and what's next

I had a good piano lesson yesterday. Part of it was having to weeks to practice the stuff (last week, my piano teacher had to cancel, she was having toothaches - she came this week and said, "Well, the dentist couldn't find anything wrong; I had a sinus infection" and yeah, I've been there and got the t-shirt, so I sympathize, and yes, sinus pain causing dental pain feels VERY MUCH like "bad tooth")

So I have achieved success on "Georgia on my Mind" and need to pick something new. I don't know whether to find another standard in one of my two big books of standards (I seem to be pretty good at playing those, and really, if I ever get to the point of playing in public, that kind of thing tends to be what people want to hear at parties and such) or whether to pick out something by Bach or Handel (I THINK some of the simpler Handel stuff I can play okay) and work on that. Maybe Invention Number 8? (That was the one featured in some ad a while back, where it showed different hands playing the two-hands part. It must be hard to coordinate two players so one plays the left hand part and the other the right hand part.)

I'm also working on a Philip Keveren arrangement of A Mighty Fortress. Keveren does a LOT of hymn arrangements. The book I have is all well-known traditional ones (he's also done some of the modern praise songs) and it turns out the theme here is arranging them in the "styles" of various composers. If I had read the intro material, I might not have picked this one, it was done to mimic Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" and I admit that's one of my less-favorite pieces and also the key changes, whoa, the key changes. This piece has, let me think: B-flat, D, A-flat, G, C, E, and maybe one I'm forgetting. So the transitions between sections is challenging because there are a lot of accidentals and I still don't know all the "turning points" of how you go from one key to another so they are unfamiliar to me.

I'm thinking one more week will do this and maybe then I do another piece out of that book - I think he has Be Thou my Vision, which is one of my favorite hymns.