🎵 JJ's Piano Playing 🎹

Documenting the journey rediscovering my piano hobby.

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Project maintained by jjvanzon Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

🎯 Goals

JJ van Zon, 2022

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(See also: Short-Term Goals)

Contents

• Repertoire Building
• Performing
• Skill Learning
• Styles & Attitudes
• Background
• Further Future

Repertoire Building

• See Pieces to Play

Performing

• Performing at a local get-together.
• Eventually an hour of back-ground music at a event.

Skill Learning

Philosophy:

• Going for imperfect piano playing.
• Things may go wrong on any aspect: note reading / memorizing / technique / motor skills / expression / listening / performing
• Obtaining skills to compensate.
• Analyses may be my strong suit.
• Improvising may play a role.

Skills:

• Note reading:
  • May include simplifying musical score.
• Memorization:
  • Discovering structures in the music.
• Technique:
  • Studying motion of the body in detail.
  • Studying arpeggios and scales and such.
  • Technique good enough to not just stomp through a piece, but also feeling well and having the control to add expression.
• Expression:
  • Studying ‘color palette’ of piano sound.
  • Respecting any note / chord / sound / way of playing as welcome.
• Harmonics:
  • Working out / learning the chords of classical piano pieces.
  • Developing harmonic insight into chords and such.
    • For better memorization.
    • To improvise myself out of a mistake.
    • To improvise for entertainment purposes.
• Recording:
  • For reflection.
  • To put online.
  • For entertainment.
• Sharing:
  • Most of the things I produce I might put online, including recordings, chords and sheet music with simplified notation and other analyses.

Styles & Attitudes

• Studying by ear more.
  
  
• Styles:
  • Classical style.
  • Romantic era is favorite.
  • Baroque side-ways appreciated.
  • Solo piano by default.
  • Composers:
  • 🧡 Chopin, Debussy, Satie, Ravel, Grieg,
  • 👍 Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach.
• Not:
  • Atonal no.
  • Fast like a race not preferred.
  • Fear expression not preferred.
  • Anger expression not too much.
  • Grandeur not something I identify with.
  • Loud not preferred.
  • Singing / voices rather not.
• Expression:
  • Not loud all the time.
  • Rubato rhythm / improvised over.
  • Phrasing is something to mind, when applying expression tricks:
    • No sudden staccato, that has no context within the phrasing.
    • No sudden drop in volume, to appear dynamic, while having no context within the phrasing.
    • Context within the phrasing seems key here.
• Imperfect:
  • Imperfect playing might be what I am going for.
  • Errors allowed.
  • Improvising used for error solving.
  • Recitals are ok to go imperfectly.
  • Stress of aiming for perfection, seems to harm the quality, cramping me up. So I might just let go of that and see performing as practice, with no aim to deliver the very best performance I could.
  • Goals are optional and allowed to fail. Hopefully gradual accumulation of skill as a side-effect.
• Mixing:
  • Improvising over things.
  • Changing things up.
  • Mixing fragments of pieces, creating a sort of mosaic.
  • Leaving out parts I like less.

Background

I have had this piano playing hobby for quite some years since youth. I have had music lessons too. I have had it on a break from time to time. I am giving it a spin again, to have something to do.

I have autism and health problems both physical and mentally. That may limit what I might achieve. Things may work differently for me. I might adapt the way I approach things, to what seems to work better for me.

The music hobby may be a way to therapeutically train (cognitive) capabilities that have diminished.

Further Future

Playing in a band?
Not any time soon. Unlikely because of health issues.

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