Skip to main content

Now the Fun(?) Begins!

As I mentioned in my last post, my piano teacher (Deborah) said it's time for me to start putting my hands together on the fugue.

Sigh. I was afraid of that. And it sounded so nice hands-separately.

But first ... she said to pick out the section I considered the most difficult, and to start by tackling it.

OK. Not an unusual approach to learning something.

So I picked out measures 17-19. It's physically impossible for me to maintain every complete held note in this section, and it will continue to be until I get my hand-stretching machine from eBay (heh). It's a scary, scary section for me; the paper is nearly rubbed through from repeated eraser marks as I changed the fingering and changed it back again (and again, and again ...). I hadn't done the hands-separately mega-drill session on this section yet, so that's what I did today.

Best to ease up to that hands-together thing., don't you think?

I had about an hour available for practicing. I flew through the scales, inversions, and arps (man, are they sounding good!) and went straight to the fugue.

I drilled. And I drilled. And I drilled. (I think I'm starting to sound like a dentist here ...)

The LH isn't bad in this section because it's only playing the bass voice. The RH, on the other hand (no pun intended), is playing alto and soprano, and the soprano is doing all of these wonderful musical arabesques from high held notes to lower notes over an octave down and than back up a sixth, and then up an octave to a high-above held note again. It's really very lovely.

The alto, meanwhile, is not exactly repeating the soprano, but shadowing it. Jumping up a fourth instead of a sixth or an octave. And it's a quarter-beat behind.

Argh. Just thinking about it makes my brain long for something easier to think about--like quantum physics, maybe, or advanced calculus.

Anyway, the RH sounds good. The LH sounds great. Put 'em together, and ...

Oh, my.

I think this is where the fun is supposed to begin.

Stay tuned. I'll be sure and report the moment, which may be a very long time from now, when I can actually play a single measure of this fugue hands-together.

I finished up the too-brief practice session with a run-through of the Liszt. I hate that I haven't been near a piano since my lesson last Thursday, but as they say, poop happens. And a lot of poop has been happening lately.

Stay tuned ... I've slated tomorrow and Tuesday for monster practice sessions (unless more poop happens), to make up for the missed days this weekend.

Today's total practice time: about 60 minutes.

Comments

robert said…
No, *No*, NO, Waterfall! Don't ease up on HT. HS is excelent to do, but too much and you'll have the gestures for HS drilled in and HT will be that much harder. You need to be practicing those HT gestures, which only comes from HT.

Your teacher is right in the section choice. In any Bach fugure, someone once remarked, there's always a section where all hell breaks loose. Easy to find, and a big nasty gremlin just waiting for a swat.

It's hellacious business when you're at the point you are now in a fugue, but we've all been there.

Don't stop HS, of course. But even if you just do half a bar HT at glacial tempo, you gotta keep at it.
8:18 AM
Waterfall said…
I wrote ease up TO, not ease up ON. :) I meant that I would become more familiar with that section HS (yesterday) before starting to tackle the HT today. Call it procrastination, but it felt like a necessary pre-step for yesterday's practice.

I think "glacial" sounds a bit too fast of a tempo for me at this point!
8:23 AM
robert said…
Sorry for the misunderstanding, Waterfall! If not glacial, then how about...the last Ice Age?

The Arpeggist has just decided that the best thing for improving the A-words are...scales in double-thirds. More elsewhere, soon.
9:22 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rethinking Bare Necessities

Today's breakthrough moment (there are actually two of them) focuses on "Bare Necessities." As you'll remember, I discovered Jonny May's arrangement back in early March and immediately decided to learn it. I printed out the music, started the course, and proceeded to learn the stride section, posting a few videos of my progress. Ha. I bet those videos make it look like I was making progress. I guess I was ... but not really. And I realized something this weekend that I hadn't before: Because I was thinking of "Bare Necessities" as a "fun" piece, I wasn't practicing it seriously or diligently. I wasn't treating it as something I wanted to master. This mindset might work with an easier piece, but this arrangement isn't easy. The result: despite a little progress at the outset, I wasn't moving forward. I was stalled. Breakthrough #1 The first breakthrough was realizing that if I truly want to learn this piece and play it well,
Post a Comment
Read more

March Goals Recap/Looking Ahead to April

It's April 1, and time to revisit the goals I set for last month. I practiced a total of 50.45 hours in March, averaging 1.62 hours (or just over an hour and a half) per day. Realistically, I practice about 45 minutes to an hour a day on weekdays, and I usually get at least one longer practice (or multiple shorter practices) in on one or both days of the weekend to bring the average up. CLASSICAL GOALS Chopin, F Minor Nocturne March Goal: Have entire piece by memory and performance-ready. I have about 90% of the piece by memory, but I still have some work to do before it's performance-ready. The only two sections that I don't quite have are "The Agitation" and the "stretto" section with the seventh chords. I'll work on both this week and will have them both memorized before the weekend. April Goal: Finish memorizing, and polish, polish, polish! My focus now is really on phrasing and dynamics. I have the notes down, even in the difficult passages. Fro
Post a Comment
Read more

Maple Leaf Rag Breakthrough

Oh, Maple Leaf. Where to begin? At the Beginning I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I learned the A and B sections of Maple Leaf Rag back in the 1990s. I can’t tell you if it was early, mid- or late 90s, but it was during those 10 years after I’d graduated college, when I was playing a good bit of piano but not taking regular lessons from anyone. I don’t remember teaching it to myself at all. I just know that, at some point, the first half of Maple Leaf Rag was part of my two- or three-song repertoire of pieces I’d be able to play by memory over the next 25 years. It was always sloppy and I knew it, but people loved it, and so I played it if there was ever a piano around. Back in January, I decided to properly re-learn those two sections, and to finally learn the C and D sections of this wonderful piece. I worked on these over the next month or two, learning (and-relearning) the notes pretty quickly ... but it took time to memorize, and also to get everything to tempo surpassing a
Post a Comment
Read more