Episode 11
Piano practice is something that all piano learners have to do. Unfortunately, there is no instant way of going from not being able to play to giving Lang Lang a run for his money without many thousands of hours of practice.
Practising Makes Progress
Last week, the news was that the Kawai NV10 was back up and working, Stan, the technician, had visited and done some general work on the instrument, which began working again. Although he wasn’t sure what had caused the problem in the first place, he called back early in the week to make sure everything was still fine. And it was, until Friday, that is. I practised on Thursday night and was running ahead of schedule on Friday morning, so I thought I’d get in a couple of runs through Gigue. The piano wouldn’t turn on again, and it has stayed that way since. It’s just as well that I got the Roland as a backup. You’ll hear it later in today’s episode.
Last night, I went to see Devi Mamak and the Caravan Band at the Camelot Lounge in Marrickville, an inner suburb of Sydney. Devi is my piano teacher, and she heads a small group of musicians. The Caravan Band, in its incarnation last night, had two djembe drummers, a saxophone and woodwind player, a bassist and a second drummer, with Devi on the piano, of course. The music was mostly composed by Devi, using some Indian ragas, and based on works by other composers such as Beethoven and Bernard Herman. The group was accompanied by five dancers in the Middle Eastern tradition. It was a great night, and I got to hear some music that is not the type I would normally go to but which I thoroughly enjoyed. Who knew that starting to learn piano would open up a whole new world of musical adventures?
Signing up to learn the piano means signing up for hundreds and hundreds of hours of practice at the keyboard. It really can be a problem when you are deciding whether to start, knowing that it’s going to be a long time before you can confidently say, “I play the piano,” rather than “I’m learning to play the piano”. So, if you’re being honest with yourself, you need to work out if you’re going to get along with all that time not being perfect.
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