Picking Up the Pieces

I got a new piano bench this weekend. It's an adjustable bench, and I'm hoping to have it for a long, long time. It replaces the kitchen chair, which replaced my old piano bench, which I'd used for 30+ years. So I'm a faithful piano bench owner, I am. I didn't get to practice this weekend, so I was looking forward to tonight's practice session using the new bench (which I've named Gilbert). Sure, I planned to practice my Shostakovich ... but I also planned to experiment with the new bench. My old bench was too high. The kitchen chair, obviously, was too low --plus, it wasn't flat, like a piano bench should be. I would get a backache before I ever made it through my warm-up scales. I started with the bench low and practice for a few minutes. Backache. I moved it up a bit. Backache. Moved it up a little more. Backache, but not quite so bad. Finally I found a good height and practiced for a half-hour before the sleepies started to take over. Then I compared...

I am in a serious musical funk. Negative, negative, negative self-talk galloping through my brain. All though my lunchtime practice session today. All through my lunchtime practice session yesterday. Here’s what the negative little voice was saying: "For someone so supposedly talented as you, who has worked as hard as you have at piano, you’d really think you wouldn’t suck as much as you do." OK, I was going to make a list of everything that little negative voice was saying, but really, that’s pretty much what it’s saying right there. Granted, I know I’m coming back to piano after a nine-month “fallow period.” I’m not in the pianistic shape I was in before. Deborah and others have said that fallow periods are necessary and good. That’s fine. But I think back to what caused the fallow period. It was basically a thought similar to the following: "For someone so supposedly talented as you, who has worked as hard as you have at piano, you’d really think you wouldn’t suck as ...

I got carried away today—carried away into a wonderful state of consciousness where I lost all sense of time and just enjoyed being enveloped in the music. That tends to happen when I find myself with a grand piano, a Baptist hymnal, and a big, empty room with excellent acoustics. Actually, it doesn’t. I’ve been practicing at that same grand piano at that same Baptist church at lunchtime for a couple of years now. Rarely have I let myself lose track of time. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I know I need to be back at work by a certain time because if I’m not, I’ll have to work later than planned. Who wants to do that? Not me. Today I worked on a very tiny part of the Shostakovich , practicing for mastery of that one little tiny part. Spent a good half-hour or more on three not-very-complicated measures. Dug into the music, picked away at the layers, drilled in rhythms, and in the process played those three measures probably 60 or 70 times. That’s the way I like to practice. That ...

Here goes. I still have pinky problems. Not good. I feel like my poor hands are atrophying. I've been playing piano quite a bit at lunch, but nothing too difficult. Mostly I've been improvising new-age versions of hymns in the style of Jeff Bjork , David Nevue , etc.--not my favorite kind of music, but an unbelievably easy style to play. I really missed my calling as new-age Christian music pianist. Really. Of course, I'm only 39 ... it's not like I'm on my deathbed. It's just a little depressing that I'm improvising the same old crap since the early 1980's. (My style is crap--not the hymns themselves. At least not most of them.) Truth is, I've played new-agey, beautiful and relaxing renditions of classics like "The Old Rugged Cross" and "In The Garden" for years. It's music I grew up to, so it's in my blood. Show me a hymnbook arrangement and I'll crank out a beautiful solo-piano rendition faster than you can say ...

I'm going to practice. Now. I really hope I don't have to commandeer the sanctuary, Jack Bauer style, from the Organ Lady. Seriously. Jack and I are both English majors who were born on February 18. Don't mess with the likes of us. And don't get between me and my piano.

Pretend this is a left hand. See those red arrows? I put those there to show where my pinky is hurting. It's at the joint between the intermediate phalange and the proximal phalange. It has definitely helped to lay off piano for several weeks. Massive doses of ibuprofen have helped, too. Today I practiced, just a bit, before the Organ Lady came in. The pinky didn’t hurt too much. At this one point, however, I had trouble even lifting my pinky (the circled numbers are the fingers). Note that the pinky holds down the G, then picks up and presses it right back down. My pinky doesn’t want to pick up, much less press back down. It would rather just stay down. This could, of course, be due to lack of practice. I’m hoping it is. Many thanks to my favorite arpeggist for pointing out that the IMSLP site is alive and kicking.

On weekdays, the Organ Lady haunts the halls of the stodgy Baptist church on the corner of First and Main. She's not the organist for this church, but she practices there. She wears shorts and a t-shirt, regardless of the weather. She's lonely. She's friendly, but only to certain people (or so I've heard). She's always very friendly to me. I think it helps, in this case at least, to be a Bach nerd and a half-decent pianist. She was haunting the halls again today. I didn't know that this morning, when I got a wild hair and decided I would practice on Xan the Grand at lunch. For my faithful reader, you may remember that Xan the Grand is the old Steinway grand at the stodgy Baptist church on the corner of First and Main. I hadn't visited old Xan in ages. It was time. So, shortly after 1:00, I braved the frigid winds and walked the block to the church. "Please, Organ Lady," I thought. "Don't be practicing today. I really want to spend some qua...

OK. Not quite a year. But almost a year. Since I've posted anything on this blog, that is. It's been a little less than a year since I've played George. And Thuddy. And Xan the Grand. My job swallowed me. I'm still somewhere in the bowels of it. Development season, with its 60-hour weeks, it coming to an end, and support season, with its 60-hour weeks, is beginning. One of the major differences between the two seasons: during development season, we work until the work is done; during support season, we show up at a pre-scheduled arrival time, take a required one-hour lunch break, and don't leave until a pre-scheduled departure time. Here are my hours for support season (now through April 15): Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday: 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. The hours are long, but we're forced to take lunch breaks. I don't think I took a single lunch/piano break during development season. I worked...