Starting conditions
It seems as if one should not begin by announcing a project, in the sense that whenever a person announces that they are doing something they are proactively pressuring themselves to do whatever it is that they said they were going to do, and in many cases this pressure actively prevents the thing from actually getting done.
They say it's because you get the dopamine boost from saying you're going to do something and you no longer need the dopamine from the actual doing of the thing, but I've never believed anything they've said about dopamine.
I suspect, at least from my perspective, that it has more to do with what happens when you discover a part of the project that you do not yet know how to do.
"I'm going to learn Ravel's Jeux d'Eau," you might say, and then you get to the second half of the fourth measure.
And the trouble is that the rest of the piece falls into place fairly well, at least to the end of the first two pages, but there's something in measure 4.5 that baffles your current capabilities and fails to yield to any of the previous tricks you've been taught, e.g. "what if you played it really really slowly?"
Unfortunately you've already told people that you're going to learn this piece, which gives you two options:
- Play it with a gigantic honking mistake at the very beginning, along with any other mistakes you may find as you continue to progress.
- Give up.
Option 3, "Learn it," is not a true option because you would have already done it.
Option 3.5, "Learn how to learn it," takes you to the extent of your capabilities. You have tried "playing it really really slowly," you have tried "visualizing it before you begin to play," you have tried "memorizing the notes," you have tried "making a little spreadsheet and doing a tickbox every time you get it right and documenting your error every time you get it wrong," and you have tried "just playing the thing at tempo and letting your intuition and/or subconscious and/or internal sense of rightness somehow make the entire thing happen perfectly."
I suppose I haven't tried "using a program to generate asymmetric chromatic arpeggios and playing those until the notes in Jeux d'Eau measure 4.5 no longer read as aberrations from arpeggiation," although I'd have to start with "learn how to program" or maybe "check to see if anyone has already created this program."
I mean, this is what we do in voice lessons, if I want to sing the G-C interval at the end of Debussy's Mandoline while maintaining vibrato on the C (which is slightly unnatural given the note's position in my register), then I gotta sing a bunch of fourths with vibrato on the upper note while slipping the G-C interval in there the way you'd drop a doxycycline tablet into a spoonful of curd rice, avoiding malaria in both cases (pun intended).
The trouble is that I do not at present have a piano teacher who could recommend something like that to me, and so I have to come up with it on my own, and I'm still not at all sure it's the right way to go because I don't have an immediate next action. I cannot get up from this laptop and go over to my digital piano and begin playing a series of generated asymmetric chromatic arpeggios, nor can I insert those four words into Google and retrieve what I'm looking for.
The other trouble is that I teach piano myself, and I don't know what to say when my students find themselves in a similar position.
And the path from wanting to do something to no longer wanting to do something goes both literally and directly through Points Unknown.
At any rate, I meant to tell you that I was writing a musical, and still am, except the third song's kind of a turd. It shouldn't be, in terms of structure and scansion and melody and chord progression and all of those other rule-following things, and it even fits the type of song that's supposed to go into that part of the show, but I'm just like blehhhhhhh I do not want to work on this, and it's because something about the process isn't working.
I'm not even sure whether it's the song itself, or the score, or whether I'm hesitating because I don't know whether the condition this song introduces is going to get resolved in the second act. One option would be to throw out the schedule in which I score the entire first act and workshop it in the Art Lab in Q1 2024 before beginning the second act, and just say "look, write your script and songs for the second act and then go back to this song and see if it still makes sense."
This seems like the strongest choice because it's the choice I'm most interested in.
(We do understand the difference between writing a song and scoring a song, right? Act I has a complete book plus lyrics and melodies for all of the musical numbers. Right now I'm working out the accompaniment, because we'll need it for the workshop. Also because this musical is written for two pianos which are played [often simultaneously] by two of the characters in the show.)
As for the Ravel, well –
It occurs to me that the reason I picked up the Ravel in the first place was because Larry suggested I learn the Chopin Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58, and at first I was all "yeah, sure," and then it turns out I was able to get much of the first four pages fairly easily except for the arpeggios in measures 14-16 (at which point I abandoned the Chopin for the Ravel, since Jeux d'Eau was wayyyyyy shorter), which may mean I should just play arpeggios of all kinds, we actually have a Lang Lang technique book that has a bunch of stuff like that, and that's a place from which I could start right now.
What about you?