Humbled

The past week my family has done a folk dance school. I ended up taking Extraordinary Contras, Beginning English Country Dancing, Advanced Dance Band, and Longsword Dancing. All in all, it was a very fun week.

We had the advance dance band start off with a waltz and then a jig. I played keyboards for them. It went alright as far as that goes, nothing fancy. It's been eight years since I've done improv keyboard, and that was in rock bands, jazz bands, and show choir, not folk.

Well they had the New Year's Eve Dance, which lasted till about 12:30 and then a party at somebody's house who happens to have a fairly large dance floor in their house. I arrived somewhere after 1:00. They had somebody playing piano for them for the first couple of songs. I was sitting there talking about music education and preschoolers to a preschool teacher and giving her ideas for some structured games involving music or songs that preschoolers could do. They suddenly called out to see if any piano players were in the house. Since this isn't a style I'm familiar with, I reluctantly held up my hand and said that I'd be able to play, just slap the chords in front of my and I'll do it.

So a few minutes later I frantically searching through three songs they gave me to play for the first dance. Okay..., managed to hack out the chords in the appropriate rhythms, but nothing to fancy. Just straight chords.

The next one was a little better. The caller wanted Turkey in the Straw. Very basic chord structures, no problem. Gaining a little confidence and goofing off a little more as we begin it. After a while, and everyone's still dancing, the fiddler gets bored and calls out B - D major. I barely caught the D major part and starting hacking out chords in d major.

At first I thought they wanted the same song, just in a different key. Well, a few measures later, I realized that they were no longer playing anything relating to Turkey in the Straw. I was the only rhythm player at the time, no guitar, no bass, no drums. It was all me, and I don't even know what song we're playing. I just know it's the B part, which I don't have, and it's in D major, and the chords for what was previously played do not work.

Time to put the aural theory skills to the test. I get to listen to a melody which I've never heard before, figure out the chord structure on the fly and play in a style that I'm unfamiliar with. All the melody and harmony players either knew the piece or have the chops to play the song in whatever key he had just called. So here I am clunking out random chords in an effort to make it somewhat okay. It's still sounding pretty awful and my ear couldn't pull the chords out and make it possible for me to play them. I finally call out to find out what in the world I'm supposed to be playing. Well, come to find out that the harmonic progression pretty much changes every beat, and the guy calling out chord changes to me is telling me right on the beat, which doesn't help when it changes the next beat, so if anything, I was playing the right chord on the wrong beat. After the wind player who was trying to help me realized that this wasn't working, he quickly pulled out the music for me to follow. This helped tremendously, but I still had issues with my hands positions wanting to play more in G than in D, that didn't help my A7's at all, among other things. At least through the whole dance I was able to keep the rhythm going for the most part.

Finally the piece ended and the original piano player returned for the next song and just tore the piano up playing compared to whatever I was doing on the keyboard. While nobody but me and the other musicians noticed this(from a musician's point of view), it was still a pretty humiliating experience, but perhaps throwing me straight into the fire is the best way for me to learn and eventually play in more bands, and hopefully with more ease than that.

Time for bed. Blah.