Imagination (5)

I'm finally done!

This was a crazy experience. I know my piece could have been so much better, but with everything going on I think it felt short of my expectations. Over the weekend I had a German competition, so I couldn't really practice.

Now, for the breakdown of my TED talk. There wasn't a given rubric, so I decided to grade myself based on four topics: Content, memorization, fluency, overall effect, and process.

Content: 4.5/5. As I heard from my friends, I learned that much of the math went over their head. I think I could have done less math and more application, and that way I would uncover more secrets in music which was my main point.

Memorization: 4.5/5. I know I said so many um's that I felt like my presentation wasn't really connected, broken up by so many pauses.

Fluency/Cohesiveness: 3.5/5. Again, this goes along with memorization, but I felt like I had many awkward pauses due to the pictures not loading on time. Additionally, I had to keep on referring back to the PowerPoint and this caused my eye contact to be poor.

Process: 4/5. I didn't really explain the process behind my journey but more of the secrets behind math. I'm not sure

Overall effect: 9/10. I felt like I got my point across, but there was a lot of things that I could have done to have a more profound effect.

That comes out to 25.5/30. I'm not happy with it, but I think it's the score I deserve. More problems that I faced included blanking out on the questions and according to one person, using a Trump-esque technique of dodging certain questions and twisting it.

This has been an incredible journey that if I could do again, I definitely would. I learned so much about myself and other people that these positives continue to outweigh the struggles that I faced during this project.

If I have time, I might be able to record and upload the final performance.

Edit: And here it is! I could only get the first two movements in today, so the rest will probably be uploaded Wednesday for the 2 of you that actually want to see it. I didn't get much time to practice over spring break, and I focused on movement 2 more since I will be playing that for a recital. So the pieces may sound at the same level as the last time I uploaded videos.

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Has the Genius Project changed anything about my piano skills? Not really. Has it affected my work habits? Somewhat. What I really learned, however, is the fact that if you put your mind towards something, nothing can ever stop you. I remember back in 7th grade, we had to do an assignment for Language Arts. You had to choose a quote and explain its meaning. I don't remember the exact quote, but it went something like "Taking the first step is half the journey" (it was NOT Lao Tzu's quote). Before I thought that this quote would never really apply to me, but this project really led me to believe it. The assignment was the first push, but everything else was really a natural "hike," not influenced by any outside factors.

Even though the time I have for piano is slowly dwindling due to schoolwork, it was pure joy to see what it was like to feel "younger" again when it was more of a hobby.

This week I commented on:

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Week 3 Progress (Vlog)

This week was definitely a lot better.

I got to practice a little more from a decrease in workload in school, but definitely not as much as I would have liked.

Is six weeks still a reasonable goal? I still don't know the answer. My original goal was to play both parts of the piece, the orchestra and solo part. I think this is definitely unreasonable, so the day before the TED talk my piano teacher and I will play the two parts together for the 1st and 4th song. For the 2nd and 3rd song, I hope I can get my grandmother to sing along with me which is what my piano teacher recommended.

I also haven't memorized the piece yet (which is obvious from the annoying page flips), so that is must-do for the next two weeks.

Here is the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvGKb_s3uHgIuawbXY3-8Jyoo7PB0yvln

I'll explain a little more about my progress and what I want to do in my vlog. I have some good ideas, but I think I will stick in the hidden aspects of music theme. It is an interesting perspective on music that is not really known in the world today.

Sometimes I hate technology. Of course, Vimeo ruins my life and claims "Upload limit reached" when this is my first video and it is 4 1/2 minutes long...I guess I'll have to use Youtube.

Annoying websites have to be annoying!

Here is the vlog:

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Confidence (4)

I think I'm getting better and better.

I got some more time to practice this week with the snow day yesterday and a relatively light week. However, on the weekends, I am extremely busy. This is a disappointment since usually I blocked off time on the weekends to practice.

On Saturdays I usually do my school homework and other stuff. On Sundays, though, I have to teach a math class and then have a math practice. That's from 12-8.

This week I researched the hidden aspects of mathematics in music. I have to say, I am really surprised at this. I didn't know that everything fit like it did.

The Golden Ratio is approximately 1.618. It is most common by founding the positive value of x in the equation x^2-x-1. But it's not as simple as that.

Take the Fibonacci sequence, for example. The first two terms are 1 and 1. The next terms are found by adding the previous terms. So the Fibonacci sequence is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, and so on. Divide each each pair of terms. Therefore, 1/1=1, 2/1=2, 3/2=5, 5/3=1.667, 13/8=1.625, 21/13=1.615, 34/21=1.619, 55/34=1.618. What do you notice? The numbers get closer and closer to the golden ratio! Something seemingly unrelated like the Fibonacci numbers are related to the golden ratio.

