Episode 97 - Tradition

G'day, everyone! Welcome to show number ninety-seven. In this week's show, I discuss getting back to learning scales, the changing way society approaches learning music, and last week's pretty special Sydney Symphony Orchestra concert.

Progress Update I had my piano and voice lessons on Monday. Finding time to practice the piano has been a bit of a challenge lately, so progress is slow, but the singing is coming along nicely! I can now reach some notes that were previously out of my range. Our choir is more than halfway through the repertoire, and we are now doing full run-throughs of some numbers as we are only two months away from the performances.

Review - Scales I have two excellent reference books that list all the piano scales: https://amzn.to/4whjbsm https://amzn.to/48Ms6ln Instead of reviewing them, I wanted to share the approach Devi, has suggested for my practice. Playing scales straight up and down is pretty boring, so adding variety makes the repetition much more bearable. I'm focusing on C major and G major across two octaves. Aside from getting the fingering right, the main focus is on keeping a strictly even tempo and getting exactly the same loudness for each note. I'm also practising them staccato in both hands, using contrary motion, and—quite trickily—playing staccato in one hand and legato in the other.

Essay - Tradition There is a long tradition of learning and playing music, stretching back thousands of years—from the songlines of Indigenous Australians to the singing bards in Homer's Odyssey. But times and traditions are changing. I used to buy a new CD every week and chat with the staff at the local classical music shop. Today, for less than the cost of one CD, I have access to almost everything ever recorded via Apple's classical catalogue. I am curious to see what new traditions will emerge around modern music listening.

SSO Concert: The Planets Last weekend, I attended the Sydney Symphony Orchestra concert at the Opera House with Nigel Westlake's percussion concerto, When the clock strikes me, performed brilliantly by Rebecca Lagos. We also heard Charles Ives' Unanswered Question, followed by Holst's The Planets. The Holst piece was particularly interesting because it was a "Symphonic Cinema" performance. You can find out more here: https://www.sydneysymphony.com/events/symphonic-cinema-the-planets

Closing We have an extra rehearsal for a charity event next Saturday, where we will be singing A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman. I'm also hoping to check out a second-hand music score shop I found in Sydney. Contact me at david@pianofinally.show or visit www.pianofinally.show.

The contents of the podcast were entirely generated by David Reidy, but these show notes were created by Gemini.

