Plateau

 My piano playing is at a plateau.  When I thought about why this was so, the answer was clear: I practice the same way every time, so I am reinforcing everything I am doing now including whatever bad habits I might have. I might get slightly better at what I can already do over time, but there is not really any improvement.  

So yesterday, I practiced what I normally would, for 30 minutes. 

Today, I will do something different. I think I will play blues in Db.  I never do that, so it should stretch myself somewhat.  

[update: a plateau is not a bad thing.  When I switched back from the unfamiliar blues to what I normally would play I noticed an immediate gain in fluency. The Blues was noticeably stiffer. The good thing about a plateau is that it is stable. Still, the stretch is important as well.  I can alternate between plateau days and stretch days.] 

Improvisation

I can improvise. I can be directing my attention toward motifs; paraphrasing the melody; hitting the chord tones to signal the chord changes; going up and down scales; having one phrase answer another... There are, indeed, wrong notes. They are notes that are not what you heard in your head, or that clash with the harmony. I can improvise using only a certain note value, like only quarter note triplets. 

A lot of the improvisation will be dissonant. There are several categories: a note that is fairly dissonant, but actually forms part of the chord, say, a seventh in a major seventh chord. That will sound dissonant to someone not familiar with jazz. Then, an upper extension or altered note, like a sharp 9th. Again, this will be dissonant, but forms part of the jazz language. These are not wrong notes. Wrong notes are outside the harmony of the piece, but outside in an unintentional way (as opposed to being chromatic ornaments). 

I find myself playing things that are too harmonically ambiguous, so, for example, any notes sound acceptable if they are part of the diatonic scale of the piece, but I need to emphasize the chord tones more to make the melody sound less random. 

The main flaw in my playing is that it doesn't sound jazzy enough. I can improvise, but that does not mean I can improvise well, or in a way that's idiomatically jazzy enough. Even playing the cliches would be better, from that perspective. 

Probably the most interesting thing to do is develop motifs. Invent a motif, then play it using different notes (but with the same melodic shape and rhythm). Then vary or expand it. 

Modes of melodic minor

 We can derive modes by taking a C scale and beginng the scale on different notes. So D Dorian is DEFGABCD. Phrygian is EFGABCDE..  

We can also take the melodic minor, CDEbFGABC, and then derive 6 other modes, like DEbFGABCE. EbFGABCE, etc...   

As I like to say

 Suppose  I hear a simple melodic phrase and then can sing it back. That's rather mysterious, because many people can do that. We aren't consciously producing a certain series of notes, but just able to mimic what we've heard. Then someone who can play a melody on the piano for a song they already know. I can do it somewhat, but not perfectly in all cases. Now that unconscious ability to mimic, we can do with an object exterior to the body. The process is still unconscious, in some ways, because people who can do this naturally aren't thinking, oh, "that's a minor third up." They just know how to exteriorize that pitch matching with a keyboard. Of course, conscious thoughts can occur too; I'm just saying that the process is not overall a conscious one. 

Then, improvising, I can hear a phrase in my head and then play it. I'm not sure how I do it. As I like to say,  the thing about it that surprises me is not that I can write great songs, or improvise very well, but that I can do it all. 

Blue Skies

I tried to learn a jazz standard by ear.  I started with Irvin Berlin's "Blue Skies." I listened to some recordings and found out by ear, with my keyboard out, that it is usually played in C. The next step was to play the melody by ear. That wasn't hard to figure out.

The first chord is A minor. I tried to figure out the second chord but what I came up with didn't sound right. I tried to get E7 to work, but I was not satisfied with it. I got some other things "right," after I looked at what the chords were supposed to be. Then I remembered that I had played the song by looking at the chords, maybe a year ago, so I was partially reconstructing it from memory.

The result was an inexpert reharmonization of the tune. I'm not discouraged, because I learned something about my own abilities.

