Music for studying mentally

[elephant]

Starting two years ago, I played the piano with a teacher for about ten months. Then I moved to a new town, and the followong year I played only very irregularly.

When I write this, I have not touched a piano for six months, but all this time some part of me has been thinking, wondering why I started playing, why I stopped, and somehow awaiting the day I feel ready to reapproach the piano.

But please excuse all these words…

What I´m after is some good music for studying without a piano or any other instrument except for my head. I would like:

-Pieces suitable for listening to, slow enough for me to follow all the notes with my head, simple enough for me to analyze and get a comprehension of everything going on harmonically.

-Printed music – it must be very basic, so that I can play it using my inner ear, but preferably considered suitable as an object for harmonic and structural analysis.


Any suggestions?

[elephant]

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[mound]

Do you not have access to a piano? Mental practice requires envisioning the movements your hands/fingers/wrists/arms are making. If you don't know, through actual practice and lessons, what those movements are going to be, then mentally practicing is going to be impossible.   If you do have a piano, stop making excuses and start playing again! If you don't well then.. Not sure.. But specifically to what you asked, perhaps the Bach 2 and 3 voice inventions/sinfonias would be good. You can listen and read the score and try to mentally seperate the voices. Then you can read the score and sing the voices. There is enough harmonic depth to these pieces to keep you busy for a while.

but seriously.. get a piano and start playing

[Fugue]

indeed, you should get to a real piano and start practicing! Mental practice, unless you Gould, can only go so far. But in the way of peices, you could try Ravel's prelude (the single prelude, not the one from his suite). Its a fairly slow piece (quarter to 60) with very simple, but not quite tonal, harmonies (as in a C# seven chord in a e minor context).