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Ode to Joy Day 4: Leaps, 3b3, and Retroactive Interference

As part of Day 4 of Rebecca Bogart’s Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge, the focus was on identifying leaps and taking steps to make them more reliable.

It’s fair to say that the stride arrangement of Ode to Joy has its share of leaps. 🙂

Day 4

The left-hand leaps didn’t get much attention today. They show up in almost every measure, but they’re not a major concern for me because I am the ragtime queen (she writes modestly). Right-hand leaps are a different story. There aren’t many in Batch 1, but there is one spot where the right hand jumps up an octave to begin a short descending run, and that one deserves attention.

Today's Wins

My biggest win today was locking in the eight-measure intro. It’s not especially difficult, but there are a couple of spots that needed work—the move from A9 to Em7 in the left hand, and the final measure with the augmented chord.

I focused on those trouble spots using 3b3 (play three times slowly, take a short break, then repeat). Once those felt more stable, I applied the same approach to the full intro. It held together well, so I did something I don’t always do this early in learning a new piece: I turned on the metronome.

60… 65… 70… 80… 90… 100… and then I stopped. It was a useful experiment, but tempo isn’t the goal right now. Solidity and memorization are.

I also did all of this without looking at the sheet music, which is another win in my book.

Here is a very proud Nina playing the intro from memory:

Today's Challenges

The yellow section (A/A′, measures 8–23) is coming along more slowly. The left-hand jumps are manageable, but the right-hand leap into that descending run is still inconsistent. I spent a fair amount of time isolating that measure and then reconnecting it to what comes before it.

The other issue was retroactive interference. A and A′ are identical until the final measures, which is exactly where things get confusing. To counteract this, I worked on the A ending (which includes the leap into the downward run) in this morning's session, and I waited until the afternoon to tackle the A' ending. Toward the end of the afternoon session, I tried to play them back-to-back ... but the morning's A ending had vanished from my mind.

I may have tried to interleave those two sections a little too early, before either one was fully stable. Or maybe I didn’t separate them enough in practice. Either way, it was a good reminder that similar material needs a bit more space before it can peacefully coexist.

Where I Am Now

I’ve already spent about an hour on OTJ today, so I may not get another session in. There’s a small sense of frustration that the A/A′ sections aren’t as solid as the intro—but they’re also more difficult (yellow vs. green), so this is probably just the process working as expected.

At the end of the session, I used the sheet music to play through the A/A′ sections because I had a slightly different focus: left hand staccato as written, melody notes clearly brought out as indicated in the score. At this slower tempo, the melody can get buried, so I wanted a version where it comes through more clearly.

Here it is:

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