Nostalgia

I have brought a “oneshot” recording of Joe Hisaishi’s “Nostalgia”! This will be the one post for it since I consider this my final recording. I ignored the thumbnail in my recs for a while until my friend sent it to me directly and as soon as I heard that opening Db major7, I just knew I HAD to learn this lol (thank you, Soap!!).

It is common knowledge by now that seventh chords make me weak in the knees so this entire piece is.. very potent stuff.. I admit this piece took me by surprise because the constant octaves were a bit of a challenge? More on that later. And please forgive me for the weird mood lighting and subsequent grainy quality of the video- I had to play in a dark room with a single light on because for some reason the fully-lit room made my camera freak out lol.

Detailed Breakdown

After the lush opening chords, the very first appearance of the melody is my favorite version of it. It’s the only time the melody is just single notes and something about the isolation of the melody in the RH with quiet supporting chords in the LH is super beautiful? The first LH chord at 0:12 is.. honestly the hardest one LOL for some reason I can’t easily break chords in that shape.. I had to really work to get the chord to sound smoother. It still pales to my RH, but.. good enough.

The octaves start at 0:32 in the RH as the melody loops back around- this is the first time I’ve had to play so many octaves consecutively, to my surprise. In other pieces I’ve played, the octaves are usually chords which are easier to play for whatever reason.. but pure octaves make note accuracy more difficult for me. But!! I think it was a great exercise for improving my octaves, so I’m happy.

I really like the phrase from 0:43 to 0:54, especially the LH; I love when the LH doesn’t move much horizontally and yet goes through several different chords in succession.

We enter the 3/4 time sig at 1:00 and the “B” section of this piece. For the LH from 1:07, this is a common pattern I’ve seen in other pieces (like The Other Promise) that I usually need to use a different fingering for, but since the tempo was slow enough, I was able to comfortably use the more “conventional” fingering. Not much else for this section.. probably the section I found least interesting musically.

At 1:14 we enter the next section, and I had to be most careful with my octaves here. Specifically, the jump at 1:20 down to the F octave and the octaves at 1:27 were the most prone to errors.. I’m used to octaves in scales, so the intervals between each octave were bigger than I’m comfortable with. But, it was very gratifying when I was able to play them all accurately.

(The LH at 1:34 exactly mimics the LH in K.K. Moody from Animal Crossing and I just.. had to mention something about it because I LOVE K.K. MOODY AND SPECIFICALLY THAT CHORD PROGRESSION)

After that, we’re back at the melody, with a spicier iteration and little embellishments added in. The LH goes ham and adds some octaves from 1:44 but those were a non-issue since I’ve played similar patterns in The Other Promise (thank goodness I learned that piece lol). I do still struggle with playing LH octaves cleanly since I tend to “flam” (thumb and pinky don’t hit the notes at the same time), so it’s something I’m working on continuously.

1:53 leads us back to the first octave melody and it’s the same thing until 2:52. I tried to play slightly differently the second time around to keep things interesting so I hope it’s noticeable.. I had some hiccups because I started getting camera freeze but no actual blunders until 2:42, but if a blunder were to happen, I knew it’d be that one lol. It’s cool, not gonna beat myself up over it because frankly I didn’t put in any extra practice for that particular jump whoops.

2:53 takes us to the end, where we come back to the chords from the very beginning, and then we’ve reached the end of the piece.

Conclusion

I spent a little under two weeks on this without breaking down any sections- I just kept playing through it over and over either from start to end or in huge chunks. Not best practice for learning anything, but I didn’t intend to make this perfect. It was a nice change of pace from all the dramatic stuff I’ve been working on, and I was pleasantly surprised by how challenging the octaves were. I can already feel the improvement in octave accuracy for other pieces, and most importantly, I feel a lot more hopeful about being able to play octaves on the inside of white keys rather than having to yank my wrist back all the way to the edges. I can definitely hear that the octaves played on the insides are not as clean in tone, but for passages with rapid octaves, this could be a game-changer for me.

When I first heard this piece, all jokes about seventh chords aside, it really hit different.. something about the melody is bittersweet and (forgive me) nostalgic. I’d never heard this piece before and yet from my first listen it was deeply moving.. It’s rare for a single piece to leave such an impact on me just from the music alone (without my own emotional attachment to the media it’s from), so I wanted to learn it and encapsulate the feeling in my own way.

All in all, it was an “easy” and enjoyable breather, with unexpected benefits. Learning this has inspired me to pick up more “breather” pieces like this while working on bigger pieces, so hopefully more to come. But for now.. back to the dark and dramatic :)