Lesson Report - Arps and Bach!

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 "the left hand is playing this part" and "the right hand is playing that part." So I'm going to do some visualization of that at my next practice.

After spending some time on the prelude, we moved on to the fugue, which I'm playing at about ♪=63. And guess what! It sounds great! Carol was visibly happy with how I'd played it. I've put a lot of effort into making the eighth notes detached and the sixteenth notes not detached, and the effort is paying off!

We didn't get to Schubert or Chopin because there was no time. I'm going to spend more time on those two this week so we can focus on them next time around.

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Picking Up the Pieces

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