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

Rethinking Bare Necessities

Today's breakthrough moment (there are actually two of them) focuses on "Bare Necessities." As you'll remember, I discovered Jonny May's arrangement back in early March and immediately decided to learn it. I printed out the music, started the course, and proceeded to learn the stride section, posting a few videos of my progress. Ha. I bet those videos make it look like I was making progress. I guess I was ... but not really. And I realized something this weekend that I hadn't before: Because I was thinking of "Bare Necessities" as a "fun" piece, I wasn't practicing it seriously or diligently. I wasn't treating it as something I wanted to master. This mindset might work with an easier piece, but this arrangement isn't easy. The result: despite a little progress at the outset, I wasn't moving forward. I was stalled. Breakthrough #1 The first breakthrough was realizing that if I truly want to learn this piece and play it well,...

March Goals Recap/Looking Ahead to April

It's April 1, and time to revisit the goals I set for last month. I practiced a total of 50.45 hours in March, averaging 1.62 hours (or just over an hour and a half) per day. Realistically, I practice about 45 minutes to an hour a day on weekdays, and I usually get at least one longer practice (or multiple shorter practices) in on one or both days of the weekend to bring the average up. CLASSICAL GOALS Chopin, F Minor Nocturne March Goal: Have entire piece by memory and performance-ready. I have about 90% of the piece by memory, but I still have some work to do before it's performance-ready. The only two sections that I don't quite have are "The Agitation" and the "stretto" section with the seventh chords. I'll work on both this week and will have them both memorized before the weekend. April Goal: Finish memorizing, and polish, polish, polish! My focus now is really on phrasing and dynamics. I have the notes down, even in the difficult passages. Fro...

Maple Leaf Rag Breakthrough

Oh, Maple Leaf. Where to begin? At the Beginning I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I learned the A and B sections of Maple Leaf Rag back in the 1990s. I can’t tell you if it was early, mid- or late 90s, but it was during those 10 years after I’d graduated college, when I was playing a good bit of piano but not taking regular lessons from anyone. I don’t remember teaching it to myself at all. I just know that, at some point, the first half of Maple Leaf Rag was part of my two- or three-song repertoire of pieces I’d be able to play by memory over the next 25 years. It was always sloppy and I knew it, but people loved it, and so I played it if there was ever a piano around. Back in January, I decided to properly re-learn those two sections, and to finally learn the C and D sections of this wonderful piece. I worked on these over the next month or two, learning (and-relearning) the notes pretty quickly ... but it took time to memorize, and also to get everything to tempo surpassing a...

Picking Up the Pieces

Search This Blog