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Guest post by Dakota Gale, part of his Notes from the Keyboard series for adult amateur pianists

Back in 1970, when my mom was 18, she composed the first section of the only piece of piano music she’s ever written.

Perhaps inspired by copious amounts of listening to Debussy and Satie, the music just poured from her fingers one day when she sat down at her piano.

At the time, she was in college in Madison, WI and in love with Robert, her first serious boyfriend. The piece starts off sweetly, brightly, a happy time in her life. The happiness shines from the first notes.

She’d taken piano lessons when she was younger, but never studied composition. She never wrote down the music, but it lodged in her hands and head.

Like mother, like son. (A drawing of mine.)

My mom graduated from college a couple of years after she wrote the first section. She and Robert planned to head to Santa Fe together and get married, but first he needed to work in construction for a bit to earn money for the move.

My mom headed south ahead of him to get situated in Santa Fe and start job hunting. A month, two months passed, but Robert didn’t show up. She wrote him letters, no response. Had he changed his mind, broken up with her?

Finally, a letter arrived. But not from Robert—from his mother. 

He’d died in a construction accident. 

Devastated, her world spun around and plans shattered, soon afterwards my mom wrote the second part of her composition. It’s a faster, darker section, an outpouring of grief after a sudden key change.

Years passed. My mom got a teacher’s certification, moved to Idaho, lived in a tipi and taught art. 

Then she went to a national ceramics convention and met a bearded artist from California. A romance followed and they got married and moved to a defunct commune outside Chico. 

Little Dakota popped out into the world not long after.

42 years later during a snowy walk in Bend.

Around this time, she composed the third section of music for her piece. It’s sweet, my mom in love again. The innocence and freshness of it is apparent. Cheery, fast and impetuous, full of expectations. 

Who knows, maybe it flowed from her fingers while she was pregnant with me? She can’t remember the exact timeline.

Regardless, I recall her playing it occasionally when I was younger. After years away from the piano, she could perform it beautifully at any moment.

When I started learning piano, I wanted to learn the piece, but there wasn’t sheet music… Until this past week, that is! 

On a rainy afternoon during her recent visit, we worked through the chords together and I explained the harmonies and sudden key changes that she’d chosen. She’d never learned music theory and didn’t know which chords she’d picked or why—all the music came straight from The Muse.

Sorting out the piece. Check out the stained glass in the background that my mom made for us—lady of many talents!

The only things missing were a final chord or two, so we played around with options before landing on something she liked. After some work, I fully transcribed the piece to sheet music—a first for me.

And so I’d like to present In Search of Lost Time by my mom. If you’re a pianist, you can download a PDF of the sheet music via Dropbox and play it! (Please forgive any newbie sheet music notation mistakes.)

Here’s a recording of my mom playing her piece, 54 years after the initial idea bubbled up from her consciousness:

The end of a special project together.

Dakota Gale

When he isn’t playing piano, Dakota Gale enjoys learning languages (especially Italian) and drawing. He also writes about reclaiming creativity as an adult and ditching tired personal paradigms in his newsletter, Traipsing About.

He can often be spotted camping and exploring mountain bike trails around the Pacific Northwest.

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Guest post by Ann Martin-Davis, pianist and teacher

‘Dum diddle diddle dum dum dum.’

How can it be that this simple tune that we all know isn’t counted in three? Yes, you heard me, not in three, but in fact in four plus two.

Try it out right now in your head – go on – and then go through all those other Baroque minuets that you have been humming for years and you’ll see that the shape of the melodies and the articulation that follows fall into the same pattern.

Now fast forward 200 years to Ravel; Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn, the Sonatine, Menuet Antique, and you’ll find the same patterns, and why? Because this is how it’s danced.

Learning the dances of the Baroque period doesn’t just sort out your understanding and playing of these composers, but it can inform pretty much everything else dance related that you might be involved with.

I’m with the dancer and historical coach Chris Tudor, and I’m joined by harpsichordist Sophie Yates, and Bach specialist, Helen Leek. We’re here to learn some of the basics and after intros in our ‘comfortable clothing’, we’re warming up with a simple hand held chain called a linear carole.

Caroles, or carols as we now call them, always used to be danced and sung, but at some point we lost the dance element. The origins go way back to the ancient Greeks and to the choros, or circular sung dance. Remember the dancers on Achilles’ shield in Homer’s Iliad? The magic of the shield creates a moment of escape from the pressures of reality and of the battle; I too quickly forget my parking battle off the Euston Road and settle into the conviviality of it all.