I can tell what key a song is in

I can figure out the melody

I can figure out some of the chords easily

I can hear when a chord is completely wrong when I try out something that isn't even in the ballpark

When I am wrong I can reharmonize things in a way that doesn't always sound completely bad

I have some musical memory to rely on.

On the other hand, I cannot

hear exactly what the chords should be / I'm at about 30%.

reharmonize with skill

I will try this with another song next.  

If I play something and it sounds wrong, then that is actually a skillful event. It is MY ears that are telling me that, therefore my ear has some capacity.

***

I looked at a first sentence of one my chapters, and I realized it was not a good sentence, especially to introduce a chapter. You don't want to lead with a weak sentence. That feedback loop is like my "ear" for prose.  I'm sure the sentence was functional in some previous version of the chapter, but it is not, so I changed it.  Normally I read through a paragraph many times, on many days, making small changes, until I can come back to it and leave it alone.

Autumn Leaves

I came up with this little thing yesterday where I play the arpeggiated pattern of Bach's Prelude in C from the well-tempered clavier with the chords of Autumn Leaves. I don't know where that is leading. !  Oscar Peterson's Jazz exercise #8 is cool, with a baroque flavor to it.

I have this other thing where I play the first four chords of One-Note Samba very slowly and improvise over them very fast in the right hand. The idea is to get as much going with each chord as possible. I can play slow and meaningful melodic ideas, or I can play fast, but often if I overextend then it sounds too random (i.e. not meaningful), and sloppy. So the idea to catch myself when I am playing too much outside the changes for it to be meaningful, and rein myself in. At the same time, the random fast playing is not all bad, because it might lead to other ideas. I CAN improvise.  The question is being able to do it meaningfully enough. I can play fast, but if isn't "clean fast" it isn't good.

Listening Without Ego

When I listen to my recordings without ego, this means that I am listening for what I like and do not like. If something turns out nice, and I like it, that is good. If things are not to my liking, then I make a note of that too. I hear myself overemphasizing something, being too much on top of the beat, rushing through a melodic phrase rather than giving it its full value. The voicings could be muddy, with too much bass.  Being a good musician is being able to listen for all of this.

The things I liked were some good voicings that sounded smooth and sweet, some melodic lines; the overall feel of things at times. The main thing is that it is my own taste that is the guide. I can hear something and say it is to my taste or not. The ego is out of the way in that I don't have to get upset or over-elated about what I hear. I can just try to keep the good stuff and not as much of the things I dislike.  I hear a lot of players much better than I am who are not to my particular taste.

Your voice is your ear

If I ask myself to sing a note in the middle of my speaking / singing voice, I will come up with a G3 most of the time. It will be around there, sometimes an F#.  My ear is not particularly good, but the voice itself acts like an ear. People who can play an instrument by ear can essentially treat another instrument as though it were their voice. When people can't match a pitch played on a piano in their voice, we say they have no ear. In other words, if you cannot match the pitch with your voice, we say that you can't hear it.

The ability to hear is more important than the ability to produce a sound, so music is more about perception than production.

Walking bass lines

Nothing has helped me improvise as much as learning to write (and improvise) walking bass lines. When you think about it, these lines have everything you need:

*They outline the chord tones of the chords in any particular set of chord changes. 

*They are melodic. They can go up and down the scale, hitting the chord tones, or can be arpeggiated.  So they are scales + arpeggios. 

*They have chromatic (non-scale) tones as leading tones to the scale tones. They can have "enclosures" (a word I learned today!), in other words, approaches to the target notes from chromatic leading tones above and below in the same phrase.  

If you can improvise a bass line on a set of chord changes, you can improvise a melodic line as well, because you are already doing it. The differences:

*The walking bass line is almost all quarter notes. The improvised melodic line will be mostly eighth notes and triplets, with a much more irregular rhythm, and including pauses between phrases. 

