Ode To Joy, Day 16: Joyful, Joyful, Thee I Practice

In my journey through the Learn New Repertoire Faster Challenge at Piano with Rebecca B, I’ve reached Day 16 of Jonny May’s stride arrangement of Ode to Joy. Today’s assignment was to continue learning Batch 5 (measures 72–95) and begin my revisit of Batch 4 (measures 64–71).

Day 16 Morning Practice: Pure Joy

This morning’s practice focused mostly on Passages 1 and 2 of Batch 5, a.k.a. The Easy Section.

The left hand switches from boom-chick to four-on-the-floor, and the busy right hand gives way to a single-note melody. The whole section is delightful, sweet, and charming. I love it. Scroll down to the video at the bottom of this post to hear it.

There are still a few tricky spots, and I gave those some focused work this morning. In the video, I say “motifs” when I really mean “phrases,” so I’ll use the right word here.

The tricky spots:

The lead-in to Phrase 2: The four-on-the-floor pattern shifts, including a bass note on beat one while the right hand plays a broken E minor chord. Not hard, but there’s a stretch between fingers 3 and 5 that needed attention.
The end of Phrase 2: The left hand drops back into boom-chick while the right hand does a couple of little curlicues (turns), including a wider-than-usual stretch between fingers 3 and 1 in the second turn.
The return to the easy section after the first transition: The challenge here is continuity: moving from whew, survived that to no time to breathe, here comes the next phrase.

I also spent about 25 minutes on the pedal-point section (Passage 3), which I wrote about yesterday.

Where I Am Now

I’m happy with my progress on Batch 5. I’m glad I gave extra time to Passages 1 and 2, even though they felt easy. Of course they still needed the work, and now those transitions are smoother and I feel more confident playing them.

Tonight will be my first revisit of Batch 4 (the very red section) in several days, and then tomorrow I'll set Batch 5 aside and start Batch 6—the final batch. The final page!

Looking ahead, the schedule also brings Batch 1 back into the rotation tomorrow. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to juggle three batches in one day. I haven’t touched Batch 1 in a week, as the schedule prescribed, so it’ll be interesting to see what stuck and how long it takes to recover the rest.

Here is my video from today's practice, featuring the delightful Passages 1 and 2.

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