piano notes (october)
Oct. 26th, 2025 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluajust a bit of this & that—
* i dusted off the Final Fantasy V Piano Collection's arrangement of "Battle With Gilgamesh", a piece i'd memorized in high school but had long since forgotten. i was surprised how fast it came back to me—i had it memorized again within a week, i think? though then i didn't play it at all again for a couple weeks, and i'm surprised how fast it fell out again—i tried playing it yesterday and could not for the fuckin' LIFE of me remember the last couple chords, whups. i'm sure there's more systematic ways to memorize stuff than just "play it enough times that it sticks"; i might investigate those if it becomes dire enough lol. it's really fun to have this back in my repertoire though (you get to BANG ON KEYS LOUD AND FAST!!!), even though there's a couple bits i'd like to polish up
* but i did NOT polish those bits up, because i instead started working on Charles-Valentin Alkan's Op 65 No 6 "Barcarolle", a piece i picked for a couple reasons: (1) i really wanted to play some Alkan and this is one of very few pieces of his that aren't fiendishly difficult, lol, (2) the way the left hand moves looks like an easier version of the way the left hand moves in Chopin's Etude Op 10 No 9, so maybe learning this will set me up a little better for eventually learning that piece?, and (3) my piano teacher seemed to brighten considerably when i mentioned Anything That Wasn't "Réverence" lmao (more on that later). (and also, yes, most importantly, reason (4): it's damn pretty!)
my piano teacher's been having me do these modified hanon exercises to focus on specific weaknesses in my technique, and i tried to keep those in mind while practicing this piece, which i think is partially working; she says she can tell i'm not collapsing my pinky as much anymore, and a couple other bits-and-bobs are looking better. certainly i learned the reach/span on my left hand is a lot wider than i thought if i'm properly swiveling my wrist searchlight-style along with it, so that's cool.
she also taught me an interesting little trick for practicing arpeggio-esque sections like what you have in the left hand in that piece: you play the first three notes, then hit the next three notes in the run all at once, as a single chord. practice it like that a few times, then go back to arpeggiating it, and it'll feel nicer. (it's because it trains your hand to think, instead of "oh we're going up and then back down again," something more like "oh we're going up and then we are switching to a new chord so we need to switch our hand position accordingly." made it a lot more efficient for me to learn those passages.)
* speaking of those hanon exercises: i had a new exercise one week where i apparently wound up practicing it wrong the whole week between lessons—i misunderstood and thought the exercise meant "keep wrists high," but it was more like "keep wrists neutral but raise fingers high," which feels very different, and i felt kinda embarrassed that i'd managed to forget what i'd been taught or mislearn it or whatever. i've had a pretty scattered month with bad sleep and a lot going on but also BLARGH
* i have been working on "Réverence", theoretically, and i have ~2.5 out of 5 pages of this arrangement sounding pretty alright. but i really hate what the arranger did with one of the sections in the middle—there's completely unnecessary repeated crossing-over of hands in a really awkward way that feels bad to play—so i've been meaning to replace that section with the equivalent section from this other arrangement instead. but soon as i start thinking about doing that i'm like Ugh Should I Open Musescore To Physically Merge These Scores Together Or Should I Just Have An Awkward Number Of Sheets On My Piano, and also, once i start comparing the two scores, i'm like Should I Have Just Learned This Second Arrangement Instead Of The First One (at first glance, the first arrangement looked simpler & some of the chords in the second arrangement looked #thicc to the point of being a little silly, which is why i initially piced the first one... but now i'm like, hngh the second looks like it was arranged more pianistically in a lot of spots—an issue i think my piano teacher noticed before i did, haha. the first time i brought in "Réverence" to her she asked several times "you're sure this is how it's supposed to sound?" and kind of scratched her head, and at the time i was like Oh Yeah I Mean There's No Non-Awkward Way To Finger This Progression Haha, but now i'm looking at the second arrangement and i'm like... actually yeah there is a non-awkward way, why on earth was i ok with the arrangement where i had to have my pinky play like five notes in a row jfc. yeah there's some thick chords in the second arrangement, but thinning out thick chords is a lot easier of a problem to fix!)... and then i get a big UGH field about it, so. i haven't done it yet and haven't bothered learning more than what i've already got, whups.
