Self Evaluation

I performed “Promenade” for my Keyboard Skills III midterm. With this piece, I began by observing its basic characteristics. I noticed that the piece is in 4/4 time and remains in G major throughout. I also noticed that the second section of the piece is repeated. Next, I observed stylistic characteristics such as articulation, dynamics, and phrasing. The first section of the piece begins marked forte and ends piano. The second section is marked f-p, indicating that this section is to be played forte the first time through, and then piano on the repeat. I noticed the staccato quarter notes in the left hand and began to figure out the best way to execute them. I also discovered that the piece employs phrases that are each four measures in length, and are arranged in a simple binary form that can best be expressed as AABB. Knowing all of these things before even touching the piano is very helpful in understanding the overall framework and design of the music. I find that taking the time to analyze a piece in this way is much more beneficial than trying to read a piece down “cold.” In other words, instead of playing something the wrong way, over and over again and trying to add details later on, this process allows you to get more things right the first time you play it.

The next step in my process, of course, is to actually play the piece. I typically start with both hands together to get an initial feel for the degree of coordination required and to get the tune in my ear. Sometimes I sing along to one hand at a time using solfege syllables. This helps me memorize the piece and to more easily identify note errors when I make them. After a run through with both hands, I like to isolate each hand individually. I like to loop difficult passages, like the eighth note sequencing motive that occurs in “Promenade” multiple times. when doing this, I will typically take it at a very slow tempo and gradually speed it up to performance tempo. Another difficult part of the piece for me was the left hand passage of the second section, which plays broken intervals from G that increase in size. The largest interval is a minor sixth from B to G, which is immediately followed by an E in the same hand. I found it a bit of an obstacle to stretch my hand to play the B with my 5th finger and then get my 3rd finger back in place to play the E without hesitation. Repetition proved to be an effective tool with this as well. After a while, I became familiar enough with the distance between these notes to play this passage without looking.

I thoroughly enjoyed preparing this piece for my midterm. I found that the way in which I approach preparing a piano piece is very similar to the way I approach a solo, etude, or excerpt in my trumpet playing. I took the process very slowly and patiently and, in the end, was able to perform “Promenade” successfully.

Concert Review - Troy T.

This past Saturday, September 26th, I got to take part in an annual event held here at George Mason University. I attended the Arts by George! concert and was, overall, very impressed by the musicianship and professionalism of the program. Though pops and broadway music are not my favorite genres, I figured this show would be perfect to go to since it would force me into witnessing a piano player master the pops and broadway craft, and hopefully, create a deep appreciation for the difficulties in those kinds of music. Brian Stokes Mitchell was the featured singer of the program but I really found that his band members were the key to making him shine. I made of point of trying to meet the piano player to pick his brain about the experience of performing with the Tony Award winning singer and was very pleased when I did speak with him. His name was Ted Firth, a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music in Jazz Piano, and he told me how fulfilling it was to accompany a singer while still being a part of a large ensemble production. I thought his playing was delicate but surprisingly well heard (considering he was playing with an orchestra!) and that he made me think differently about pops and broadway all together from the second the concert opened with "Some Enchanted Evening." It was an interesting experience all together.


Posted by ttyrer at 11:44 PM 0 comments

Self Evaluation

For the past two weeks or so, I have been working on “Amazing Grace.” The piece was challenging for me because it had movement in both hands, not just the right. Getting my left hand to move with my right hand proved more difficult than I originally thought.
When I first started practicing the piece, I only did separate hands. I did this until I could do each hand perfectly alone; I had the correct time, notes, and dynamics. Then I began the dutiful task of playing both hands. At first, I tried to play the whole piece at once. This was not a good choice, as I stumbled through the piece and made too many mistakes. However, I continued to do it this way, and yielded little results. After the extra help session on Wednesday October 7, Professor Yi had given me some tips and better fingerings to help me with my struggles.
I then decided to go line by line, and be very strict with myself when I practiced. If a line was not perfect, or I did not feel comfortable enough to move on, I continued on the same line. When I felt like the line was good enough, I moved to the next line and did the same thing. Then I tried the first two lines until I could do them together perfectly. I did this for the whole piece.
As I practiced this way, I began to notice some trouble spots. They mostly occurred when two hands were moving contrary to each other, or when the pattern of chords changed. While I knew where the chord changes were and what they were, I was unable to do them quick enough to keep in time. I slowed down the speed, which helped a lot, and then gradually brought the speed back up to where I thought it should be.
In terms of the musicality of the piece, I knew I had a lot of leeway. “Amazing Grace” is a traditional piece, but this arrangement was a jazzy style of it. I knew I could play around with it and sort of feel it out. It’s very interesting how musicians can just tell how a piece should go based on how it feels when they play it, and this is how I figured out where I wanted the piece to go. I decided on starting out calm, and building up to about five measures from the end, and then bringing it back down for the last two measures. This happened very naturally, but yielded a very nice sound.
When I first saw the piece, I thought it was going to be easy, and I pushed it aside for a while. However, when I first practiced it, I knew it was not going to be as easy as I thought. Through careful practice and time, I was able to perform it to the best of my abilities and think it was very successful.

