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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ode to Joy Day 3: Patterns, Shapes, and Short Breaks

As I work through Rebecca Bogart's Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge , I'll be posting more extended updates here on my blog. Days 1–3 Day 1 was analysis, listening, and generally scoping out the territory of the music . The road trip to Florida last week turned out to be Day 1, even if I didn't label it that way at the time. Day 2 was fingering and the start of my first "batch": measures 0-7 (intro), 8-15 (Section A), and 16-23 (Section A'). Day 3 (today) was about recognizing patterns and continuing work on Batch 1. Batch 1: Intro, A, A' The intro isn't difficult, and it will likely be one of the two easiest sections in this piece. Still, the syncopation is a little tricky, so I took some extra time with it. I've already memorized it, as the chord progression is pretty straightforward and the melody is just a single line (no harmony notes). There is one big augmented chord at the end that required some focused work. Sections A and A' ar...
Post a Comment
Read more