*The bass line tends to hit the chord root on the first beat of the measure, or beat 3 if the chord changes there. You can begin a chord on a note other than the root, but while learning I tend to just use the root every time. The treble melodic line emphasizes all the other chord tones except for the root. 

I'm developing the technique of playing a bass line and then improvising above it with a melodic line. It isn't easy for me. The treble lines come out very stiff sounding, stiffer than if I am simply playing block chords in the left hand. My ideas sound more limited than when I have other kinds of accompaniments.   

I learned bass lines for the first section of "Autumn Leaves" in all twelve keys this summer. This meant learning 2-5-1 progressions in both major and minor in every key, cycling downward through the circle of fifths. I have also improvised many hours over "Bemsha Swing," but just in one key. I can't get a good bass line for this song, since the movement of the chords is already so chromatic it doesn't seem to leave much space.  I guess I'll have to look at one from a record to see some of the possibilities here.  

Problem solving and rehearsal

There are two main kinds of practicing I do: problem solving and rehearsal.

The first is working through things I cannot yet play and learning to play them.  One problem is that I do not know what the notes are yet, that I have figured out, on the page, what they are in the literal sense. A second problem is that I cannot get my fingers to play those notes. I have small hands to reach is an issue for me.  

Rehearsing is playing something I can already play, as beautifully as I can. That should be done with intention each time, with thought, never just running through the notes just to refresh your memory.  When I do that, I have to stop myself.  Rehearsal can be experimental... what would be piece sound like a little slower, with a slightly different feel to it, or some other way? Or it can be oriented toward determining one particular interpretation. The interpretation blossoms as I rehearse. It expands or deepens. It can grow stale through excessive repetition. I am not good enough yet to be wholly consistent. Instead, I let the interpretation vary a good deal from day to day, even when moving in a single overall direction. The idea would be to have a single interpretation that only varies a slight bit, but never getting stale either. I am playing the C minor Prelude by Chopin now, which would be easy to play stalely, since it is overplayed, but to me it is fresh (since I'm still at the problem solving stage with it).  

Since I am new to the process, having learned these things just now (this is just what I understand so far), the growth or blossoming in my understanding of the process itself is amazing to me. It is like a strange gift that I don't quite understand yet. It's a bit like discovering a hidden room in a house you have lived in your whole life.  

Recently I was able to hear a phrase in my head before I played and then play it, listening to whether it was the same phrase that I wanted to hear. I'm sure all very good musicians already do that!            

A Dream of Rhythm Changes

I was in a lesson and was supposed to play along with the teacher and some other people on rhythm changes. I started by playing a walking bass in my left hand but I was told "Enough of that bass," so I gave that up. I simply could not play anything, though they were all playing coherently through the changes; I didn't even touch the keyboard through an entire chorus.

 I finally said I wanted to play it by myself.  I did, without looking at my hands, and without being sure of the notes of the chords either. It started badly and got worse and worse, until the final phrase was completely atonal.

Information problem and movement problem

The piano teacher in the post below, Dr. John Mortensen, distinguishes between information problems and movement problems.

The information problem is when you can't read the music. You don't know, in a literal sense, what those notes are, or how to count that particular rhythm.  He says that practicing is problem solving, so you solve that problem by figuring it out.

A movement problem is when you can't physically play something on the piano.  You can't make your fingers do that easily. So you solve that problem by fingering, grouping, etc... getting to the point where you fingers will play it correctly at a slowed down tempo.

The main take-away is that practice is problem solving.  I had not thought about this before, though I had distinguished in my mind between things I couldn't play because I couldn't read them, and things that I couldn't play because I couldn't play them physically.  It is helpful to know what kind of problem you have.

I play through the easy lines over and over, and then work for a bit on the hard parts. Obviously this is backwards. As he explains in another video, you have to divide the piece into playable parts and non-playable parts, and only work on the non-playable parts until they become playable.

