I signed up for Ray Chen’s Tonic App sometime last year but I didn’t get it working for myself, possibly because I got nothing much working for myself and I focused on music theory last year to deal with the gateway Grade 5 for the ABRSM plans I have.
But I started using it to track practice before Christmas and it is handy enough for accountability there (a bit like the exercise things are on Apple Fitness). I worked myself up to the gold league a few weeks ago and it’s marginal but I might make a step up this week as well.
The part that has surprised me this is not the fact that it tracks my practice streaks (currently on 9 days in a row and the fact is, travel has tended to seriously disrupt that for me so this is really good going for me) and keeps me mostly on board there. The unexpected plus point is listening into other people. There are names I am starting to recognise, sometimes because I know that they are working on something or other. I know that we are all in different timezones.
I grew up more or less isolated doing music when I was a child. The teacher had other pupils, of course she had but we never really built much of a community. It didn’t bother me at the time and I also grew up enough in an era where I just wasn’t aware of certain things. Fame was on the TV, I didn’t know that Juillard really existed. There was no IMSLP. There was no instant access to pieces of music that you wanted to learn. I got to learn what the RIAM reckoned I should be learning. All due respect to them but not a lot of it appealed to me, especially not the Bartók.
I never really got to hear other people practising. I’m 51 years old now and I am listening to people of all ages practising pieces in various levels of difficulty and knowledge. What I have learned is that I’m not any worse than the vast majority of people. It might not make sense but I assumed that because I felt certain key skills were weak for me, the effort I had to put in to learn pieces was probably disproportionate. I no longer think this. I hear dozens of other people repeating bars, crashing their fingers on the keyboard when things go wrong, other people talking to themselves. And because they are part of a community, they are sharing information, advice and encouragement.
I sometimes wonder if this is what it would have been like somewhere like Juilliard or Curtis. I wonder what it might have been like to have the dream to go one of these places, and be part of a mutually supportive community.
There are a lot of things that I wish had existed for me when I was 15 years old. Tonic is one. IMSLP is one. YouTube is one. Instead, I had the Great Composers on cassette which my mother collected when I was about 10 years old. It was my only access to a wide variety of classical music. Even now I am thankful for it.
But mostly, I wish I’d been inspired by people like Daniil Trifonov when I was about 11. The nearest I came was Evgeny Kissin when I was 21 years old at which time I had no piano.
The two pieces of music I bankrupted myself to buy as a teenager were Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto and the Grieg in A minor.