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My Latest Lesson

This evening's lesson was about 50% talking and 50% playing. We started with scales. I played six major scales at 60, and then we did a few minors at my new glacial pace of ♪ = 50. I played them through pretty well, and I think I need to stick to that pace (or slower) for a while with these contrary minors.

Next, we did Hanon and worked on playing softly with both hands, then soft LH/loud RH, and vice-versa. One thing we are focusing on is "weight," as she calls it: how much core weight you use to get a certain volume out of a key--and knowing, before you press a key, exactly what volume you are going to get. So the focus is on playing softly and evenly. That's a challenge. If I play softly, some notes are a little louder than others, and some notes don't make any sound at all. So I have a bit of work to do.

She suggested Debussy's "La Fille Aux Cheveux De Lin" ("The Girl with the Flaxen Hair") as a good piece for working on what I'll call "softness control." Would I want to learn that one? Sure. I actually played that for a class recital in high school (10th grade, maybe?), so it's somewhat familiar to me. Of course, I haven't played it since (I didn't particularly like it then; it wasn't "show-offy" enough for my taste at the time), so it will feel like a new piece.

After that, I played part of the Chopin, but she stopped me at the end of the first page. It is going to be a while before I can rid myself of old habits from years of playing this piece from mostly memory and not paying attention to the music or truly listening to myself. I am making the simple error of totally ignoring the crescendo and decrescendo markings:


It's dumb, and I should totally know better, but there it is. I liken it to having sung the wrong words of a song for years. Even though you're aware of the right words, you sing the wrong ones anyway because that's where your brain keeps going if you don't think about it.

We're also going to be working on some theory. We're not quite going to start at the very beginning. The first chapter of the book we're using (an older edition of Spencer's The Practice of Harmony) is on identifying note names. She asked if I thought I needed that, and I said, "Well ... reading notes is kind of like reading English for me." So we're skipping that. Instead, we're moving to the identification of scales (major, natural minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor). This will be pretty simple as well, but I think I could use the review.

Next lesson isn't until a week from Thursday, so I hope to get lots of practices in (even if they're just micro-practices) between now and then! I have a busy few days ahead (including a possible road trip and a full weekend), we'll see how much piano time I'm able to wrangle.

I should also get my Debussy in the mail in a couple of days!
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