There's another kind of practice where, once I know a piece well and have memorized it, I play it in order to rehearse it for recording or performance, even if the performance is only for my teacher in my lesson.  This guy says that your performances will reflect how you have practiced. So he can hear a student play and immediately know how the student practiced, what sh/e did or did not do.

Mompou, Música callada X

Pardon the image on the video.  There ought to be a way of uploading an MP3 rather than having to do it as a video.  Pardon my playing too. I'm sure I'll be embarrassed a year later by this. But that is because I am making some progress.

What I was going for was a certain sound on the piano. I was playing on a Steinway at the music building that had a real meaty bass register, and a really loooooong decay. and so I played the piece a bit bombastically, with some storminess rather than cantabile, and some mudiness in the sustain pedal. Still, this for me is good playing, the best I've been able to achieve in the classical vein.

A cool chord

I found a cool chord in Mompou.  It is a diminished triad with a major seventh and a ninth on top. So it has three minor thirds in all, with a major fourth between the flatted fifth and the major ninth.   Transposed to the key of C it would be

C / Eb / Gb / B / D

I'm going to have to borrow this chord for a composition of my own. I don't know what it really is, but he uses it in two different keys at the conclusion of two successive phrases.

Piano notes

There are a few really obvious things I've learned about piano playing. They weren't all obvious when I began.

The level you need to get a piece to to play for anyone else is much greater than the ability you have when you think you can play it for yourself at home. First, there is the added nervousness; secondly, you aren't really playing it at home as well as think in the first place.

To play a piece well, it has to be far easier than your intermediate level. It has to be something that you can play without any hesitation for the notes.  All the attention most be on nuances: dynamics and exact phrasings. This applies to difficult pieces as well. They must seem as easy as a simple child's piece in order to sound good.

Muscle memory and proprioception rules. It is not sufficient, because you can blank out mentally and the muscles won't do what they are supposed to do. You can also engrave mistakes into your muscle memory. Mistakes are not accidents, but things you have learned wrong. You should know where your hands and figures are, always. Looking at the keyboard is not as efficient.

Fingering has to be efficient and consistent. It is hard to have good muscle memory if the fingering varies each time you play something.  

Looking at the written music, by the same token, is distracting from actually playing. You have to get to the level where you either know the piece by memory, and the score is only a reminder, or else be so good at reading the score that there is no difficulty there. Imagine trying to recite a poem you didn't know in an alphabet you could barely read. You would either have to know the poem well, and use the alphabet only as a crutch, or get better at reading that alphabet.      

Linear, right hand patterns are not difficult, inherently. They can be learned slowly, and gradually sped up.  The same goes for linear patterns in the left hand, involving only one note at a time. Most of my difficulty seems to come from playing more than one note at a time.

Even numbered intervals will be written on a line and a space, so a fourth, a sixth, and octave, etc... Odd numbered intervals are written all on lines or spaces, so thirds, ninths, etc... This pattern extends as far as you can count. Intervals, then, look a certain way on the page, and are more distinctive looking than individual note values.

The placement of the note C on the piano is symmetrical.  So it is the next to the bottom space on the bottom, the next to the top space on the top; two ledger lines above and below the treble and bass clefs.

Every note will change from a line to a space or space to line at every octave.

Speed

I was going to go twice as fast and learn a new key every half month, since I already have a good grasp of the key for January, B. But I am resisting that temptation. Instead, I will use the rest of the month just to reinforce what I've learned and dwell a while comfortably in this new territory. February will be E major. Ultimately, what I want is a very good grasp of 12 keys, so I will force myself to play a lot even in ones I already know well. At least I can already say that B is not one of my weakest one.  Now those would be F#/Gb and E. A, D, and G are not hard, but I haven't written songs in those keys yet. I am more comfortable in C, F, Bb, Eb, Ab, and Db.

B (2)

The key of the month club is going well. I've composed three songs in the key of B. Even if this experiment lasts only one month, it will have been worthwhile.  Even after only a week B is no longer one of my weakest keys.  Thinking in terms of sharps rather than flats reorients my vision, so that Eb - 7 becomes D#-7.  