* my piano teacher asked if i would have any interest in doing something more classical, as in pre-Romantic-era, since she thinks working on something like that would do a lot to improve my technique. as it so happens, the very week she asked this, i'd been listening to Claire Huangci's album of Scarlatti sonatas during my commute, partially because i'd really liked the interview i heard with her on the Chopin Podcast, and partially because i'd been introduced to Scarlatti a few months earlier from this AMAZING video of Martha Argerich playing one of his pieces, and i was starting to get into my head that "i should learn one of those!" like, they're just really short and energetic and FUN, and a lot of them seem pretty accessible?
so i then proceeded to spend a couple days agonizing over the BEST Scarlatti sonata for me to play—he wrote over 500 of them holy jeez—before settling on k61 (moderato, a minor) and "deest" (apparently a "newly found" manuscript? in g minor). i started them today and man both are trickier than they look! and that has left me in a cross mood lol. a lot of things i'm kind of lazy/sloppy/weak about are... kinda impossible to hide with something this sparsely pedaled, and demanding this much fast independent finger movement, and all that. admittedly i'm also presently fighting off a brutal cold atm so maybe i'll play better when my head's clear. the latter's the simpler of the two, and the score's only a page long—it should be a really nice little sapphire to keep in my back pocket when it's ready. the former will be a bit of a workout but i think is totally doable by even my lazy/sloppy/weak/rusty self it'll just TAKE a bit lol. tsuyoku naritai or whatever
ETA: oh right, "Verso"—i'm still on break from playing that piece, mostly, but i do think some of the technique-building work i've been doing elsewhere has helped it—the few times i've "cheated" and played it, the right hand part sounds a lot more fluid and feels a lot nicer. as in "actually i can play it at 210bpm pretty well a decent chunk of the time" hell yeah. so progress is happening!
also, shoutout and/or critical support to this madman who listened to all the scarlatti sonatas & ranked them. i don't 100% agree with all his takes (at least, on the much smaller subset of the sonatas that i listened to lol), but i DID find some p sweet sonatas i would've otherwise overlooked and the article's vibes are good!
* i dusted off the Final Fantasy V Piano Collection's arrangement of "Battle With Gilgamesh", a piece i'd memorized in high school but had long since forgotten. i was surprised how fast it came back to me—i had it memorized again within a week, i think? though then i didn't play it at all again for a couple weeks, and i'm surprised how fast it fell out again—i tried playing it yesterday and could not for the fuckin' LIFE of me remember the last couple chords, whups. i'm sure there's more systematic ways to memorize stuff than just "play it enough times that it sticks"; i might investigate those if it becomes dire enough lol. it's really fun to have this back in my repertoire though (you get to BANG ON KEYS LOUD AND FAST!!!), even though there's a couple bits i'd like to polish up
* but i did NOT polish those bits up, because i instead started working on Charles-Valentin Alkan's Op 65 No 6 "Barcarolle", a piece i picked for a couple reasons: (1) i really wanted to play some Alkan and this is one of very few pieces of his that aren't fiendishly difficult, lol, (2) the way the left hand moves looks like an easier version of the way the left hand moves in Chopin's Etude Op 10 No 9, so maybe learning this will set me up a little better for eventually learning that piece?, and (3) my piano teacher seemed to brighten considerably when i mentioned Anything That Wasn't "Réverence" lmao (more on that later). (and also, yes, most importantly, reason (4): it's damn pretty!)
my piano teacher's been having me do these modified hanon exercises to focus on specific weaknesses in my technique, and i tried to keep those in mind while practicing this piece, which i think is partially working; she says she can tell i'm not collapsing my pinky as much anymore, and a couple other bits-and-bobs are looking better. certainly i learned the reach/span on my left hand is a lot wider than i thought if i'm properly swiveling my wrist searchlight-style along with it, so that's cool.
she also taught me an interesting little trick for practicing arpeggio-esque sections like what you have in the left hand in that piece: you play the first three notes, then hit the next three notes in the run all at once, as a single chord. practice it like that a few times, then go back to arpeggiating it, and it'll feel nicer. (it's because it trains your hand to think, instead of "oh we're going up and then back down again," something more like "oh we're going up and then we are switching to a new chord so we need to switch our hand position accordingly." made it a lot more efficient for me to learn those passages.)