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Transcript

Opening

SPEAKER_00 0:00

G'day everyone, I'm David Reedy. Welcome to Piano Finally, a podcast by an old bloke who's getting around to learning the piano. Finally. Welcome to show number ninety-seven. In this week's show, I'll discuss learning scales, something I'm back to doing, talk about the changing way society approaches listening to music, and review last week's Sydney Symphony Orchestra concert, which turned out to be pretty special. If you're new to the show, I hope you'll find all of that interesting. And if you're a regular, I hope you're enjoying the content too. If there is something you'd like me to have a look at or talk about, drop me an email at David at pianofinely dot show. I had my piano and voice lessons on Monday. The piano is still coming along slowly, because of the problem of fitting in practice at the moment, but the singing is coming along nicely. I can now get to some of the notes that were out of reach before. They don't sound wonderful yet, but at least there is something to hear. Thursday night's choir rehearsal was good. We're more than halfway through the repertoire, and the rehearsal now includes full run throughs of some of the numbers, which is much more fun than just learning blocks of a few bars. That's probably just as well, as we're now only two months from the performance. I have two books that list all the piano scales, but I'm not going to review them this week. I'll include Amazon affiliate links to them in the show notes, they're both very good reference works. Instead, I thought I'd share the way Devi has suggested I approach them for practice. We all know that scales are important, they form the basis of most of the music we are likely to play, including all of the music that seems to be set for learners. The real problem is that they are pretty boring if you just play them straight up and down. So adding a bit of variety to the approach makes the repetition a bit more bearable. Of course, it is traditional to start with a C major scale. I'm not sure that is the simplest to begin with, but it is certainly the most standard fingering. Chopin used to start his students with B major in the right hand and D flat major in the left, saying that they were the most natural given the differing lengths of fingers. Still, it would seem that modern practice differs. Most of the YouTube pianists tend to use C major for their demonstrations too. And so I'm back to C major and G major with Devi. I'm playing them across two octaves, hands separately to begin with, and then hands together. I'm finding it strange that the left hand seems easier than the right. Normally, especially for pieces, it's the other way around. I'm not just playing them though. I've got the fingers right, so now the main focus is on getting exactly the same loudness for each note. In other words, going a little lighter with my thumb and a little heavier with fingers four and five. This is in addition to keeping a strictly even tempo. Then it's staccato in both hands. Again, I'm meant to be concentrating on getting the dynamics and tempo consistent. This is taking some work, but I'm making progress. I'm also trying staccato with one hand and legato with the other, which is proving quite tricky. I'm also doing the scales with contrary motion. I'm finding that pretty simple compared with the mixed staccato and legato. Going back to starting each practice with some scales isn't hurting, and I suppose that I should really be concentrating them as I approach the more advanced music. The simple skills are important, and just like my note reading is improving from having to follow the scores for the choir, getting more proficient at scales will pay dividends in the long run. Tradition There is a long tradition of learning and listening to music. In some cultures, this tradition reaches back over many thousands of years. Indigenous Australians have song lines that describe astronomical phenomena with cycles spanning many hundreds of years, carrying their culture and knowledge across generations. European music doesn't go back nearly as far, and because of the development of writing, it has had less of a job preserving cultural knowledge. But it has still built up plenty of tradition. But times are changing, and tradition is not enough to ensure that music listening will keep its importance. In Western tradition there are stories of music going back thousands of years, tales involving poets and bards singing stories. Even in Homer's Odyssey, we have a bard recounting part of Odysseus' tale. I doubt that these professional musicians were the only way people got to hear music. I'm sure that many people would be able to play an instrument and sing at home for their own entertainment and that of their families. And this is how it continued, at least up until the invention of audio recording and the development of devices that could be used in the home. It was one of Thomas Edison's engineers who came up with the wax cylinder method of recording sound. At the time, there was no way of mass producing the cylinders, so each one was recorded live. This involved someone performing in front of a bank of tens of machines, each with its own cylinder. It wasn't until the popularization of the gramophone and seventy-eight RPM records that musical performances really became a take-home item. But still, learning and playing an instrument was seen as a valuable skill. There were few options for entertainment in the home, there were books, although literacy levels were quite low, but pianos and player pianos were everywhere. Other instruments were plentiful as well, and given the longevity of wood, they could be passed down to a family. Music playing was a tradition. But that has changed and continues to change. A tradition of mine, once I started to earn enough money to have some spare each week, was to build up my music collection one disc at a time. I started seriously collecting when CDs first became available. My first was a Deutsche Grammophon recording of The Planets, and I would spend around twenty dollars a week adding a new CD to the growing row on the bookshelf. That doesn't happen anymore. For less than the cost of a CD each month, I have access to Apple's classical music catalogue, meaning I can hear almost anything that has ever been recorded, including pieces I might like, but would never have purchased. Part of that tradition was to go to the classical music shop in the city and have a chat with the shop staff. It normally took five minutes or so to find a disc, but it was often accompanied by