Remember back in January, when I wrote about resolutions? Well, maybe you thought I forgot. Or maybe you forgot. Or maybe you don’t even know what in the world I’m talking about. That’s ok. I’ll remind us all. 🙂 Back in January, I wrote about making an intentional effort to play piano music again and learn some new pieces. (You can read more details on that post by clicking here.)
A few months later, in May, I posted a you tube video of a playlist by a pianist named Yiruma. (You can read that post and see that video playlist by clicking here.)
Well, the official end of summer is approaching, so I thought it would be a good time to post an update on this, because I challenged myself to learn a few new pieces of music, and by golly, over the summer, I did it!
I downloaded several of Yiruma’s original piano scores and learned how to play two of them. (Which ones, you ask? “River Flows in You”, and “When the Love Falls”. You can hear Yiruma play these on the above link.) Plus, I also bought the “King of the World” sheet music (sung by Natalie Grant) and learned that, too. (Click here to see a video of “King of the World” which I posted on a blog post earlier this summer.)
After playing those three pieces (and practicing them incessantly), I picked up a couple of my other piano books and thumbed through those pages. One book is a collection of pieces from the “Early Romantic” time period; it’s a book I’ve had since high school. And you know what’s cool? I picked it up and started playing some of those, and some pieces that used to look hard weren’t as hard anymore. The same thing happened with the Chopin book I’ve had since high school; I actually started practicing some of those pieces in the book.
It was a bit different, though, with a Beethoven piano book I bought a few years ago. (The truth is, I only bought that particular book because it had the entire Für Elise piece in it, and I really wanted to play that piece again, as I had many years ago.) A number of the pieces in the Beethoven piano book still looks challenging, and I still have many songs on my list that I’d like to learn, such as Moonlight Sonata. I like music in many genres, however, not just classical, so the list is pretty long… though it’s not as high as the mountain stack of books that I’d like to read!
I did also say in that post back in May that I’d post one of my own songs, too. Well, though I can play my own piece quite easily, and I found my old notebook with my other pieces written down (thankfully I still had it!), I don’t know what to do about copyrights and all of that. What if some random person finds the song and likes it and uses it? How would I ever know? The truth is, that kinda bothers me. I wish I didn’t have to worry about stuff like that. So I’m not going to post my own music here, until and unless I figure all of that out. I know that someone could take these posts, and any of my writing on this blog and my poetry that I’ve posted, too…. I guess I can’t stop most of it and may not be aware of it. But I think I won’t post my own music. I really do like what I’ve written and don’t want to just put it out there… not that I think it’s superb and the best music you’ve ever heard in your life. No, the point is simply that it’s mine. I think it’s wise to keep these boundaries and it could save me a lot of headaches later.
But if you happen to be a real-life friend of mine that I see in person and happen to read this blog post and if you want to hear the song, I don’t mind playing it. It’s in my head and I don’t mind sharing it. (I frankly need to get it written down but I don’t have the patience to sit down and figure all that out. When I was younger, I could have done so, but now, I’d love to just play and wish for the notes to magically write themselves!) I did record myself playing that song on my iPhone, though, so there’s that. If anything ever happens to me, you’ll know there’s a song of mine on my phone. 🙂
And just for fun… remember these? 🙂
____________________________________________________________________________________________