In piano, there are 13 notes in between an octave (including the black keys). A scale is 8 notes long and 5th and 3rd notes are the basis for all chords. Coincidence? Possibly, but the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence are known for occurring randomly in nature.

You can go even deeper. What happens if you divide any two Fibonacci numbers?

It's definitely a surprise that math is found in music. Now do you think math is useless?

Videos going up this weekend!

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Week 2 Progress

So I honestly think I haven't improved. At all.

Some of me wants to practice a lot more this week, because at the pace I'm going I won't go anywhere. I blame part of my lack of practice time because over the weekend I had a piano competition at Penn State. Theoretically I have a 1/6 chance of winning, but I did so bad that realistically I have a 1/9999 chance. Haha that was actually a joke. It's more like 0.

Anyways, I have the picture of the poster of my piano teacher for the Yellow River Concerto. Here it is:

If you couldn't tell, my piano teacher is the woman. You can definitely tell that she performed the piece often in China.

Video will go up tonight. I promise. Last night I tried to upload it but it said "16 minutes" FOR ONE VIDEO. No thanks, I would rather get an extra hour of sleep.

Here is the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvGKb_s3uHgLy5UumONWOLZll6OZ5Wwya

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Luck (3)

I’m not throwing away my shot just yet.

Look around, look around at how lucky we are.


There’s a million things I haven’t done, but I think I have done well this week.

I am the one thing in life I can control, however. And I’ll admit, I didn’t control myself a lot.

Some days I played a little and some days I didn’t play at all, but never did I play a lot.

Oceans rise, empires fall, it’s much harder when it’s all your call. Truer words have never been said. Usually, when I play piano, there is a strict schedule I must follow; additionally, I am constantly worrying about how I sound like when I have piano lessons.

What comes next?

I hope to become more consistent in when I practice and how I perform the piece. There are off and on days when I play really well and then I play horribly. The only way to improve on my playing is to practice every day with a set schedule and a set amount of time.

I know that that will be impossible.


Hopefully...

I’ve seen wonders great and small, but I may not live to see my glory. This “glory” I get depends on the effort I put in for the next two weeks.

If I work well, I can hopefully use these habits for my school work.

Until then, I can only practice and practice.

When my time is up, have I done enough? Will they tell my story?

In three weeks we’ll find it, but I know one thing for sure: I’ll never be satisfied.

Anyone get all those Hamilton references?

I specifically used Hamilton lyrics because that musical is one of my inspirations in the competitive field of entertaining a diverse group of Americans.

In fact, Hamilton all started from one lonely person sparking a new idea.

I can only aspire to be as good as them at the end of this six week period, but this boost of confidence will be helpful.

Also, I think have an idea for my TED talk. I want to do the hidden mathematical side of music and what that means for the listeners' pleasure and how the song is composed. I'll research a little bit of this and hopefully next blog post I can give a detailed mathematical side of music. I also want to have an excerpt of my piece to relate to the part I am researching about.

Videos going up this weekend!

A picture of my piano teacher’s promotional of the Yellow River Concerto will go on this weekend as well.

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Week 1 Progress

Get your seat belts ready, ladies and gentlemen, because this will be a bumpy ride!

A VERY bumpy ride.

So I recorded the piece and everything went okay. I didn't practice before the piece to mimic the actual conditions of playing this at a concert. That was a big mistake.

Oh well.

If you hear slight pauses, that's probably me turning the page since I had no one to turn pages for me.

Also, if you hear weird notes, I probably played them wrong. Be ready for LOTS (and I mean lots) of weird notes!

Here is the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvGKb_s3uHgIHnyJkKQt_45AtCbgK_KIH

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please comment!

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Failure (2 + Interview)

I failed.



It’s definitely a hard experience with failure. The four pieces didn’t go as I expected them too.

I feel like I rushed a little too much.

Instead of taking one week to slowly build up the muscle memory for each hand, I started putting my hands together on around the fourth or fifth day.



As any pianist knows, this is a BIG mistake. A mistake that could really determine the fate of the piece. One week for playing hands separately is recommended and almost required for playing the piece well.

As you can tell, that did not happen with me.

When I was younger, I tried to take one week to play hands separately. And it worked. Some pieces even required two weeks.

But as I grew older, it was getting boring.

Why did I have to waste ten minutes playing the right hand and then ten minutes playing the left hand instead of using ten minutes to play them both at the same time?

That’s when after I felt like the piece was “okay” and not even good or great, I started to put my hands together and never look back.

That was definitely a bad decision, and it sure caught up to me.