half an hour or so of discussing music. That shop closed many years ago, and there is no replacement in Sydney that I can find. So that tradition is gone. I'm guessing there must be new traditions emerging around modern music listening, but I haven't noticed any yet. Sharing a Spotify playlist isn't the same thing as making a mixtape for a friend, and I'm not sure that sharing earbuds is the same as sharing a forty five single. With the ease of subscribing to a streaming service, even the tradition of sharing around pirated MP3s is gone. Something will come along, but I have no idea what the new traditions are going to be. Maybe you do. The first of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra concerts for the year was last weekend. As a reminder, or if you're new to the show, the concerts are held in the concert hall of the Sydney Opera House, and because of the subscription, I get the same seat each time, in the main store section towards the middle. It's a good seat with a clear view of the orchestra, and not too many people needing to push past if they arrive after me. Before each concert in the series, there is a talk by someone associated with the orchestra to put the works into context. These are in the northern foyer of the Opera House, and on a sunny Sunday afternoon, it's a very nice place to sit and learn about music. This concert's talk was presented by Simon Bruckett, with the help of one of the Opera House's grand pianos, which had been moved down to the foyer. The talk covered all three of the works in the concert and in particular shed some light on the second work, the world premiere of the reworking of Nigel Westlate's When the Clock Strikes Me. This is a percussion concerto, and not the type of work that would normally appear in the series. So Simon spent some time talking about how Rebecca Lagos, the orchestra's principal percussionist, would be performing the work. The opening work of the concert was Charles Ives' Unanswered Question, which made a lot more sense after the earlier explanation during the talk. It was a short piece with lots of chromatic notes from the different soloists in response to the orchestra's question. The second work was the percussion concerto. If we normally think of playing music as mostly stationary, this certainly didn't fit that mould. Rebecca Lagos, whom I have also seen played the snare part in Ravel's Bolero, was anything but stationary as she moved between the different percussion pieces which were spread across half the stage. At the end of the piece, after a fair bit of applause for what was an amazing performance, the composer joined the orchestra on stage so we could acknowledge his work too. After the interval, there was something very different. The music was Holt's The Planets, a piece I've heard a few times. And being an astronomer, one I quite like. The piece needs a fairly large orchestra. The concert hall stage was packed, along with a women's voice choir at the back of the auditorium for the final movement. All of that was pretty standard, but there was an addition. This performance was part of Symphonic Cinema, a collaboration between filmmaker Lucas Van Verkum and the orchestra. Lucas has produced a silent film with actors Emma Thomson and Greg Wise, which explores grief and is matched to the different movements in Holst music. This might sound fairly standard, except that Lucas is on stage behind the violins and he edits the movie as the orchestra plays. So instead of the conductor and orchestra having to synchronise with the vision, Lucas adjusts the speed and length of each scene to match where the orchestra is up to in the score. It was an interesting way of experiencing the music, and it got me thinking about what we are doing when we listen. I'll talk more about that in next week's show. As always, it was a great day of music, and I'll put a link to the SSO's page for the concert if you'd like to know more, especially about the symphonic cinema process. Voice and piano lessons on Monday, and the third round of debates for the school teams on Wednesday evening, and the normal choir rehearsal on Thursday, with an added half hour for the one song rehearsal for the charity. But this week there is something extra. The charity event that the extra rehearsal is for takes place next Saturday. The performance accompanies the end of a video showing some of the work the charity does. It's three minutes of A Million Dreams from the Greatest Showman. I'll give a full rundown in next week's show of how it all went. One thing I found while preparing this week's episode is that there is a second hand music score shop in Sydney, and it's only a few streets away from where we have the choir rehearsals, and it's open on Thursday afternoons and evenings. I'll try to get there and check it out this coming week. If you'd like to contact me, email is the best way. You'll find me at David at Pianofinely.show and the website at www.pianofinely.show. In both cases, pianofinely is all one word. The show is also available on Spotify and as an audio only stream 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 or learning to sing, let me know where you are on your journey. What's going well? What challenges are you finding? And how are you managing your time? I'm finding it difficult. This podcast is mostly produced on the lands of the Darug and Gundangura peoples, lands that always were and always will be traditional Aboriginal land. I pay my respects to their elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people listening to the podcast. And so until next week, I hope your piano stays in tune and you enjoy your time at the Keys. I did get a little more piano practice done this week. After lessons on Monday, I had a full choir rehearsal on Thursday, and Wednesday night was debating, and we were the hosts once again, so two evenings were out for practice. As I mentioned earlier in the show, I've been working a lot more on scales, so I'm going to include the different versions I've been practicing. I'm still working on C song and Titans, but they're still under construction. I've included the different versions of the G major scale, hands together, concentrating on dynamics and tempo, and then the staccato version, and finally the staccato and legato version. I'm finding that really tricky. The aim is to go up with the left hand staccato and down with the right hand staccato. You'll hear what happens. The music was recorded using the Kawaii N V10 with the contact clear piano emulating a Fatsi Oli Grand Piano in concert mode. I used Cubase 15 and the Mac Mini Pro to make all that happen.