Skip to main content

Monday, August 7

Yes, it has been a very long time since my last practice.

I worked for about 70 minutes tonight. Did the usual warmups--my, but those scales and arps sounded good! I flew through two sets of each, worked on Suzuki for about two minutes, and moved on to the fugue.

I kid you not. I played my six and a half measures from memory, perfectly, five times in a row. After five times I started to make little mistakes here and there ... but five times! I think I kept replaying it because I didn't believe my ears.

I worked on two and a half more measures tonight. I now have nine measures of the fugue. The material I worked on tonight wasn't quite as difficult because one of the voices steps out for a short while, and I'm only working with two voices instead of three. But even when the third voice comes back in, it's not too bad.

I played those nine measures through about fifteen times. They sounded OK the first time, pretty good by the tenth time, and great by the fifteenth time.

Then, since my husband is home for the first time since early June, I asked if he'd like to hear the Liszt. (That's code for, "Hey you. Listen to this. Now.") I played it through. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't any worse than what I'd played for Deborah last Wednesday. I was thrilled that I didn't seem to have "lost" anything in the days I haven't practiced. I'll spend more time actually practicing the Liszt tomorrow.

Why haven't I practiced? I had piano on Thursday afternoon, then left Friday morning for a (piano-less) retreat and didn't get home until Sunday evening. Then the Hubster came home shortly after that, and I wasn't about to practice piano when I had a Hubster at home for the first time in months. That was yesterday. So tonight's my first practice since Thursday.

It was a good practice, not very long, but productive and ego-boosting.

Comments

Julie said…
Thiis is awesome
10:52 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eureka! Secondary Dominant!

I am such a nerd, and I love being a nerd! Today I was working on Section 5 of You Are My Sunshine, specifically on getting this section up to performance level. In other words, I was practicing being a performer , not an arranger . But then, of course, I came up with another idea. I had just played the delicate sixths and descending rag rolls of "when skies are gray" (I chord) and then moved to the parallel octaves of "you never know, dear" (leading to  IV). The shift sounded abrupt to me. Harsh. It needed something. It needed musical WD-40. Something to ease the hinge between textures. And then I stumbled upon it! Right before moving to IV, I can slip in a V7/IV — a secondary dominant! So I tried it, and it sounded so good that I actually yelled "Secondary dominant!" out loud in my house like I was Archimedes discovering water displacement in the bathtub. It's such a small thing. One little chord. But it smooths that transition, leaning the harmony ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Rusty Lock and Key

I'm in a room. There's a door in front of me. On the other side of that door is a whole world of adventure and imagination and joy and delight, but for the moment, I'm locked in this gray little room. The door itself has a lock that is all rusted. I've tried to open it in the past, but I've never gotten very far. Sometimes I try to scrape the rust off the lock. I also have a rusty old key that I occasionally try to polish. Each time, after I've made a little progress, I'll put it into the keyhole in hopes of opening the door. It turns a half a millimeter or so, but the brief excitement at my progress dies quickly when I realize, once again, the lock isn't opening. I set the old key aside, and from there I can forget about the door, the lock, and the world outside, for months—years, even. But then something happens—I hear birdsong, or I catch a glimpse of color—and I pick up the key and start picking away at the stubborn rust. That dark little room is my ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ode to Joy Day 3: Patterns, Shapes, and Short Breaks

As I work through Rebecca Bogart's Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge , I'll be posting more extended updates here on my blog. Days 1–3 Day 1 was analysis, listening, and generally scoping out the territory of the music . The road trip to Florida last week turned out to be Day 1, even if I didn't label it that way at the time. Day 2 was fingering and the start of my first "batch": measures 0-7 (intro), 8-15 (Section A), and 16-23 (Section A'). Day 3 (today) was about recognizing patterns and continuing work on Batch 1. Batch 1: Intro, A, A' The intro isn't difficult, and it will likely be one of the two easiest sections in this piece. Still, the syncopation is a little tricky, so I took some extra time with it. I've already memorized it, as the chord progression is pretty straightforward and the melody is just a single line (no harmony notes). There is one big augmented chord at the end that required some focused work. Sections A and A' ar...
Post a Comment
Read more