Pig Sty Avenue

I've had Hanschen Klein  (aka Lightly Row ) plink plonking away in my head for nearly three years now, on-and-off.  And I need to deal with Wee Hans this summer. I'd learned to play it, kind of, on the midi keyboard in 2010 with the PSP software.  And then I was working in Roehampton University that summer, and that was my first attempt to play on a real acoustic piano.  It was pitiful.  People kept coming in to the room to see What Was Happening? and Was I Alright? I can't remember the sequence of events exactly, but I got discouraged and gave up practicing a few months later, and something tells me Wee Hans was at the root of that. Whatever, I need to get it learned (after #jollygoodfellow).

Got right through with RH this afternoon - not 100% memorized yet, but almost.  It's an interesting one to learn with.  You need to be spot on with this as regards tempo: people who don't normally sing, will sing it, chorally, so you need to give them what they're expecting, no faster or slower, no awkward pauses.  So, although it's quite simple, it needs to be right. Later, trotted though Lilliburlero a couple of times.  Need to do it once or twice every practice, to improve it and as a kind of personalized Hanon/warm-up/wtf. Best of Elvis Costello PVG sheet music arrived in the post today. It has Shipbuilding and My Funny Valentine , which I want, and which both look graspable for the near future.

I got the sheet music for Big Time from eBay, arrived this morning.  Even the "Birmingham Library DISCARD" on the G of BIG can't spoil its cover.  And the music is something to shoot for one day.  But Strange Weather didn't look too difficult on the page, so I thought I'd give at least RH a go...  Until I get to the first two bars. I mean, those two chords don't look too difficult, do they?  Until you try to play the buggers.  With RH.  Be quite easy with LH, but on RH, the second chord means 2 on the G#, 1 underneath on the B, and poor wee 5 on the E.  If I've even read it right, I get a bit lost that far south of the staff. This might be stretching DIY piano learning a touch too far, and I'm likely going to need a teacher before I get as far as Tom Waits. Blimey.

I was musing last night, thinking out loud, really, whether I should carry on practicing Lilliburlero a bit longer, get it just right, or draw a line and move on.  I was taken aback by how emphatically Herself suggested I should draw that Lilliburlero line and move on.  "I would appreciate it, and so would all the neighbours."   From a learning point of view, also, it's probably right to move on.  I mean, I'm not just learning to play this tune, I'm learning to play the piano, and one tune can only teach so much.  Be interesting to come back to it in a few months, and see how much the macro skills have improved. So here it is, imperfect, (having it recorded adds another layer of difficulty, as a kind of public performance, I found).  Still those gaps between phrases, you can almost hear me thinking, where tf do I go now?  But, there it is.  My first proper tune learnt, first wee foothill climbed. Next, probably For S/He's a Jolly Good Fel...

Playing it right through, without mistakes, (though still not at the right tempo), gives a definite endorphin buzz, albeit a mild one, not a rush in any sense.  It's a bit addictive.  Tonight at past 12 I'm wishing I had a piano somewhere out of everyone's earshot where I could have another hour or so at it. Nearly there. Couple of sticky notes. At bar 5, RH goes to The C, and LH to the E below, and I hesitate almost every time - it's getting better, but every other run through there's that feeling of stepping out over a cliff, and not knowing where I'm going for a second, less, but too long. Apart from that, the first 8 bars, (repeated once, therefore first 16) is memorized/internalized/wtf, and the second part, with all the activity around G is almost there. I've stopped looking at the music, (except as a reference, for example to explain the bar 5 situation).

The methodology is: Play It Again, and Again, and Again, et seq.  The bits that seemed difficult get just a tiny bit easier each time.  Now it's moving to a new stage, which (I think) means it's moving into the process memory, where it seems to be acquiring plasticity as to tempo, note length, velocity and  feel .  To put it another way, when you stop having to think about what note's coming next, you're free to work on it as music.  It's nearly there, meaning nearly in a state to record it for YouTube.  Another three or four hours? Which, means all over a little more than 30 hours altogether.  In other words, one hour per bar.  Which is worth noting for future reference.

I should have it all memorized this weekend.  Had a really good practice yesterday getting from bar 17 to 28, and now there's only 25-28 still a bit fuzzy.  I've found that I need to play it through RH a couple of times  because playing 2H seems to mash-up memory of RH a bit.  And also sometimes do a few octaves of 2H Hanons to get the fingers working together, (Hanons are good for THAT, at least).   As I memorize Lilliburlero I've been thinking about Rusbridger's Play It Again , and the problems caused by his excellent sight reading which led to difficulties of memorization.  This feels like a fundamental difference in approach between people who love serious/"classical" music, and those who love playing around with jazz/folk and anything else.  For the former, often great sight reading is combined with a reverence for the music as passed down on paper from the composer.  For the latter, the sheet music is a point of departure: follow the melo...

