, and while I've never changed my self-taught embouchure, most every other aspect of my tuba technique is very much by the book. I think it's safe to say that the piano is a far more intuitive instrument to learn than the tuba, and that it has a richer history of a variety of approaches, including the autodidactic, as well as those who simply do more with less. It's an instrument where I can clearly see how a traditional course of study benefits the player, and yet I can also see how the pervasiveness of that particular approach has yielded a certain amount of conformity among players, a conformity the type of which I'm inclined to avoid participating in if I can at all help it. Hence, my approach is to simply focus on learning to play what I want to be able to play, and in doing so, address the technical challenges of those particular pieces as they arise, even if that's not in order of progressive difficulty or an otherwise sensible succession of challenges that build on each other in a clear way.

The one area where I'll be forced to engage in purely technical exercises is independence. I've always felt that if I had great independence, I could do pretty much everything I want to do with the piano using just the minimal technique I already have with each hand on its own. That, however, is nowhere near the case. To this point, I've steadfastly avoided approaching anything that required even a hint of independence simply because I knew it would take longer to learn than the time I had to do it in. For now, at least, I've finally become motivated to do the grunt work required to overcome this barrier. We'll see if it actually works.

Piano Proficiency (ii)

I've never been one for favorites, top-ten lists, and the like. As a kid I refused to identify a "best friend," maintaining that all my friends were important to me. These days, I refuse to name favorite composers on the grounds that no composer's output taken collectively could qualify. I think it's infinitely more helpful to name favorite pieces individually, as this paints a much clearer picture (the Postroll exemplifies the same approach taken to bloggers). The favorite instrument question is similarly flawed, and yet, there's been little doubt in my mind for several years that the piano is my favorite instrument. Perhaps a better way to put it is that much of my favorite music is written for the piano, and also that I enjoy writing for the piano myself quite thoroughly. If only I had learned to play it.

I do like the sound of the tuba, and even enjoy playing it from time to time, yet within the last several years, I suddenly haven't been able to shake the feeling that there's more to life, a feeling I wasn't burdened with before, and which afforded me the focus needed to develop my technique quite well, yet which now has made it all but impossible to find the discipline necessary to continue to advance technically on the instrument. Concurrently, whereby the hardest thing about sitting down to play piano has always been the sudden feeling of being handicapped in comparison to the instrument I had invested so much more time in learning, the attraction of more immediate technical advancement per unit of practice on an instrument where I have less experience has become seductive, even if the endgame is inevitably the same.

What's new here is my willingness to oblige this temptation, not its presence. I've always been inclined to pick up new instruments, starting after only a year of playing euphonium in band when I begged my mom to buy me a trumpet, and going through high school, where I often showed up to pep band events with a sousaphone, euphonium, and trumpet in hand, and where I once took a clarinet out of the band room behind the teacher's back and got reasonably competent at it within a couple of weeks in just a few minutes a day at home. I received what I considered to be good advice from many people along the way about the prospect of being a multi-instrumentalist, advice which invariably parroted the "jack of all trades, master of none" zinger. Eventually, I heard it enough that I came to believe it, and in fact, it's undoubtedly for the better that I've at least been as far as I have down the path of specialization, for should I decide to veer off of it, I'm eminently better equipped to do so. Nonetheless, it's hard not to wonder if that impulse couldn't have been turned into something the way my somewhat less acute impulse to rescue the reputation of the tuba has been turned into, well...something else.

While it appeared for some time following my sudden adolescent musical conversion from uncooperative pupil to star student that the tuba was the destination, it's looking more and more like merely part of the journey these days. I'm finding my interests too diverse and my patience too short to continue doing what has to be done to develop my tuba playing to its fullest potential. I feel dirty just writing that, but it's true: I could not see the path to tuba virtuosity more clearly and could not abhor it more thoroughly than I do. That's not because it's not worth it, or because I wouldn't love to have it, but simply because my tolerance for the menial technical work like lip slurs, long tones, and articulation drills which got me ahead of the game in college has been burned to shreds, my resolve to give it another go crushed by too many "square one" moments that I don't feel I've earned, but which the combination of my physique and mental approach have yielded over and over against every effort to the contrary.

I don't expect my piano playing to catch up to my tuba playing anytime soon, and I'm certainly not giving up on the tuba altogether. I've just realized, like many "professionals," that I need a way to make playing tuba fun again. I've also waited way too long to make playing piano fun for the first time.

Piano Proficiency (i)

I have a complicated relationship with the piano. It should be more complicated, actually, since that's usually what happens when you invest a lot in a relationship; my investment, though, has been made inconsistently, in spates, and in that scattered, dabbling way that yields smaller and more trivial rewards than it would had all that work been more focused and occurred over a shorter period of time.

There were two harpsichords and zero pianos in the household I was raised in. Some of my earliest memories are of jumping on the couch while my dad played the music of Bach, Rameau, and Scarlatti. I called it "Bouncing Music," much to the chagrin of my mother, who had the best interests of the couch in mind. She told me that someday, I would bring my girlfriend over to sit on that couch, and that I wouldn't want it to be saggy and uneven. Predictably, that admonishment had no effect on a 5 year-old.

I came downstairs one day on my birthday and found a handwritten version of "Happy Birthday" waiting for me on the stand of one of the harpsichords. It was my mother's last best effort to get me interested in playing music, but was, like all previous efforts to that end, quite unsuccessful. I think about that day a lot, sometimes every day for stretches of weeks as I now ponder my musical strengths and weaknesses and how they might be different had I not been so decisively scornful of music until I reached junior high school.

Around the time I turned 12, a friend and I took it upon ourselves to investigate a moving sale taking place just up the block, and stumbled on a more-than-serviceable upright piano on sale for $200. It cost $250 to move it down the block, but my parents knew what they had (even if the seller didn't), and so they took the plunge. I was thusly introduced to the piano music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven through my dad's suddenly incessant practice (a neighbor called us on the phone and asked us to stop playing the record we'd been listening to all day, since it was getting late). Because this was around the time I had started playing in the school band (which I only did because we had to join either band or choir, and I was not going to sing), I started to dabble with the various keyboard instruments that now dominated our house, developing what I would later come to understand was a very strong understanding of basic music theory concepts, yet without so much as a hint of proper keyboard technique.

While I've learned quite a bit over the years, and even had to pass a piano test in college, my relationship with the instrument has hardly changed since this early stage. I never invested the least bit of time in developing any real technique, most especially in the area of independence of the two hands. My college piano class for music majors was all about applying theory to the keyboard, not about actually playing the instrument, and I was able to skate by putting forth minimal effort since this was, in fact, the only piano-based skill I already had at that time.

I sat down no fewer than 5 separate times in college and told myself that this was the time when I would get serious about playing piano. It never lasted more than several days, save for one isolated incident where I practiced the first Two-Part Invention religiously for 6 weeks, finally giving up having not once gotten through it at even a moderate tempo without making at least one basic technical mistake. After a while, when the impulse struck me to give the instrument another shot, I simply thought back to all of the previous attempts and how they ended (not well), and simply abandoned the idea. That's where I've been for the past 5 years or so.

The reason I'm taking to time to relate all of this is that, through a combination of many factors, I have as of a few weeks ago finally found whatever it is I needed to find in myself to get serious about the piano for the first time. I plan on sharing more about what exactly these factors have been in the very near future.