I probably should be asleep but instead I am here with the end of the Christmas chocolate and a mug of tea. This week, since Tuesday (I was travelling on Monday), I have averaged about 90 minutes a day practising the piano. The bulk of my effort has gone to Bach and Mendelssohn but I have a policy of “touching” the other two pieces at least once a day. Why I am I focusing on the first two? Because certain elements of them are tantalising close to a positive point of no return.
The Mendelssohn piece – one of the Songs without Words known as a Gondola song, 19b in G Minor (it’s mentioned all over the place and as I type I’m listening to Igor Levit’s rendition) – is the reason I did the Grade 6. I had toyed with skipping – after all, I just wanted the grade 8 so I could do the diplomas later if I wanted. I want very much to do them. Now that I am listening to Levit’s version, I realise I probably too often play it too fast. This is something I can fix relatively easily. I do slow practice anyway.
Anyway, I want to polish it but first, I would like for the fingering to be securely accurate. For me, this means playing it correctly more often than not. There isn’t a bar in the piece I can’t play accurately so the problems are lying in the glueing all of the pieces together. I love the voicing in it. I loathe the pieces I consider dragons, the pieces I struggle or struggled to play correctly. I’m incredibly close to it. So, so close. So I keep playing with a huge degree of focus and I’m so close to getting it right.
The other is the Bach dragon. There is a particular rhythm which turns up occasionally in the E major two part invention which I am I’m struggling to render correctly when one rhythm pattern is played on the left hand rather than the right. One example of it is in bar 7. I’ve written about it elsewhere but here’s the offending piece of music:
I’m really, really close to getting it right. REALLY close.
but not quite there. The net outcome is currently Vladimir Rebikov’s afflicted autumn leaves and Elissa Milne’s Indigo Moon are not getting adequate love and attention.
I have averaged 94 minutes practising since Monday. About 90% of that went to Bach and Mendelssohn between then. I’ve also worked a little bit on Brahms 118/2, one of the bridges and it has some polyrhythms so I have worked on that too (hence the post the other day).
When I read/watch tuition on best ways of practice, there’s a point at which most say “blindly repeating things is a waste of time”. I get the need for a strategic approach to practice. But eventually if you haven’t played something right, because, for example, your fingers are slipping off the black notes (I feel like my keys are very slippery lately)m and you make an occasional mistake, well, you can’t not go through it again.
Ultimately, I’m going to be playing these pieces a lot – one of the next things will be to play them in the order in which I intend to present them for the Grade 6 exam which is Bach, Mendelssohn, Rebikov, Milne, ie, the order in which they were composed.
In the grand scheme of things, it was a productive week.
- I can mostly get the Mendelssohn right
- I can most get the Mendelssohn right
- The Bach Bar 7 is moving in the right direction
- I’m practising daily at the moment
- I’ve picked up the Milne and the Rebikov again
- I’ve started picking at the Brahms I want to learn
- I’m planning a miniproject to improve the sight reading (need to select the 40 pieces and put them in a spreadsheet.
All told, better than last week, and in fact, better than most of November and December in which I barely touched the piano. I’ve probably doubled my 3 month practice total in just this week alone. Pretty much everything I touched is showing an improvement.
Oh and I also realised that my Soundbrenner app on my phone has some handy features on the metronome front that my Seiko does not have.