Picking Up the Pieces

Yesterday was my piano lesson. I played through the arpeggios--all of 'em!--to warm up. After that, we moved on to Bach, starting with the Prelude. I've been working on this thing for months, and I've had the notes down for some time now. It sounds pretty good to the untrained ear, and now I'm really in the fine-tuning phase, working to have everything perfectly balanced. The scales are sounding good, and those left-hand trouble spots are not causing nearly the trouble they did before. Oddly enough, my biggest problem now is the thirty-second notes in those first few measures. My left hand eighth notes are light and graceful, but my right hand thirty-second notes are uneven--not so much rhythmically as ... tonally? The second note will be too loud, or the third will be too soft, or ... they just sound punchy rather than smooth. One thing Carol said was to imaging this piece is being played by a single hand, and think of a single line of sound rather than ...

Once again, my failure to blog does not translate into a failure to practice. While I still have days where I don't play a single note, those days are few. Most days I'm managing to spend an hour or so at old Henry. On Sunday, I spent three. After that three-hour session, I decided that three hours of practice per day would be just about right. Alas, I cannot beam myself back to 1989 or 2004, when I actually had  that kind of time. So I practice when I can. I can now play all of my pieces—the prelude and fugue, the nocturne, and the impromptu—perfectly (at least when it comes to striking the right notes) ... at about half the tempo they're supposed to be. For the next few weeks, it will be a process of diligently playing these pieces over and over again at a certain notch on the metronome ... and then moving up a notch. And playing them ad nauseam at that notch ... and then, moving up another notch. Until I can play it at my goal tempo. It's going to be a slo...