It’s hard to go back to playing hands separately once the piece is played with hands together. It’s like taking one step back when you need to take 100 steps forward. So now I guess there’s no turning back. I’m stuck with playing hands together. Forever.

At least I’m ahead of my goal, but it can quickly turn bad if I can’t make the tempo due to less practice on each hand. Hopefully, my end result will stay the same.

I also ended up doing some research on the *second* Sino-Japanese war and the history of the Yellow River Concerto (apparently, they had two wars. I guess the second was more interesting).

I apologize in advance, but last week I gave some alternative facts (now I can finally be the POTUS!).



The Yellow River Concerto was written in 1969, but it was based off on the Yellow River Cantata.

The Cantata was written in 1939, not the Concerto.

The poet Guang Weiran was with troops along the Yellow River when he saw fishermen battling against roaring waves and singing uplifting songs. He decided to write a poem about the war and Xian Xinghai, a composer in the audience when Weiran shared the poem. Apparently, Xian only wrote the Cantata in only two weeks! He made sure to focus the piece on foreign tyranny and the feelings of suppressed people. He symbolized the Yellow River as a symbol of the Chinese people, with the waves representing anger but also resistance against the Japanese.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s wife introduced a musical revolution. The committee that wrote the piece were a group of 5 pianists, which is why the Yellow River Concerto has so many composers. Since everything was searched for foreign thoughts, the composers made sure to incorporate the Chinese national songs “The East is Red” and “The Internationale.”

After Mao’s death, however, people started to reject the concerto to forget the hard times they faced during the time period. It became known in the West when one of the composers in the group moved to the United States and continued to perform the concerto there. Over time, the concerto was revived in Chinese concert halls and today it is found in almost all the repertoire of Chinese solo pianists.

This history will allow me to convey the emotion that Weiran had in mind when writing the piece. The fierceness of the Yellow River and the motivation of the fisherman should be expressed through my playing.

I hope that only a week of luck can happen after a week of failure.

Interview

This past Sunday I interviewed my piano teacher, Cong Fan. She played the Yellow River Concerto with the Ambler Symphony. Most of this blog post was on the emotional backstory of the Concerto, so I decided to ask her about that. She said that learning the piece was not that hard and even some professionals could take two weeks to learn the pieces and two weeks to perfect it. Obviously, I’m not a professional, but she said six weeks was good enough for me to play the piece well.

Since emotion is a big part of the piece, I asked her how she conveyed her emotion. She said that she researched the history of the war and heard the pieces with the lyrics that accompanied the piece at the time. She also watched a movie about the making of the Yellow River Concerto.

Here is the movie she watched (it’s in Chinese): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRPfLfXfGXo

The difference between each individual piece is important, claims my piano teacher. She thinks that the 2nd and 3rd movement are more emotional and bring emotional contrast while the 1st and 4th movement have a more technical challenge including fingerings and phrasings.

On the original video, the fisherman are shown singing the song and using the Yellow River as a way of defense. It could have been imagined, but she thought it was better to see what actually happened.

The video she recommended me (and the people of the blog) to listen to is here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEv8lQ5XStRKFtRqnu3_aETyIpeoQYOpX

It is the original performance of the concerto with the revised piano and orchestra part in 1970 during the height of the cultural revolution.

Here is a Q and A format for the interview:

Q: Is six weeks a reasonable time for learning the piece?

A: It will definitely be a challenge. For professionals, they can practice the piece for two weeks and then use another weeks to perfect the piece. For "your" level, however, it is possible but it might not be top-tier quality.

Q: What is the hardest part about learning the piece?

A: All the songs are different. The second and third songs bring an emotional contrast, so it is definitely a harder piece to "emotionalize" the piece instead of just plain technique. The 2nd piece is a lyrical piece while the 3rd has many mood contrasts within itself. It is also a technique challenge during the quicker parts of the song. The first and fourth songs are much more lively and because of that, the movement of the fingers and the feet can be hard to control.

Q: How did you research the song?

A: I watched a documentary about the song that showed the backstory behind the development of piece. You can find it here (Link above). If you can research the song, you will understand the reason behind the cantata which is what inspired the final piece. That will allow you to incorporate the actual emotions into the piece.

Q: How did you "emotionalize" the piece?

A: I watched the documentary and a film, and what I also did was watch performances from great pianists during the time period (Link above). It's possible to imagine the scene behind the making of the song, but it is definitely better to see it on video.

Also, a poster of my piano teacher's tour is in the post "Week 2 Progress."

