Skip to main content

YAMS Update: Failure Is Information

Are y'all tired of reading about my You Are My Sunshine progress yet? No? Excellent. I will continue.

This week is recital week. Yesterday was my "dry run" recital with the Piano with Rebecca B group. Tomorrow is the PWJ Student Recital.

PwRB Performance Report

I crashed and burned.

Or maybe more accurately, I stumbled, recovered, stumbled again, and kept moving forward—which, really, counts as a kind of success. The tempo held together, more or less. (Though I'm scared to watch the video Rebecca kindly posted after the recital.) The piece never fully unraveled. But the mistakes were persistent—and oddly placed, showing up in spots that usually sound fine in practice.

The finale, in particular, went rogue. I landed solidly on a completely wrong chord at one point, and at the very end I forgot to finish on the high octave for the final downward gliss. So I ended in the middle of the keyboard, paused just long enough to realize what had happened, then tacked on the gliss anyway—a little late and somewhat out of context. Not exactly the grand finish I had in mind.

And yet, I wasn't especially nervous, and I'm not kicking myself for messing up. Yes, I'm a little disappointed that I didn't play better, but "playing well" wasn't really the goal here. The goal was to see what would happen in a performance setting. To gather information.

Failure Is Information

In volleyball, I often tell my players: failure is information. Or, if failure is too scary of a word for the littles, mistakes are information. Failure puts our current limitations front and center. Mistakes tell us where to focus. They show you where your assumptions are shaky, where your attention drifts, where your hands don't yet fully know what to do.

Yesterday's YAMS performance gave me a wealth of information.

Intentional Focus, Deliberate Distraction

The piece, and the finale in particularly needs more than repetition—it needs intention. I need to see the keyboard, feel where I’m landing, know the harmony as I play it, and stay aware of what my left hand is doing while my right hand sings. In other words: less autopilot, more presence.

At the same time, I also need the opposite: practice that removes conscious control altogether. Playing while reading out loud, or holding a conversation—anything that forces the hands to function without constant oversight. I'm not sure what goes on in the brain when I practice that way, but it seems to lock things in and help the hands know where to go next.

Between those two approaches—intentional focus and deliberate distraction—I’m hoping to close some of the gaps that showed up yesterday.

The Big Challenge Now

The challenge is time. (Isn't it always?)

I logged about 25 minutes this morning before work—playing while reading, then using the metronome at 90 and 95 (my goal is ~105). Tonight I have a work event and probably won't get home until late, but I'll still play it through a couple of times. There is value in practicing while tired; it's not that different from performing under less-than-ideal conditions.

Tomorrow my sick kitty has a vet appointment, and then, a few hours later, I have the recital.

It's not an ideal lead-up to a performance.

Even so, I feel good about where this piece is. I've put in the time. The structure is there. The character is there. Now it's just a matter of helping it hold together while people are watching. While Jonny May is watching.

Video with Metronome

Here's a video from this morning's practice, playing with the metronome at ♩=95. And yes—the metronome is very present. You’ll know exactly how accurate my rhythm is, whether I like it or not.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Amazing Practice Tracker 2.0: Leveling Up My Piano Game

(Apologies for the cheesy clip art. I needed to come up with something, or the Blogger template would show a fuzzy, overly-enlarged snippet of the first chart below.) When I showed my husband my piano practice tracker, he said I should market and sell it. Ha. It’s not for sale, but I’m excited to share how this tool has transformed my practice—and why it might inspire all three of my readers. Since my last post about the Amazing Practice Tracker, I’ve made it even better. Here’s a peek at how it works, using my June data. All The Pretty Colors, All the Pretty Winners My tracker now sparkles with color: darker shades for active pieces, lighter ones for maintenance, technique, and sight-reading. Each day, the piece I practice most gets a bright yellow highlight—a little “gold medal,” if you will. (Click image for a slightly larger view.) A leaderboard automatically shows the day’s top piece and time. And if that isn't enough, I keep track of the month's leaders--specifically, ho...
1 comment
Read more

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