Traditional piano lessons are a structured, upward march through progressively more and more difficult pieces. You learn to play these pieces so that you can pass your next exam or play your next recital without embarrassing your loved ones. The prize for doing these things is the next grade level, and lists of still more difficult pieces.
Most people (myself included) eventually quit when the difficulty of the music requires more practice time than they are willing to give. I hated exams and recitals, but (as I’ve mentioned before) I really liked practicing.
I wish someone had told me that performance didn’t have to be the point; the point can be the practice.
Nahre Sol is a pianist, composer, YouTuber, and a big fan of practice. She takes it very seriously, graphing how she spends her practice time, and giving advice on her highly successful “Practice Notes” Facebook page. Her YouTube channel, meanwhile, is filled with forays into different styles; videos in which she attempts jazz improvisations, Victor Borge-like composer parodies, and even makes a lo-fi hip-hop track that is better than a significant proportion of lo-fi hip-hop tracks.
But the overall impression I get from watching her videos is that this is someone who understands that practice does not, as the saying goes, make perfect. Rather, practice makes progress. It makes growth, and growth has no end point.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. By her own admission, the opening moments are inspired by a Chopin mazurka, but then at 0.26 she throws in some kind of flat-fifth jazzy wonder-chord that would be right at home in a Billie Holiday song.
2. The middle section, from 0.42 to 1.19, uses a left-hand triad pattern reminiscent of Chopin’s Prelude in E minor, but where Chopin’s piece evokes melancholy consternation, the triads in Sol’s piece feel more like contemplation.
3. At 1.20 there’s a floaty sequence that hints that we’re going to end in D major, but instead we end up in…no key, really. The four final notes we hear are d, e, c, and g, a set of notes that could lead just about anywhere.
Recommended listening activity:
Warming up for the sake of warming up.