Skip to main content

Sloppy ... but fun

"That was sloppy ... but fun!"

That's not what one should say after flying through a Bach prelude.



This is one of my favorite pieces I've ever played. I picked it up a few days ago after my decade-long hiatus from regular practice. At first, it was as if I'd never learned it; beyond the first few measures, I was having to re-learn everything as if for the first time. But after a couple of run-throughs, everything came back to me surprisingly quickly.

A few days later, I can play it again! It's sloppy, though. And I'm going on mostly muscle memory.

So I know I need to slow down, re-learn it by memory s-l-o-w-l-y, concentrate on evenness of tone, and work my way back up to my previous tempo.

This is Bach. It could take a while.

So today I sat down and decided, "Okay. Just this once, I'm going to fly through the piece, just as if I'd never stepped away from it."

And I did.

I literally did not miss a note. My muscle memory is fully intact.

But it could have sounded a lot better.

So when I finished, I felt a little breathless, a little high, and a lot happy.

Happy because I'd just sailed through a piece I love, but also happy because my work is cut out for me.

Sloppy ... but fun.

It was both, and the process of cleaning up the sloppiness is going to be fun, too.

Comments

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