***

A melodic "hook" has the shape of a hook, on the axes of pitch and time.

B

The key of the month will be B.  I first make sure I know the scale itself. Then I make sure I have in hand the 9 chords associated with the key (7 plus the tritone substitution, and the dominant chords for the I and IV to play the blues). I then compose a piece in the key. (I have done this, but haven't written out the "B" section yet.)

I can do a key a month this way, always choosing as my next key the one I like or know the least.  So Feb will have to be E or Gb. By the end of the year, I can simply review the keys I already have a better grasp of.

Writing in B is not hard per se, but it led me to an idea I would not have had otherwise: iii IV7 iii ii / iii IV7 II7 V (tritone sub) / I vii I V I...  In other words, it is not just the completist urge to learn all the keys, but the ability to generate ideas out of new ways of thinking about familiar relationships.

unnecessary weaknesses

Here's an idea. I want to rid my musical life of unnecessary weaknesses, like being intimidated by certain keys, or by my slowness at reading music. These are unnecessary because they aren't due to an inherent lack of ability: if I can read music at all I should be able to read notes that far above the staff. I just need to practice more and systematically learn what I need to learn. If I know a key with five flats, then I should be able to learn one with 4 sharps. If my time is weak because I don't practice enough with the metronome, then the solution seems blindingly obvious. These are self-created obstacles, not inherent defects in my musicality.

Of course, this is not a claim that I have no inherent limitations. It may be that I am not a very good musician in numerous ways, some of them correctable with time, others not so much. Some limitations might be correctable, but I might not get there in the time I have left on earth. For example, my piano technique will continue to improve, but I won't become a virtuoso.

It seems obvious that mechanical details that numerous other non-genius musicians have mastered are also accessible to me.  Also, only those things that are possible to improve are worth working on in the first place. In other words, aptitude or raw potential are, by definition, impossible to improve.  

 

I love theory

I mean music theory, here. It is funny that what goes by the name music theory would be, in literature, the equivalent of prosody and plot construction, not "theory" as it is known to literature folks. (And not in the third sense of a scientific theory meaning a strong and empirically testable explanation that accounts for a set of phenomena in the natural world.) Although classical performers study theory in conservatory, many of them find it unexciting. To write or improvise music, though, you are always thinking about what the chords are. I am constantly making duh discoveries, like the fact that the pentatonic minor scale will have the same notes as the pentatonic major scale of the relative major. It seem kind of obvious, but I just discovered this this week. I also discovered that I was using pentatonic scales in melodies without knowing what it is I was doing.

I like working in Dflat (five flats) for some reason. I think it is because it has chords unrelated to C, so that if I combine those two keys, then I have about 20 chords under my fingers, if I include modulations to other keys related to these two keys, tritone substitutions, secondary dominants... I don't have to learn 12 keys really well; I can have about 3 or 4 I know pretty well and I have most if it covered.

Someone was asking how to memorize all the chords. You don't memorize them, you learn them in relationships to other chords and keys. You know them. If you tried to memorize them by rote out of all context it would be much harder.  A harmonic context distant from C major is simply a different context, where things have a different meaning, but where the relationships are completely commensurate.

A musical composition has to make sense to me, melodic, rhythmic, structural, and harmonic. I have to work on it until it all fits together. The surprising thing is that I know how to do this, that I knew how from my first song, and that more sophisticated harmonies do not make my songs necessarily any better. They are just fun to compose in their own way.  

Everyone who listens to music knows what melody is and can recognize one or have one stuck in the head. There is no actual criterion for what a good melody is except for one that someone responds to subjectively as a melody.  We can say objectively that some music is more complexly organized or longer, but can we say that the Beatles's "Michelle" is better or worse than some other melody that a lot of people like as much? There are melodies from Bach I don't think are great, and others that are.