Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

I tried the Substack thing. I'm still doing the Substack thing, but I have an audience (albeit a tiny one) with Substack, and there is this expectation that the articles there actually be "written" and not just rambled. I like to ramble. When I'm dead, they'll say, "Didn't she ramble!" So I'm moving back to Blogger, where I have zero audience members and no obligation to write nice, tidy essays that I must edit endlessly before leaving them well enough alone. Occasionally, if I write something good here, I may fix it up for Substack. But mostly I'm going back to my old schedule of posting nearly every day about whatever piano-related topic I happen to be thinking about at the moment. If you, imaginary audience, would like to see what I've written on Substack during my break from Blogger, you can find it all here . I'm not linking to this blog from Substack because I honestly don't want a bunch of readers that I will then have to f...

 I was looking through my old blog and found this piano post from something like 2006. It was titled "Dance of the Nail-bitten Digits: A Ramble and an Analogy." I was working on Liszt's transcription of Schubert's Ständchen at the time--a beautiful piece that I've (sadly) forgotten. I'd also forgotten about the analogy at the end of this post, so I'm posting it again here. Dance of the Nail-bitten Digits: A Ramble and an Analogy (2006) I am loving Liszt. I love the way my hands have to "share" the melody in "Standchen." I have so much to write on that, but I'm borrowing a computer and don't have enough time to do it justice. Suffice it to say that I've practiced three and a half wonderful hours today, and about two hours on Liszt alone. What I find wonderful about the Liszt is that it pushes one hand hard, but not too hard. Then the other hand gets a turn to be pushed. But it's never both at the same time, and never one ...

It seems my blog is dead. Three years of blogging ... gone. I'm not sure what to do now. Should I just blog from here? Should I start a new blog that isn't just piano-related, since piano isn't the only thing in my life? I definitely don't want to use Blogger again. Should I go to squarespace or wordpress or one of the other blogging services? I've actually been thinking about starting a piano podcast. As if I have the time. I'm kind of depressed about this. Boo hoo. :(