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Sources:

Lintu, Mika. "The Yellow River Concerto - a Product of Its Time." GBTimes. GBTimes, 20 Nov. 2013. Web. 24 Feb. 2017.
Maitzen, Rohan. Hello My Name Is Failure. Digital image. Novel Readings. Novel Readings, 26 Sept. 2016. Web. 24 Feb. 2017.
Oops Sign. Digital image. Real Success Network. REAL Success Network, 22 Apr. 2015. Web. 24 Feb. 2017.
Szep, Paul. George Washington Alternative Facts. Digital image. Scholars and Rogues. Wordpress, 23 Jan. 2017. Web. 24 Feb. 2017.

Video of me playing will come this week hopefully!

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Hope (1)

Introduction

If you can already guess from my blog url, I hate classical music.

Well, according to my 4th grade teacher, hate is a really strong word.

So let's just say I'm tired from classical music. Ever since I started playing the piano in second grade, my life has been classical music. Going to a competition? Classical music. Playing at a recital? Classical music. A fun piece to perform? Classical music.

I've think that I've been exposed to so much of this genre that classical is my new fingerprint word.

So when this project was first I assigned, I thought, "Why not take this opportunity to learn something new? Maybe romantic piano? Jazz? American pop if I'm feeling adventurous?"

I wanted to do something completely different that had close ties to classical piano. Jazz music was something I tried out in middle school with the Black Dog Band but I felt that it just wasn't right. I'm lucky if I hear ten different pop songs in a week. 

Finding the Piece

So what did that leave me?

Absolutely nothing! I ended up searching the internet for different "subsections" in classical music. Chopin is one of my favorite composers, and since he was alive during the early 1800s, I could play something from a composer in the 1700s or mid to late 1800s.

This was when I realized that this project was going to extremely boring if I did another classical piece that I really had no interest in.

Despite the obstacles, I managed to find a piece that was from a different time period and composer while also keeping some of the same elements of classical music. That piece is called the Yellow River Concerto, which was written during the 1930s and 1940s.

1930s China. Hmm...I've definitely heard of that before. But from where?

Oh yeah! History of Japan (It's amazing how many times this video can relate to real life)! It was definitely a difficult time to compose, but the piece also has amazing cultural elements during that period which only those who live in it can describe and capture into music.

Goals

The Yellow River Concerto is definitely a hard solo piece. I plan to play all 4 pieces, which means that the combined length will be 40 minutes. It seems like a lot, but I think I've got it worked out.

Week 1-On all 4 pieces, I will play hands separately, meaning that I first play the piece with only the right hand and then with only the left hand. I think I will start at a moderate tempo, slow but close to the actual tempo. Additionally, I need to research the history and background of China during this time. This allows me to convey the mood the author intended for the piece.

Week 2-Start putting hands together. I will go slower than the tempo in the first week, only because this is usually one of the hardest parts to get right. Major mistakes are welcomed in the week so I can improve on them such as fingering, coordination, and rhythm.

Week 3-Go faster, step by step. By the end of this week I want to reach the actual tempo of the piece with a few minor mistakes (meaning wrong notes here and there, pedal work, phrasing)

Week 4-Play with emotion. From the research done in the first week and throughout the second and third week, I will have an understanding of the conditions and the hardships of the Chinese at the time. The piece will have much more meaning to it if the correct emotions are produced. Since this is not a "concrete" goal, I will compare my playing of the piece to recordings of it on YouTube.

Week 5-Practice the other part. Since this is a concerto, there is supposed to be an orchestra playing as well. However, I only have one piano. The book I have does offer the combined orchestra part as a separate piano, so I plan to play that and then "combine" it with my solo piano part.

Week 6-Record, record, record! I want to have my version up on YouTube with memorization preferred which will come with the weeks of practice. I consider my goal "done" once I am satisfied with my recording compared to ones from more famous piano players.

I guess I should be practicing right now.

For each weekly blog post I'm going to record what I have done so far to help you, the reader, and I get a sense of where I'm at compared to where I wanted to be at the time.

I know it's going to be hard, but I hope it all works out in the end. Hope and motivation is something I'll really need at the end of the day to help me move forward. If not, I'll just fall apart. The good thing is that I can't wait to start playing.

I can only hope for the best, I guess.

Sources:

Fingerprint Word. Digital image. Slate. Slate, 11 Sept. 2014. Web. 14 Feb. 2017.
History of Japan. Dir. Bill Wurtz. YouTube. YouTube LLC, 02 Feb. 2016. Web. 14 Feb. 2017.
Music Practice Flowchart. Digital image. Pinterest. Pinterest, n.d. Web. 14 Feb. 2017.
Yeah Um No. Digital image. Vermont Clothing Company. Vermont Clothing Company, n.d. Web. 14                  Feb. 2017.

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