I'm returning to regular practicing and blogging today after a two-week trip involving a festival, a recording, and a conference. I'm excited to get back to the piano for some quality work without pressing deadlines.
An "actually-practicing-is-helpful" testimony:
During the last two weeks, I had to play a very scalar piece a few times. I found that practicing scales in the key of the piece for evenness and precision during the morning hours helped me to somehow, sort of magically, be able to play them in their various configurations in the piece later in the day!
The five to eight hours of hymn singing, hymnologocial presentations, and fellowship with hymnologogists that I experienced each day during last week's annual conference of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, convinced me that work ought to flow out of worship and prayer. So I'm starting this morning's practice session by reading through a few hymns from my newly-acquired African American Heritage Hymnal.
An hour later -
I started learning the second movement of Schumann Fantasy today. Years ago, I asked a good friend who is great at giving solid and exciting performances how he learns his music. He said that he usually spent a month or so just getting familiar with a work, analyzing, determining fingering etc.. During that, month he didn't push himself to be memorizing. And at the end of that time, most everything was memorized already. Then he zeroed in on the tricky spots.
I think that approach will be good for this movement. I like to think of practicing a piece of music a little like getting to know a person. I'm feeling a little like this Schumann movement is a bit of a catankerous co-worker. We're going to have to be in a lot of meetings before I warm to it and start to recognize and appreciate its best qualities!
No comments:
Post a Comment