Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

Yesterday was my piano lesson. I played through the arpeggios--all of 'em!--to warm up. After that, we moved on to Bach, starting with the Prelude. I've been working on this thing for months, and I've had the notes down for some time now. It sounds pretty good to the untrained ear, and now I'm really in the fine-tuning phase, working to have everything perfectly balanced. The scales are sounding good, and those left-hand trouble spots are not causing nearly the trouble they did before. Oddly enough, my biggest problem now is the thirty-second notes in those first few measures. My left hand eighth notes are light and graceful, but my right hand thirty-second notes are uneven--not so much rhythmically as ... tonally? The second note will be too loud, or the third will be too soft, or ... they just sound punchy rather than smooth. One thing Carol said was to imaging this piece is being played by a single hand, and think of a single line of sound rather than ...

Once again, my failure to blog does not translate into a failure to practice. While I still have days where I don't play a single note, those days are few. Most days I'm managing to spend an hour or so at old Henry. On Sunday, I spent three. After that three-hour session, I decided that three hours of practice per day would be just about right. Alas, I cannot beam myself back to 1989 or 2004, when I actually had  that kind of time. So I practice when I can. I can now play all of my pieces—the prelude and fugue, the nocturne, and the impromptu—perfectly (at least when it comes to striking the right notes) ... at about half the tempo they're supposed to be. For the next few weeks, it will be a process of diligently playing these pieces over and over again at a certain notch on the metronome ... and then moving up a notch. And playing them ad nauseam at that notch ... and then, moving up another notch. Until I can play it at my goal tempo. It's going to be a slo...

Greetings from your long-absent piano blogger! Have my three regular readers been wondering what happened to me? Well, in this case, infrequent blogging does not translate to infrequent practice. What it does translate to is a lot of life-stress, particularly related to work, and I haven't had the time or desire to be at the computer any more than necessary. So no blogging. I do want to write a quick update, though, for myself as much as for anyone who is reading this. The main reason I started this blog was so I could track my own progress, so I want to start doing that again. Below is a quick update on my progress in everything. Scales Slow and steady is the rule here. I'm slowly, very slowly, working my way up the metronome. I'm still not playing anything fast (72 for major scales, 52 for minor), but I'm working on playing everything perfectly--smoothly, with total control. I now have near-total confidence in being able to play all the notes of a given scales; f...

Yesterday the plan was to work on Schubert, and I did ... but I spent another half-hour on Bach, specifically measure 28 of the fugue. I had a hard time with this one. A couple of measures before, the F is sharped, and I kept wanting to play F#, particularly in the left hand. I finally ended up writing in a natural sign. I also couldn't figure out which fingering to use on that same F-natural. Four on F-natural, five on E-flat? Playing a black key with 1 or 5 is almost never a good idea, though it's occasionally necessary. Bach said to use 3, and I ended up going back to 3, even though it's a stretch from the 1 on D. I also struggled to hear the individual voices at the end of the measure when the soprano comes back in. I don't like to use the word "struggle" because that implies that the process wasn't enjoyable, and it was totally enjoyable. It took some concentrated work, and I forgot time as I played the voices hands separately, played slowly, p...

Today's practice was broken into several short sessions. This morning, I tackled scales and arpeggios: All major scales at 72, all harmonic minor scales at 40. I feel like I could go a good bit faster on both, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. As always, I'm playing four octaves with contrary motion. Arpeggios are going well, I guess. I'm playing them the "old" way--or the "pre-Deborah" way. Deborah told me not to worry so much about connecting the notes, at least not to the point of twisting my hands this way and that. But now I'm back to the old, legato way ... which is fine. It's actually easier. Plus, I'm not doing contrary motion. It's just four octaves, repeated once, and that's it. I think it's good to do it this way for now. I'm definitely out of practice, and while I'm finding the arps "easy," I know there's always room for improvement. At another short practice, I played through Han...

Despite almost no time for practice last week, I managed to start writing in some fingering for the B-flat major fugue, starting at the end. At my piano lesson yesterday, I played through the last few measures. We talked a bit about the fingering, and she agreed that my LH fingering in measures 45 and 46 will work well. Here's measure 45: Bach said to use 3 and 2 for the C and E-flat, but I switched it to 2 and 1, which makes it easier for me to move from 5 to 3 in the bass. The thumb of my left hand just slides down from E-flat to D, and all is good. I am so excited about playing another fugue! The C#-major one was a bear (albeit one that I loved dearly), and this one has been a lot easier (so far) to pick up. For the most part, the fingering flows pretty smoothly; I've only come across a few weird/nonstandard fingerings ... like this move from 4 to 5 in the LH: Normally, you would go from 4 to 3 there, but the 3 is busy playing the B-flat above. I just lov...

Last night I grabbed about 20 minutes to focus on Bach. I have been playing the scale sections in swing and in rhythms of 4 (starting on a different note/beat for each run-through), all in the effort to make the scales smoother and more equal, without (in particular) my fourth finger on my left hand slipping and stumbling and making things uneven. At the very end of my practice, I made a quick recording (without the metronome) to let my many (okay, two) (I think) readers hear how it's sounding. Keep in mind that my phone recorder is very low-tech (making everything sound loud), and that there wasn't much I could do about the air conditioning and the TV in the background. There are still a few spots of unevenness, and of course I missed a note or two (which is typical for when I'm recording something!), but overall I'm happy with how it's sounding so far. Enjoy!  (If you can't access it, please let me know in the comments.)

Ever since I learned the notes of the Bach Prelude (BWV 866), I've been playing it at a snail's pace. In this recording (click) , I've sped it up to the furious pace of ♪=50. The suggested tempo is ♩=72, which is about three times faster. Here's András Schiff playing it a more typical tempo: So you can see that I have a long way to go. A couple of days ago, one day into my "staycation," I began inching up the tempo. I have been determined not to rush the tempo increase. I want my fingers to be strong and my mind confident by the time I get to the goal tempo. So I inched up to ♪=52. And then ♪=54. And then ♪=56. And on and on, playing it several times at each tempo. It sounded good! I wasn't just focusing on hitting the right notes; I was intent on making it sound smooth, not plodding or "punching," keeping my fingers light. ♪=58. ♪=60. ♪=63. ♪=66. It was easy. I wasn't sure if I should speed up so many notches in one practice sess...

I usually have a wide-open morning for practicing on Saturdays, but that hasn't been the case today, mainly because I was exhausted after a long, stressful week and slept in (a rare thing for me) this morning. But I did have time for some scales and Bach. At my lesson on Thursday, Carol said that I'm going to need to play more lightly if I ever want to get this prelude up to speed. I'm "punching" the keys and playing them with more weight than I need to. I think this is partly because I'm going at such a slow speed (♪=40). It's a plodding pace, and I'm tempted to plod and "punch." So today I practiced playing it more lightly, but with equal intensity, starting at ♪=40. My goal at this point—now that I have the notes and the fingering figured out—is to play it perfectly at this tempo. Once I can play it perfectly at ♪=40 (and by that, I mean that I can do it consistently, not just once), I'll move to ♪=42. I won't move to ♪=44 unti...