Skip to main content

Hand Pain

My plan for today was to post about my scales breakthrough. I've actually already written the post; the only thing missing is the videos to demonstrate how fabulously I'm playing the D major and B harmonic minor scales.

Alas, yesterday at work, I was having a lot of hand pain while typing. This happens on a semi-regular basis, and it's weird--I don't have (or I don't notice) any hand pain at the piano, but at times it's almost impossible to type at work because of the aching in the back of my right hand, mainly from just above the middle of my wrist up to the bases of my fingers.

Last night I sat down to practice, and ... it wasn't happening. At least not to the degree I'd planned. I ended up doing a good bit of left-hand work on the "Mad Chase" section of Chopin, as well as some review/repetition on the stride section of Bare Necessities ... and that was it. I wasn't going to touch Maple Leaf or the Bare Necessities ragtime section with my hand feeling like it did.

(I worked pretty hard on the first page of the Bare Necessities ragtime "A" Tuesday night, so I'm kind of wondering if that contributed to the problem. It requires a lot of hand-stretching, and maybe I shouldn't have gone at it so hard for my very first practice of this new section.)

Anyway, instead of practicing piano, I poured myself a glass of wine, iced my hand, and watched "Devil at the Crossroads," a Netflix documentary on Robert Johnson, while sitting under a mountain of cats.

It wasn't a bad evening after all.

My hand still feels a little achy this morning, so I'm going to try to limit my keyboard time at work and do some hard-copy editing that I've been needing to do. And hopefully, I'll be back at the piano this evening.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...

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...

Feb. 9 Practice

My February 9 practice was short and sweet. I worked only on the Liszt, playing in rhythms. Do you know how hard it is to play a piece in rhythms when the LH is even and the RH is all over the place, with 2-against-3 and later with 4-against-9? Don't worry--I'm not trying to be impeccably exact when I'm doing rhythms. And I've discovered what a *rut* I've gotten into with the Liszt. It's so beautiful, and part of me is content just to play it through, again and again, and be done with it. But rhythms are forcing me to look at the seamy underside, at the 0's and 1's that make this piece what it is. And it's not an altogether pleasant experience. But it's waking me up. The beauty of this piece has lulled me into a sort of sleepy complacency when I play it. I think that's why Deborah said not to play the piece through a single time this week. It is so tempting to just play it through and listen to the beautiful music. But when I do that, I'm...