* speaking of those hanon exercises: i had a new exercise one week where i apparently wound up practicing it wrong the whole week between lessons—i misunderstood and thought the exercise meant "keep wrists high," but it was more like "keep wrists neutral but raise fingers high," which feels very different, and i felt kinda embarrassed that i'd managed to forget what i'd been taught or mislearn it or whatever. i've had a pretty scattered month with bad sleep and a lot going on but also BLARGH
* i have been working on "Réverence", theoretically, and i have ~2.5 out of 5 pages of this arrangement sounding pretty alright. but i really hate what the arranger did with one of the sections in the middle—there's completely unnecessary repeated crossing-over of hands in a really awkward way that feels bad to play—so i've been meaning to replace that section with the equivalent section from this other arrangement instead. but soon as i start thinking about doing that i'm like Ugh Should I Open Musescore To Physically Merge These Scores Together Or Should I Just Have An Awkward Number Of Sheets On My Piano, and also, once i start comparing the two scores, i'm like Should I Have Just Learned This Second Arrangement Instead Of The First One (at first glance, the first arrangement looked simpler & some of the chords in the second arrangement looked #thicc to the point of being a little silly, which is why i initially piced the first one... but now i'm like, hngh the second looks like it was arranged more pianistically in a lot of spots—an issue i think my piano teacher noticed before i did, haha. the first time i brought in "Réverence" to her she asked several times "you're sure this is how it's supposed to sound?" and kind of scratched her head, and at the time i was like Oh Yeah I Mean There's No Non-Awkward Way To Finger This Progression Haha, but now i'm looking at the second arrangement and i'm like... actually yeah there is a non-awkward way, why on earth was i ok with the arrangement where i had to have my pinky play like five notes in a row jfc. yeah there's some thick chords in the second arrangement, but thinning out thick chords is a lot easier of a problem to fix!)... and then i get a big UGH field about it, so. i haven't done it yet and haven't bothered learning more than what i've already got, whups.
* my piano teacher asked if i would have any interest in doing something more classical, as in pre-Romantic-era, since she thinks working on something like that would do a lot to improve my technique. as it so happens, the very week she asked this, i'd been listening to Claire Huangci's album of Scarlatti sonatas during my commute, partially because i'd really liked the interview i heard with her on the Chopin Podcast, and partially because i'd been introduced to Scarlatti a few months earlier from this AMAZING video of Martha Argerich playing one of his pieces, and i was starting to get into my head that "i should learn one of those!" like, they're just really short and energetic and FUN, and a lot of them seem pretty accessible?
so i then proceeded to spend a couple days agonizing over the BEST Scarlatti sonata for me to play—he wrote over 500 of them holy jeez—before settling on k61 (moderato, a minor) and "deest" (apparently a "newly found" manuscript? in g minor). i started them today and man both are trickier than they look! and that has left me in a cross mood lol. a lot of things i'm kind of lazy/sloppy/weak about are... kinda impossible to hide with something this sparsely pedaled, and demanding this much fast independent finger movement, and all that. admittedly i'm also presently fighting off a brutal cold atm so maybe i'll play better when my head's clear. the latter's the simpler of the two, and the score's only a page long—it should be a really nice little sapphire to keep in my back pocket when it's ready. the former will be a bit of a workout but i think is totally doable by even my lazy/sloppy/weak/rusty self it'll just TAKE a bit lol. tsuyoku naritai or whatever
ETA: oh right, "Verso"—i'm still on break from playing that piece, mostly, but i do think some of the technique-building work i've been doing elsewhere has helped it—the few times i've "cheated" and played it, the right hand part sounds a lot more fluid and feels a lot nicer. as in "actually i can play it at 210bpm pretty well a decent chunk of the time" hell yeah. so progress is happening!
also, shoutout and/or critical support to this madman who listened to all the scarlatti sonatas & ranked them. i don't 100% agree with all his takes (at least, on the much smaller subset of the sonatas that i listened to lol), but i DID find some p sweet sonatas i would've otherwise overlooked and the article's vibes are good!
