Tuesdays & Wednesdays, + Thursday Micro-Practices

I have been dealing with a lot of anxiety lately. I've had issues with the depression in the past, but anxiety has never been that much of a problem for me ... until now. Some of it has to do with work stress, some has to do with money stress, and some is just plain old life stress. While the cost of piano lessons adds somewhat to the money stress, the escape of practice and the anticipation of the next lesson have helped me make it through these last few weeks.

I'm finding that I tend to hit a low point on Wednesday evenings. Let's see why:

On Tuesdays, I have a full day of work, including a required meeting at noon.
On Tuesday evenings, I am the leader for a combined Tiger/Wolf/Bear Cub Scout Den.
On Wednesdays, I have a full day of work, including a required meeting from 12:30 to 2:00.
On Wednesday evenings, I volunteer to teach a pre-school class at church.
On Wednesday nights, I have choir practice.

So, as you might imagine, I can go two days without touching the piano, and not from lack of desire to do so. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are like whirlwinds, and I collapse, exhausted, into bed on Wednesday nights.

Except there's this other anxiety thing I'm dealing with: insomnia, accompanied by random panic attacks as I lie in bed and the worries and cares of life race through my brain.

This morning I still managed to wake up early enough to work on some scales. I'm on my lunch hour right now, and I've already managed to have two micro-practices today:

Early this morning from about 7:40 to 8:00, I ran through my major scales and six minor scales. I also worked on Hanon, practicing playing loud/soft in a controlled manner.
For about 10 minutes at lunch, I worked through the other six minor scales and played through the Schubert coda three times at a slow pace.

I think I'm ready to go to the next section of the Schubert. Since I'm working backwards, that will be the last few measures before the coda begins.

I have a Cub Scout recruiting event at 5:30, and then my daughter has taekwondo at 6:30, so we won't be home until about 7:30 tonight. Luckily, we have plenty of leftovers for dinner, which means I won't have to cook or wash a bunch of dishes ... which means that I just might have some time for Bach and Chopin tonight!

Comments

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 ...

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 ...

The Tyranny of the Dots

In the Billy Joel documentary And So It Goes , Billy talks about "reading the dots." He didn't want—or need—to "read the dots," meaning the music notes on the page. He had developed his own rock 'n' roll piano style and, after a few years of classical training, he left the dots behind. I didn't want to read the dots, either, once upon a time. As a little kid, I had a good ear and could quickly figure out just about any tune on the piano. But in first grade, I finally started piano lessons, thus beginning my life with the dots. The Wall of Dots Between Me and Music I hated the dots! I wanted to learn them, sure, but it was so hard. If my teacher played what was written, I could play it right back for him. But if he asked me to play it from the dots, I felt like I would pop a blood vessel in my brain. It was so frustrating for my six-year-old self to have the code to a simple tune sitting silently before my eyes and not be able to crack it and bring th...

Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

Search This Blog