Episode 36 – Vision and Reality
Introduction
G’day, everyone. I’m David Reidy; welcome to Piano, finally, a podcast by an old bloke who is getting around to learning the piano, finally.
[Crab Canon]
Welcome
Welcome to show thirty-six. Thank you very much for being here. If this is your first time hearing the podcast, I hope you enjoy the episode. If you’re a returning listener, then thanks for coming back. If you’re learning the piano or another musical instrument, let me know how you’re going with it. You can contact me at david@pianofinally.show.
If you’ve been to the show’s website, www.pianofinally.show, you will have noticed that there is a transcript of each episode included with the sound file. The transcript is generated by a machine learning tool, Rez, and although it is one of the better tools, it is far from perfect. It makes the same mistakes every week, and editing the transcripts is time-consuming. So, this week, I’m trying something different.
I write a script for each of the podcast episodes. For my previous podcast, I did this with pen and paper, but for Piano, finally, I’m using a word processor. That means that there is effectively a transcript available before I’ve even recorded everything. I do sometimes make small adjustments as I’m recording, but the script is much closer to being correct than the AI transcript. I’m going to upload the script as the transcript from now on, which should make things more accurate. If you use the transcripts, let me know if that works better for you.
I had another piano lesson during the week; I’ll talk about it in more detail later in the show.
I caught up with the latest Daniil Trifonov concert on Stage+, where he plays pieces by Chopin, Barber and Tchaikovsky. The subscription to Stage+ is proving to be one of the best video services I pay for, up there with YouTube Premium and AppleTV+ measured by the amount I watch.
[Crab Canon]
YouTube - Pierre Piscitelli
This week’s YouTube suggestion was prompted by the fact that the channel has just released its one hundredth long-form video. I’ve been watching this channel’s videos on and off for a while now, not all of them as it has a range of different video types, but the ones I have been watching have been quite good.
The channel is run by Pierre Piscitelli, a pianist, educator and arranger from New York City. Pierre has an easy style and a clear and straightforward presentation style. As with most YouTube videos, the video and audio quality in Pierre’s work is excellent.
The channel content has two main themes, there are videos that look at different musical topics, famous musicians, top ten lists that sort of thing. The majority of videos though teach how to play arrangements of different pieces. Pierre has these videos divided into different playlists. There are playlists for Jazz and Christmas music, but most of the videos are for arrangements of popular songs.
The popular song tutorials are divided into three levels. Level 1 contains some very simple arrangements of parts of songs, Level 2 is similar but with more complex arrangements while level 3 gets much more involved. The songs in levels 1 and 2 are taught by rote. Pierre expects that viewers understand finger numbering and note names, and Pierre slowly builds up to a full, though simplified arrangement. In these videos, you don’t see a complete score, just a pair of staves showing the notes being played. Level 3 videos do show the score as Pierre plays.
If you want to pick up some short pieces that sound good and would be fun to bring out for a bit of informal playing, then Pierre’s channel is a good place to start. There’s a link in the show notes.
https://www.youtube.com/@pierrejpiscitelli
[Crab Canon]
Essay – Vision and Reality
It was time this week to pick another piece of music to add to the repertoire. So I’ve been thinking about what piece I’d like to add. If I don’t have to be realistic, that’s an easy question to answer; I’d like to add a Beethoven sonata, number 21 if possible. Of course, it’s not possible at the moment, and probably will never be, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t aim for it.
The most complex piece I can play at the moment has a total of about eighty notes in it, and more than half of those are left-hand chords. There are more than eighty notes in just the first grand staff of Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata, and there are a hundred grand staves in the whole work, 571 bars.
https://imslp.org/wiki/Piano_Sonata_No.21,_Op.53_(Beethoven,_Ludwig_van)
Of course, I do have to be realistic; I’m guessing that there are very few amateur pianists who play Beethoven sonatas just for fun - though wouldn’t it be great if there were lots? Can I see myself ever playing the whole sonata? No, I’m sure it takes decades of hard work and practice to get even close, but does that mean that I should just look elsewhere for something to play? No, I just need to lower my vision a bit. Maybe I can manage a few bars, maybe the first eight.
I really think the key to staying motivated as an adult piano learner is to carefully balance the vision of where we’d like to be with the reality of where we are and how quickly we can progress. A child can see adult pianists and realistically expect that with practice and dedication, they could one day get to that level too. As an adult, I can look at a pianist such as Sir Stephen Hough, who is about the same age as me and whom I’ll be seeing play Brahms at the Opera House in May, and know that I should have got started fifty or so years ago.
Learning the piano means that I can see the process these professional pianists have gone through to get to where they are. I know how long it takes me to memorise the sixteen bars of a preparatory level piece. Although I am sure that with experience, memorisation will become a little easier, I can much better appreciate the mammoth task it must be to remember a concert-length piece. I know what it’s like to walk onto the stage of the Sydney Opera House in front of an audience, but I can only imagine what it would be like to then sit down and play some Beethoven. I could see myself being that pianist, but only in some alternative timeline.
So here’s my reality at the moment in this timeline. I’m preparing pieces that would be suitable for the ANZCA Preparatory level exam, not that I’m necessarily going to do the exam, but it’s a useful starting point. For the ANZCA Go exam, you need to present four pieces from the piano performance syllabus.
The ANZCA syllabus lists quite a number of pieces for each level of piano exam; it’s up to the student to find the sheet music. ANZCA does, however, publish two preparatory level books, one with classical pieces and the other with more modern pieces. The Canon by Spinder, Türk’s Bagatelle in F and Cragg’s Afternoon Snooze are all from the classical book, so I thought I should choose one from the Modern selection, as I already had that book in my music bag.
