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hobbies

document updated 18 years ago, on Dec 30, 2007

When I was around 15 years old, there was one summer where I was bored to tears, and wasn't yet old enough to be able to drive and get out of the house. So I spent the bulk of my time teaching myself to play the piano.

Some of the arranged music I've practiced heavily at one point or another:

classical
- Moonlight Sonata, Beethoven
- Prelude in C major from Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier / Ave Maria
- Pachelbel's Canon in D major
- Für Elise, Beethoven
- Toccata and Fugue in D minor, attributed to Bach
modern
- Piano Man
- Bohemian Rhapsody (it's fun to pound away on, but the electric guitar solo does NOT work on a piano, try as one might...)
- Memory from the musical Cats
- the theme from Cheers (almost begs to be played on a slightly out-of-tune piano)
- Axel F, the theme from Beverly Hills Cop
- Against the Wind (too fast, it was ambitious to try this song, but I practiced quite a bit...)

In my second year of high school, my grandfather decided to be extremely generous, and bought me a Yamaha Clavinova CLP-124, because he was happy that I was playing the piano so much, and wanted to encourage me to continue. Ten years later, I'm still playing it and treasuring it, particularly because he gave it to me shortly before he passed away.

During college, I gradually played less sheet music and experimented more with improvisation, and eventually became decent at improvising through-composed (structureless) music. Currently, I'm working on fake book material, in an attempt to introduce more structure into my improvisation.