Over the Rainbow and Under the Bar

Flushed with success at stumbling through Joplin's labyrinthine syncopation (if a bit like an inebriated yak, nonetheless recognizably), I decided to pick up Over the Rainbow again, which I had set aside a couple of months ago because I didn't feel I had the skills to play it with the proper speed. It really moves you around the keyboard. Now that my skills have improved I decided to take another whack at it. Will these aforementioned skills pay the bills? No, but they may get me through Harold Arlen's ballad about someone dreaming of a better place beyond a dreary little town where nothing happens.

I produced the coffee-stained pages at my last lesson, since teacher was thumbing through my Classics to Moderns book looking for some other knuckle-buster to keep me going (and I haven't properly learned the lovely Schumann piece The Wild Horseman yet--it's played entirely staccato and so far I play it as you might a bawdy lay at an Irish Wake. And when I say "Lay" I use the term in both the musical and physical sense of the word; in other words I do to poor Schumann what Wagner did to Dresden. So rather than commit a ten-fingered assault upon another composer's work and disturb his eternal rest in the afterlife, I made a preemptive strike and asked about Rainbow. We discussed efficient fingering to help enhance the velocity of my playing.

It's taken me about three days to decide I have reasons for optimism. I had learned most of the piece before; this wasn't the problem. It was playing it at speed. At this point it's much smoother and melodious than it was before. My familiarity with the keyboard has increased and I can find the positions almost instinctively. It's very cool. My calcified brain still has a few neurons firing.