Devi and I had a look through the pieces; there are twelve in total. Devi narrowed it down to two, played both of them, and I got to choose. I picked the one that looks more rhythmically interesting and has more dynamics markings, as that’s where I need more practice. Could I have picked the simpler piece, yes, but where’s the fun in that? The important word in “Learning to play the piano” is “Learning”, and so the piece where I think I’ll learn the most is the clear choice. After all, I won’t get to the first eight bars of Waldstein by taking the easy path.
The new piece, Blackout Blues, is by Andrew Craggs, and I’m having a lot of fun learning it. It is very different to the other pieces I have been learning, even different to the other Andrew Craggs piece. It is the first piece I have played that includes Swing.
Instead of just starting at the beginning of the piece, Devi got me to start with a seven-note sequence that occurs, with variations, four times. There are four accidentals in the seven notes, and the F is played both sharp and natural, and my fingers just would not do it, at least not to start. They do now, though; you’ll hear it at the end of the episode.
I have my vision of where I’d like my playing to be; those eight bars of Beethoven are there in the distance, but I also know the reality of where I currently am, just getting the hang of some simple Swing. A week ago, I had never played Swing, now I’ve got a start. The reality of learning something new keeps the vision of playing more complex in the future in sight, and the path to there is sure to be full of as yet unseen surprises.
[Crab Canon]
Review – Newzik
Today’s practice was done using a new tool. It’s one I’ve known about for a while and had briefly looked into before, but following a conversation with Devi during the week, I decided to give it a proper try. I needed a way of easily making annotations, that then can be changed or removed, as I’d like to take the learning notes off, or at least hiding them, once I’ve mastered a piece. Having a way of organising pieces according to where they are in my practice schedule would also be helpful. I’m working on software to do that, but at the rate I’m currently progressing, I may well be up to playing the Waldstein sonata by the time I’m finished.
So I’m using a piece of software called Newzik, a pdf viewer designed for musicians to show scores. It runs on iOS devices, both iPhones and iPads, and there is a related website that can be used on a Mac or PC to organise your materials. I haven’t found anything about running on Android devices, and it seems that they have gone all in on the iPad for at instrument use. This suits me fine, but it may be a limitation for others; after all, iPads are quite expensive.
Newzik itself is US$24.99 for purchase outright, or US$49.99 a year for their premium subscription. You might be wondering why the subscription is the more expensive option; it’s because you get all the extended features if you go premium.
I used the web interface to set up my music. Once you have an account, you can just upload PDFs of your music and organise them. They then appear on your iOS devices without any further steps. If you only have printed scores, Newzik is working on a solution. Premium users get access to LiveScore, a machine learning service that can turn PDF files into MIDI and MusicXML files, which can then be used in DAWs and scoring software such as Dorico.
The PDF conversion is provided by Maestria, an Optical Music Recognition tool that has been trained to understand scores. It doesn’t matter if the PDF has been generated by scoring software or if it is a scan of printed music; Maestria will try to convert it to digital form. I’ve had mixed success. With a PDF I generated in Dorico, it got all the notes correct, but there were slurs and dynamic markings missing in some places. These can be fixed by bringing the MusicXML file created into scoring software.
You can use Newzik with a page-turning pedal to control the iPad and step through your score at the piano. If you don’t have a paging pedal, there is another way. Premium Newzik lets you use facial gestures to control it. The software will respond to winks or mouth movement. I found it reasonably reliable, but you probably wouldn’t want to sneeze while playing a concert.
If you want to try out some music stand software that has some interesting additional features, you can get Newzik on the Apple App Store; there’ll be a link in the show notes.
https://newzik.com/en/
[Crab Canon]
Closing
Well, that’s it for this week. If you’d like to find out more about my favourite unobtainable piece, Ryan Abshier, who I’ve mentioned on the podcast before has just finished a video series looking in detail at the music.
If you’d like to contact me, email is the best way. You’ll find me at david@pianofinally.show and the website at www.pianofinally.show. In both cases, piano finally is all one word. The show is also on Facebook and Instagram and available as audio-only on YouTube. You can subscribe via any popular iOS or Android podcast application or from directories such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. I also post an excerpt and link for each episode as an Instagram reel.
If you’re learning an instrument, let me know where you are in your journey. What’s going well, and what are the challenges?
And so, until the next episode, I hope your piano stays in tune and you enjoy your time at the keys.
[Crab Canon]
Progress
The first steps in learning the new piece Blackout Blues are in this week’s progress section, along with Afternoon Snooze, the other Andrew Craggs piece.
Afternoon Snooze is first; it’s coming along nicely, and I’m working on the articulation because the dynamics are pretty straightforward. The whole piece is marked mezzo piano. The articulation is mostly remembering to stop the legato at the end of phrases, which, just to be interesting, are before the third beat of the bar in most, but not all, cases. Additionally, there’s just a ritardando and a rallentando.
The Blackout Blues piece is, for the moment, just a collection of phrases that I’ve been working on to get the timing even and the right fingers hitting the right keys. In the piece, the left hand is mostly playing two-note chords, and they’re the next target for practice.
All the recordings were made using the Kawai NV10 as the keyboard and Pianoteq 8 running on the M4 Pro Mac Mini. Pianoteq is set to model a C. Bechstein DG piano in player mode.
[Practice pieces]