Pretty well got the first 8 bars, (which of course repeat, so that's the first 16) but still rather slow.  Moved on tonight to bars 17-20, which are great fun: whilst RH is doing it's little wander at C4 and down to G, LH is going note-for-note from C2 to G, and then back down to F. Lovely. Fairly easy, too.   I made a little foray in to the remaining 12 bars. Another couple of hours should get the whole tune into memory, and then it's just a case of Play It Again, and Again, and Again... until I get it to the BBC speed of (I think)  ♩ = 126.   And then.  I'll have climbed the first foothill to its peak.  Just another week or two away.  And then.  I can go into any piano shop, any University refectory or hotel lobby (which have a piano, of course, and many do), anywhere in the world, and play Lilliburlero, which, surely, almost everyone in the world will have heard on the wireless.  And then, I'm a piano player, albeit with a reperto...

Today was one of those practices where two hours goes by and it's felt like 40 minutes.  Getting on quite well with 2H on the first 8 bars.  It occurred today that the learning process is in four stages: Decoding (from the sheet music); then Memorisation: playing it over and over again until you know the sequence of notes (RH, LH), and then their relationship (2H);  at this stage the notes will not be the right length, and on a nippy wee thing like Lilliburlero, it's going to be slow, so that bring us to, Speeding up, getting the time right, as well as the notes' lengths; finally, Musicality - making it sound good, making it your own bit of music.   Or DMSM for short.   For Lilliburlero, I'm on course to reach that final M, both hands, about a week from today... 

Tonight rubbed out all the fingerings for the RH because tonight I got the RH all the way through, play-it-again, play-it-again.  Still a bit unsteady around bars 24-27, but another practice should iron that out.  Had a bit of fun at the end of practicing, did the RH part a couple of octaves down the keyboard, with LH, and then with RH, but a couple of octaves up the way. This isn't better than sex, btw, but playing a piece all the way through, relatively smoothly, even just RH, gives a very nice endorphin rush of some kind.  Very nice.  Not something which can be commodified in any way.

I got another version from music-scores.com , arranged by Anne Christopherson ,  the version in Country Dances had something  not-quite right around bar 12, (it wasn't quite like the "BBC version").  The Christopherson has no chords in LH, which should make it easier, but the fingering on RH has been a puzzle I've spent the weekend working on, eventually getting it last night.   Which begs the question, is puzzling out fingering a good exercise for the beginner?  It felt helpful.  Coincidentally, there was a good discussion about this on Today, yesterday (8.20), between   " Dr Alexandra Lamont, a senior lecturer in Music Psychology at Keele university, and Tasmin Little, an international concert violinist" , and one of them, presumably Ms Little, described three stages of attachment to a musical instrument:  Physical (for her, the way the strings felt as she held the violin); Intellectual, as you decode the music from the page to the ea...

Keys sticking, and it was seriously interfering with practice.  I had a shufty on YouTube.  I took out a couple of the offending keys, and also non-offending keys, and compared the felts as per what this bloke says .  But they didn't look any different...  So, not thinking really, I just pushed the keys from their ends, towards the body of the piano...  Eue-bloody-reka!  Absurdly simple, intuitive, effective.  Voila. And then I got back to a sticking-key-free practice.  First few bars two hands.  This is great fun - I'm playing it well, and it sounds lovely with two hands, it's just v-e-r-y s-l-o-w.  Unlike southern parts of the UK, SW Scotland's very wet and forecast to continue so.  Which, encouraging us to stay indoors, means I might get right through it two hands this weekend, and can start to speed up in the week.

All the way through with RH today.  Bit hesitant in parts, but not missing any notes, and zipping along.  Another hour or two should have it nice and smooth, and then I can start on LH. This is fun, and Mozart's coming off very badly in comparison - in terms of enjoying an hour's practice.  The Country Dances book has 160 wee tunes in it.  I got another book of music off of eBay in the post today, Irish Pub Tunes , which has 50 or so tunes. I'm wondering, maybe I should learn all 200 (or thereabouts) of these.  Then I'll have pretty good technique, and I can maybe start on the accordion.  The long term goal has always been to play in a pub   for beer and supper and the hell of it. Jigs, reels and Irish ballads are what goes down in pubs. There's nothing to stop me going down the ABRSM Piano Grade road, too, in the future.  But I'm going to go all folky, just now awhile.