Oh Look--a Piano Posting

I suppose I should update my avid readers, if such creatures exist alongside other xenological beasts such as sasquatch and nessie, on my piano progress.

I'm currently working on two rather crunchy nuts from my Alfred book: Little Brown Jug (tough due to the staccato sixths played in the right hand melody line and the rapid chord changes played by the left hand) and a piece called Chapanecas, aka "Mexican Clapping Song." This is the song played at baseball and Hockey games to fire up the crowd. It has a fairly simple melody line but a killer bass line, with lots of chord changes.

I'll crack both of these in a couple of days--I already have most of both of them committed to memory, but they are challenging. Corny, but challenging. I'll admit there are some very pretty parts to both of them, plus I learned new chords in the F-Major scale, which is always cool.

I'm also working on running the scales of C, G, and A Major in two octaves. This requires a different fingering than playing the scales for one octave. The ascent and decent require some thought until you get it down instinctively, which as of this writing, I do not quite. What threw me at first is that the thumb exchange--the point where your thumb passes under your fingers so you can continue, is different for the left and right hand. For example, the left hand crosses at the C key and the G key. The right hand crosses at the C key and the F key. Why? If you do not (that is to say, if both hands switch at C and G), by the time you reach the end of the second octave, your left hand has the fifth finger neatly on C--but the right hand has the fourth finger on C; you're left with the fifth finger hanging out there in space, like that astronaut lost during the Apollo mission which NASA covered up back in the seventies.

So this is page 121 of 140 of Alfred's first volume. I found an on-line yahoo forum of people studying from Alfred. Some have teachers while others do not. Most of these people apparently take about nine months to a year to work through this book. I told my teacher this and she said yes, this book is meant to take a year but she likes to push her students as fast as she can. I don't mind it at all, I think I'm absorbing the information, although I'm not learning the lesson pieces perfectly. With 20 pages to go, and about ten more pieces to learn, I suspect two more months at the latest will find me at the end of Volume One.

So what about Over the Rainbow? I'm continuing to polish it and have learned 2/3rds of it. I'm going to finish it up a bit at a time and record it and see if it's possible to attach a sound file here.