I took up piano in the autumn of 2020 as something to fill the vast stretches of time I had during COVID lockdowns. I wasn't a complete beginner, I took some lessons as a child, then also played very casually as a teenager, I was never what you'd call a particularly committed student though. With starting it again for the 3rd time, I decided things were going to be different though, I wasn't expecting to be an amazing pianist, but I at least wanted to focus on being what you might consider a decent player.
I actually did pretty well at holding myself to a pretty strict practice regiment, I wanted to make sure that I was never simply falling into the comfort zone of endlessly replaying the songs that I already knew, rather than pushing myself to learn new ones. To this end, I got myself a piano teacher more as someone to hold me to my goals than anything else. It was him who suggested I try playing One Summer's Day from Spirited Away.
I'd seen the film a long time ago, and while it wasn't my favourite, I enjoyed it for the dream-like trip that it is. The music actually wasn't something that particularly stuck with me from the film, and when my teacher first played the piece for me, I could tell it had that Ghibli sound, but didn't recognise it at all. However, once I started learning it, I must admit that I grew to really love it, the dissonant sweetness of it is so satisfying to hear.
Once I'd learned the piece truly inside-out, I felt ready to perform at a local monthly piano recital event. I'd played there once before, performing one of my own arrangements of a song I used to listen to, and it was an absolute disaster! I'd been so nervous, I'd forgotten so many sections of the music, I felt mildly traumatised by it, and convinced that the same was going to happen again this time. On the plus side, I knew that this piece was significantly less technically challenging than the piece I'd done before, so that was the one thing really giving me comfort in the lead up to my turn.
When I got up there, I felt pretty good! Briefly introduced my piece, got myself set up, and started playing. I didn't notice myself feeling nervous, though after maybe a minute or so I could feel my leg shaking, though I was unclear just how visibly. I tried to avoid letting that psych me out and just focus on getting through. There was one part where I played a small cluster of wrong notes together, and you can actually see the person in the front row cringe a little bit at it, but other than that, I managed to get through relatively unscathed. I feel like I can see my body language change as I start nearing the end and realise that I'm almost home free.
I keep saying that I'm going to do it again, but have also been very slow in actually getting round to it, for now though, enjoy the video of it...
