another Friday night

I had a frustrating monring cleaning the house, a frustrating afternoon editing video, and more-or-less enjoyable hour at the piano. Got the even to myself too. All's well..

I'm on the Three-part Sinfonia #7 by Bach, having plowed through an enourmous (for me) amount of sight-reading this evening. Eight  more and I'm done with the Bach Keyboard Music book! Then, I move on to volume 1 of the International Piano Music Library, which a couple of young beauties gifted me with last year.

Sometimes I try to wonder what's behind the sight-reading phenomenon - all  the tangled strands of rhythm, pitch, fingering, lines, phrasing, that has to happen all in the moment, all at once, and I know I'll never get ahold of it. Just doing the sight-reading will have to suffice. The current challenge is to keep looking ahead, to allow the notes to enter my sight while I'm playing the previous measure - not easy...

I haven't improvised in weeks, and listening to my recorded improvisations makes me want to do more of this. It's exciting, to hear something you did two months ago, off the cuff, and enjoy listening to it.

I'm hanging out in the coffeehouse again. It's not very busy, which is suprising. The Square is loaded with people, and UNT & TWU are about to open their doors.

I laid down to rest for awhile today, and thought about the 5th mode melodic minor. I used to recite these modes to myself, over twenty years ago, and while I had my eyes closed I did some of that. But then, it was easier to just see it on the keyboard, which I've been able to automatically visualize since I was 19.  So in G, this mode is spelled G A B C D Eb F G. You get G major & C minor, for instance.
But it's an enormously fertile thing to spell out every triad, seventh, and ninth chord, and start playing  chord progressions. (I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader....)

This is my first blog entry using my iPad. It's really light. Using laptops is going to be pretty old-fashioned soon.