Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

It arrived via UPS today! It's published by Sikorski Musikverlage in Hamburg, Germany, so everything is in German. Good thing music is a universal language! Known as " Dance of the Dolls ," "Dances of the Dolls," or "Seven Dolls' Dances," this suite is taken from orchestral arrangements of Shostakovich orchestral works. I don't know which works ... but I will know soon. Just give me some time to research them! This is definitely an easier collection than anything I've played in a long time, and I am thrilled about that. I sight-read all 22 pages tonight (total of seven miniatures), and nothing in it seems too technically difficult. Ah ... but the interpretation is going to be the fun part! And I do mean fun . You can hear excerpts from a few of the selections here . Practiced about two hours yesterday and about three hours today (not including the leisurely Shostakovich sight-read). I'm really working on the relaxation techniques in P...

I say that my blog sabbatical is over, but the truth is, I'm going to be computer-less and piano-less all weekend. I'm posting tonight and I hope to post tomorrow, but I won't be able to practice or post again until Monday. So I'll write a really long post now ... to make up for my dismal lack of posts recently, and to give my huge audience (ha) something to chew on for the next few days. :) Enough of that. On to the combined lesson/practice report. My lesson was yesterday. Deborah played me a Ginastera piece she is working on. She's exhilarated at how everything has unfolded regarding her upcoming concert in Asheville. The local NPR station is now sponsoring it as a benefit, and they're going to take care of a lot of the marketing. She's playing an all-Spanish program (composers from the Americas and Spain), with an emphasis on tango. Just a couple of days ago, the Asheville Citizen-Times ran an article on the growing popularity of tango ... so the local N...

I'm really tired tonight, so I'm just going to write a quick log for today's practice. I only got to spend about 45 minutes at the piano tonight. I mostly worked on adding another couple of measures of the fugue . I did a lot of drilling, but it didn't seem like my mind was registering it. I was just really tired, possibly because I did a longer-than-usual run today (5 miles). I'm rearranging my schedule tomorrow so that I practice the Liszt first, and during the day rather than at night after dinner. I hope to devote the after-dinner practice to JSB, and then have another practice on Wednesday before my afternoon lesson. Time to get some sleep!

Practiced for about 80 minutes. The usual warm-ups, plus some of the fugue and a lot of the Liszt with no pedal and much exactitude. It was a good practice. Went longer than I'd planned, which was nice because I won't be able to practice again until Monday at the earliest.

Good lesson today. Deborah and I usually chat up a storm before we get around to music, but that didn't happen today. We just dove right into the lesson. Scales and arpeggios were fine. When we got to Suzuki, I told her I didn't want to do Suzuki anymore, that I felt that the time required wasn't equal to the benefit it was giving me. I knew she wouldn't be happy to hear that. But it's true--I hate taking valuable practice time to work on something that I believe is, honestly, not challenging enough. Particularly when I have a Liszt transcription and a fugue to work on. She compromised. She said, "OK, maybe some of these pieces are too easy for you, but I want you to try the Beethoven sonatina at the end of the book." At two pages and with two movements, it's the longest piece in Suzuki Book II. So I guess I'll get started listening to that. I played my twelve and a half measures of the Bach and she basically said to keep on doing what I'm doin...

I only managed about 30 minutes at the piano today, but I did work on the Liszt. I'm posting this on Thursday morning and my piano lesson is this afternoon, so I'll write more about my progress after my lesson.

I was able to squeeze in 30 minutes of practice-time tonight, but I'm afraid I didn't make very efficient use of my time. Normally I'm Little Miss Efficiency when it comes to practicing, since I normally have so little time as it is. I planned to work on the Liszt tonight. So, naturally, I walked into the Inner Sanctum, plopped the Bach fugue onto the piano, and began practicing. There's something wrong with this picture, isn't there. Folks, I am a fugue-aholic. The fugue is like a big, juicy zit, and I can't stop picking at it. OK, maybe that's not the best simile for it. Zits are gross, infected, pus-filled things. The fugue is transcendent. Divine. A work of genius. Yep, the fugue went and got transcendent on me again tonight. I worked on the two "end pieces" of the section I've been working on HT for the last hundred years few weeks. Measures 14 and 15 were still good, but the measures at the end needed work. So I worked. Got the kinks ...