Next up is a renaissance dance, the Branle, which Chris tells us is a surreptitious way of introducing some of the steps to a minuet. We take one step to the right, close, then one step to the left and over with the right. Always rotating clockwise as we don’t want any negative energy.

We make swift progress and then I drop the bomb.

‘How about a Courante?’

Chris grimaces a bit and at this point I suddenly have a flashback to a grade exam, where I galloped through a Bach Courante and landed with a grateful ‘ta dah-like’ placement of the final ‘G.’

Sophie steps in and tells me that the Courante was fast in the Renaissance, but by the time J S Bach got busy with it, the metre had moved to 3/2 making it one of the slowest of all of the Baroque dances. She continues, ‘it could be apocryphal, but gossip colomnist in Chief in Versailles, Titon du Tillet said it slowed down because of Louis XIV’s long-toed shoes, meaning an extreme turn-out was necessary.’

So the Courante gets us talking about the ‘cadence’ of a dance which can relate to two ideas. We have cadence, as in the cadence of your voice, the qualities of the dance (a Courante has a noble and stately quality), but there is also the exploration of the cadences in the music and how these are going to relate to the cadences in the dance.

This is blowing my fuses now, so we all agree it’s time for coffee…

‘Dancing with Bach’, hosted by Ann Martin-Davis, with Chris Tudor, Sophie Yates and Helen Leek is a one-day workshop for pianists exploring the dance forms familiar to Bach that he used in his Partitas, Suites, and throughout his other collections of keyboard music.

Saturday 22nd February at St Mary-Le-Savoy Lutheran Church, London WC1H 9LP

Find out more here

Bring your dancing shoes!

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Guest post by Charlotte Tomlinson

January 2025 will mark the 3rd anniversary of the Oxford Piano Weekends, and the thirteenth weekend. I can hardly believe that what started on the back of an envelope in late 2021, has developed into such a fixture in the piano course market that pianists return again and again.

We started in 2021 with the legacy of Covid and all the social and musical anxiety that came with that. It was essential to find a way of getting people to know each other quickly so I devised a mini workshop to be held before supper on the first evening, in which people get into pairs to chat about a particular musical and performing issue. Within a short space of time, the conversations are animated, social anxiety disappears and people feel relaxed and comfortable. By the time we start the evening session, a united and supportive group has already established itself.

It can’t be underestimated how important this group bonding is. A good number of pianists who come on the Oxford Piano Weekends struggle with performance anxiety and physical tension, and feeling emotionally safe within the group is essential to move through these issues.

I used to have crippling performance anxiety and now I really enjoy performing, something that would have been previously unimaginable. The weekends have helped me immeasurably.

Right from the start, Oxford Piano Weekends have had a wonderfully diverse pool of advanced and committed pianists taking part: bankers, medics, piano teachers, lawyers, choir directors, pianists returning after many years, battered and bruised pianists from a legacy of harsh teaching, students preparing for final recitals and many, many more. Pianists come from all over the UK, as far afield as Dublin, Finland, Malta and most recently, Canada.

The weekend is a chance to reflect deeply on your playing with expert guidance to take away and improve your practice.

On any one Oxford Piano Weekend, the numbers are kept deliberately low with six or seven as the ideal. Each pianist has twenty minutes teaching within the group, in rotation over the weekend, and it’s extraordinary how much can be packed into that short time. I listen to each pianist to see what they need, and then make sure that my response is valuable not just for the pianist themselves, but also for the group. Participants learn so much from watching and listening to each other, seeing their own challenges reflected in other pianists and then observing that pianist transform in front of their eyes.

A truly wonderful weekend. Charlotte is so caring, and teaches with such empathy, understanding & musical knowledge and expertise.

And what’s more important than the meal times? Homemade, tasty, nutritious food with free flowing wine in the evenings, the now-famous homemade flapjacks for coffee breaks, all provide a wonderful back drop for lively, stimulating conversations among like-minded people. They truly are full and rich weekends, and I, for one, come away at the end of each one feeling exhilarated and all ready to go for the next one.

Next weekend: January 17th -19th 2025

For more details go to: https://www.charlottetomlinson.com/oxford-piano-weekends

Watch a podcast with Charlotte Tomlinson and The Cross-Eyed Pianist

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In this episode we discuss gesture in piano playing – when it’s useful and when it’s most definitely not!

Find all previous episodes here

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