Counting to Five

The goal of my Resolution 9 project is in part, of course, to shame/bribe/condition/encourage myself to get the piano playing back into shape. In the 1970 move, Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson's character, Bobby Dupea, has turned his back on his family and musical ability to live a sort of aimless life. While I may have started out my life as an adult in some ways not unlike Dupea, Nicholson's character in the movie, it certainly hasn't ended up that way, and some of the other differences are too numerous to go into here.

My story is that I am a middle aged woman who showed some promise as a young musician on the bassoon and the piano, enough that I went to Oberlin as a double degree student with my Conservatory major being the bassoon. I, like Dupea, didn't want the life of daily disciplined practice, so I dropped out of the Con, kept on with my academic studies in the College, and went a long time not playing much of anything except the guitar a little. Then, during the course of several lifetimes on both coasts later, I have picked up the bassoon again, play the piano off and on again here and there, and am a high school teacher. (No, not a music teacher.) So, like a lot of adults who played the piano when they were kids, I am taking it up again with a little more seriousness. A little more. This project is not about Nicholson's character per se whose fate at the end of the film is in some ways the exact opposite of what mine turned out to be. Rather it is about finding a structure by which I can take on trying to capture a small amount of discipline in practice and play the piano  on my terms.

In the movie, towards the end, Dupea plays Chopin's Prelude in E Minor, "the easiest piece [he] could think of." The other pieces in the movie are Chopin's Fantasy in f minor, Opus 49; Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue; Mozart's E-flat Major Concerto K272 and Mozart's Fantasy in d Minor K397. None of these necessarily fall into the realm of "easy". The pieces I have chosen may or may not fall into the realm of easy, depending on any number of things, and the fact that they are not unfamiliar pieces to musicians in some ways make them "harder", if merely for the reason that they are familiar. EVERYONE plays them, knows if you miss notes and they can be played pretty lamely if accurately.

David Hodgkins, musical director of Coro Allegro , intones many at times oft-repeated quotes  in order to coach the choir towards its usual excellence, and one of them has to do with the pitfalls of performing familiar music. When the group is rehearsing a piece well known in the classical world, like a Haydn mass or  Randall Thompson's tired "Alleluia" [THAT old thing],dutifully dragged out our back pockets for perhaps too many occasions, David will say, "It's like singing the National Anthem! Everyone sings it! Everyone knows it. We can't afford to do it "mezzo blah!'" Or some some such exhortation to avoid mediocrity. He's not just talking about accuracy, he's talking about musicality and attention, and, as he is so often, he is quite right.

"Five Easy Pieces" also refers to a set of 4 Hand Piano pieces by Igor Stravinsky, which he composed  from 1916-1917, upon completion of another set called Three Easy Pieces. But as of yet, this isn't about that either, although I love Stravinsky. I did do enough conservatory time to nail the intro to "Rite of Spring" on the bassoon.

The "easy" part is also related to  attention, focus, and time management. I do not have tons of time to devote to this particular project, so I want to make sure I am present in a kind of Buddhist way when I am.
Four pieces I have chosen are not the Bach and Mozart featured in the film, indeed not Bach or Mozart at all, and the fifth is as of yet undetermined. My choices are based on my desire to see a project through. All of the pieces except the new unchosen fifth are already on the road to completion, but in working on them, I have been not been following good practice techniques. As well, I am working on avoiding the self-defeating thinking that I MUST play the MOST difficult pieces in all the land technique-wise (as determined by some committee of shameful and invisible judges) to demonstrate that I am a competent musician. I have bashed my way through some Chopin Ballades like hacking through a bamboo forest with a machete only to have the conquered measures lie slain in my wake, "gotten through" but joylessly. And this because I was misusing my time. Instead of savoring some of it, I worried about "finishing the piece" to say I could play it. Bah. Maybe this is about being older and wiser. I love Chopin, that tortured soul,  but I might love to play Brahms and Ravel more.

Focus is the key. I have half-learned the following piano pieces and when I pull them out, I tend only to play the parts I really know. There are errors I always play, play in fact so much they are starting to become part of the way I play the piece (oh dear) and I am simply stuck on the first few pages in most. So, four of the Five Easy pieces:

1. The Pineapple Rag by Scott Joplin (Been there, done that old Maple Leaf One.)
2. Intermezzo in A by Brahms , yes, that one, I am somewhat embarrassed to say
   
3. Ravel's "Dead Princess" Pavane
4. Someday My Prince will Come - the jazz waltz version of it, not the Disney version of it
5. ???????
   

15 minutes of focus and bail out when the point of diminishing return starts. Oh and Beatles Rock Band.More on that later.