Self Evaluation

First, when attempting to play the “Amazing Grace” piece, I began with reading the notes within the piece, taking notice of the key, time signature and other necessary musical observations. After I was theoretically comfortable, I started with separating parts within the right and left hand. In this piece, I began with the right hand then with the left at the start of measure 10 because it contained the chords/accompaniment line. I usually begin with the chords/accompany line. The reason I chose to tackle the accompany line first was because the coordination to switch chords was a more difficult task than playing single note melodies, at least in my experience. I have always found it best to start with the things that are most difficult; this will infer to you the amount of effort needed to play the piece. After I gained fluidity in playing the chords, I moved to the melody lines without accompaniment. Learning pieces by studying individual parts helps me to learn the piece faster than trying to play it all at once. I am sure this holds true to some degree for everyone who is learning a piece.
Once I had an understanding of both parts, I began a long process of connecting both parts together. In a piece such as “Amazing Grace,” I had some difficulty at first rhythmically due to the rest within the accompaniment line and the eighth notes within the melody line. This caused such difficulty on my part because I had a hard time keeping my hand off the note or chord that I just played. Instead of a rest, I was playing a note or chord which made the note or chord a half note, which served as a substitute for a quarter note. The eighth notes gave me some problems because I wasn’t playing them fast enough, especially in measure 4 where there is a chord switch that was somewhat complicated for me. However, my problems with the eighth notes and rests didn’t last too long because I eventually fixed it with constant practicing.
Overall, I would still say that the chords/accompaniment lines gave me the most issues. The biggest problem I had was with measures 7 and 8. The 3rd chord within the accompaniment line plays a C#, E and A then switches to an F# and A. This switch caused some complications for awhile because I needed to quickly move right and get my second finger that was on the E to the F# while playing the notes and other notes in rhythm. There were some other weird problems that I occasionally and inexplicably experienced, but these were just temporary, silly mistakes. Simply, my predominant tactic to overcome these challenges and become successful in playing this piece was replaying the piece over and over until the mistakes became minimal or absent. I am not sure that this was the most successful way to minimize mistakes; however, I do believe this is the less complicated way which made my experience less tedious. Also this was really the only tactic I knew due to my inexperience within learning piano pieces. Still, I found it to be a very effective way of completing a piece. What helped the most within this piece was that I have heard various forms of it before which, obviously makes note/rhythm reading a lot easier. Also this song is one of my all time favorite songs so the pain of learning it was insignificant.

Midterm Self Evaluation

I chose to perform the piece “Amazing Grace” for my Keyboard III Midterm, because I was so familiar with it. For me, this piece presented a challenge that I’ve always had trouble with, which is switching the chords and melody from one hand to the other. This challenge for me was both technical and musical, because it challenges both your coordination and your interpretation, as you have to switch from making the melody loud in the right hand to then making the melody come out in the left. This has always thrown me off, and I had to do some work to ensure I was comfortable doing it in this piece. In order to learn this piece well and avoid this mistake, I went through the piece several times with each hand separately and then put them together measure by measure. After I was playing through the piece with both hands, I isolated the places I was still having trouble coordinating both hands together. Both of these things proved to be really effective for me in my overall understanding and performance of the piece for the midterm.
My conception of the piece after learning it was very similar to my conception of it before. I was very familiar with the song “Amazing Grace” and so I already had an idea of how this piece would be like to perform in my head. This idea did much for shaping things I incorporated into the actual performance like dynamics, phrasing and the general tempo throughout, and it also gave me a good indication as to what to do with things like emphasizing the chromatic parts of the piece. This really helped in my conception of the piece.