Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

I was only able to practice for about 50 minutes this evening. I'd planned to spend two or three hours at the piano, but ... well, you know how those things go. Regardless, I had a very good practice session. The Scales o' Day were D major and B minor . D major is easy, so very easy. I played it through a few times, then moved on. B minor is annoying, so very annoying. From the very moment I learned "B" and "B-flat" as a child, I have confused the two. This doesn't make sense. I never confuse "A" with "A-flat." I never confuse "F" with "F-sharp." Heck, I'm playing the C#-major fugue and have yet to confuse "G" with "F-double-sharp." It is not a good habit to confuse "B" with "B-flat." Particularly when you're trying to play contrary-motion harmonic-minor scales. The first run-through of the contrary-motion scale sounded fine. Had I played it at my lesson, my teacher...

I wasn't home yesterday, but I did manage to snag about 40 minutes with a piano where I was. Did the usual warm-up with scales, arps, and inversions , then went straight to Liszt . I'm at a point right now where I really need to start learning a new section. But first, I played through the part I've already learned. There was one section in which I've missed some big notes every time I've played it through ... so I went to those measures first. Spent about 20 minutes working out the kinks and then drilling it a million times. Then I moved on to the "new" stuff (Sections 6, 7, and 8). Sections 6, 7, and 8 are not hard. They're a little tricky because of the handwiching, but they're not hard. I can play them almost perfectly when I sight-read. This can only mean one thing: Deceptively. Easy. I drilled Section 6 probably more than I needed to. But I really want to "cement" it in my brain, you know? And, as I drilled, little kinks came out h...

I usually work during the day and practice during the evening. Since I'm going to be at Brevard Music Center tonight to see Chu-Fang Huang perform Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2, I decided to work only a couple of hours this morning and spend the late morning/early afternoon at the piano. Good decision. I practiced/played for about 80 minutes . Scales sounded good. Today was Ab-major and F-minor . Of all the scales, I think F-minor and F#-minor give me the most trouble. They shouldn't, but they do. They sound pretty good now, but it took a lot of work to get there. F-minor acted up a bit, so I tried some of Robert's suggestions (see comments for this post ). It helped to do them in groups of nine. The back-and-forth effort of suggestion #4 was actually easier than I thought it would be. "Easy" is a relative term. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't quite the impossible challenge that I imagined it would be. Next, I went straight to Bach, my beloved B...

As promised, here is the second installment of my July 20 practice log! I practiced for about an hour tonight. I didn't spend much time at all on scales, arps, and inversions. I was ready to get re-acquainted with the Liszt . So, after a few minutes of a "warm up," I went straight to Liszt. The 9-against-4 is coming. Still not there yet, not completely, but it's coming. It's a LOT easier if I focus on the timing of the RH and not the timing of the LH. Much easier. Only thing is, it's not easy for my mind to focus on the RH. I don't know why this is. I consciously have to force my mind to think, "Triplets. Slow. Slower than if you were fitting them evenly into the LH notes." I played through the rest of the piece, just to see where I was weak and what needed the most work. Narrowing it down to "Section 11" (measures 79-90), I practiced it the way I've been practicing the fugue: drilling, drilling, and more drilling. This piece is ve...

I'm calling this "Part 1" because I'm planning a second practice session this evening. Spent about 50 minutes on the piano. About 15 minutes were devoted to scales, arps, and inversions. The Bb-minor scale was giving me some trouble, for some reason. I do not want to devote a huge percentage of my practice time to scales, but last week's 20-minutes-per-scale work was surprisingly helpful. So I spent some extra time drilling Bb-minor. I took about five minutes to play through the C#-major prelude , and then the rest of the session was spent on the fugue . (This morning, when my alarm went off, my first thought was, "I'm tired. I don't want to get out of bed yet." Then I thought, "But I get to practice the fugue today!" And I got right up.) I now, ladies and gentlemen, have not one and a half, but TWO and a half measures in the bag. Measures 17 and 18, with half of 19 (the end of Episode I) are sounding nice. I'm also learning th...

No official practice report for today, but I did write about the joy of learning a fugue on A Sort of Notebook .

As I mentioned in my last post, my piano teacher (Deborah) said it's time for me to start putting my hands together on the fugue. Sigh. I was afraid of that. And it sounded so nice hands-separately. But first ... she said to pick out the section I considered the most difficult, and to start by tackling it. OK. Not an unusual approach to learning something. So I picked out measures 17-19. It's physically impossible for me to maintain every complete held note in this section, and it will continue to be until I get my hand-stretching machine from eBay (heh). It's a scary, scary section for me; the paper is nearly rubbed through from repeated eraser marks as I changed the fingering and changed it back again (and again, and again ...). I hadn't done the hands-separately mega-drill session on this section yet, so that's what I did today. Best to ease up to that hands-together thing., don't you think? I had about an hour available for practicing. I flew through the sca...