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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thursday, July 13

I worked in a short practice today. Had piano this afternoon. The short practice involved the usual scales and arps, and a run-through of my pieces. It wasn't so much a practice as a review. Piano was good. She said that the Bach sounded very musical. I asked what I should do next, practice-wise--continue drilling and memorizing HS, or start HT? She said that I "shouldn't hold off any longer" on playing HT, and to keep drilling HS if I want but to begin working HT on whatever I find to be the most difficult passage of the fugue. That's easy. I don't have the music in front of me, but in the Alfred edition, it's the bottom of page two. I played the Liszt pretty well, if a bit timidly. I'm playing it with emotion and paying attention to all of the dynamics and all of that, but I'm still also trying to make sure I get the notes right in several sections. She had all kinds of nice things to say about the Liszt. The 9-against-4 is sounding much better (...
Post a Comment
Read more

I Need an Intermediate Piece

Deborah wants me to pick out an intermediate piece to start learning next week. I went to the ARCT Syllabus guide that Robert so graciously sent me and looked up all of the pieces that I considered "intermediate." They were mostly Grade 6 and Grade 7. Not intermediate enough. I looked up my Beethoven Sonatina in G, my most recent intermediate piece. It's a Grade 3--a very early intermediate. So I'm looking for something in the Grade 4-5 category. And I'd kind of like to work on one of those pieces that everyone loves to hear--Fur Elise, Chopin's Em prelude, the Brahms waltz in Ab--all pieces I learned in junior high, but pieces that I'd like to re-learn, and learn to play well , and not like my junior-high self, whose heart wasn't in the music. And they are pieces I love, and that others love hearing as well. Hmm. Fur Elise is Grade 7. The Chopin Prelude is Grade 8. The Brahms Waltz is Grade 8. Too advanced for an intermediate piece? I'll talk it ...
3 comments
Read more