Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

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 ...