Random Notes

… and maybe week 6, too? It’s late, I lost count, and I don’t feel like going back and figuring it out!

Themes of the last couple of weeks: consistency, memorization, hitting a wall, fighting boredom!

Consistency

At this point, I know all the notes, all the trouble spots, all the frustrations; I don’t need to work specifically on learning the notes. What I do need on any piece after the first couple of weeks is to work towards getting all the notes right all the time. There’s a saying that I’ve seen quoted several times… the difference between an amateur and a professional is the amateur practices until he can play something right, the pro practices until he can’t play it wrong. That’s exactly where I am by this point … I can play it right and now I’m working on not being able to play it wrong. Some of the strategies I’m using for this:

1. repeating the difficult passages
2. putting together longer and longer sections
3. repeating the difficult passages slowly
4. playing from beginning to end without stopping
5. repeating the difficult passages even more slowly
6. altering rhythms
7. repeating the difficult sections — even slower!
8. shifting the downbeat
9. repeating the difficult sections — maybe not quite so slowly, but still slowly
10. isolating the 2-4 note units that still aren’t quite right
11. umm… repeating the difficult sections — slow….err, yeah, you get the idea!

Memorization

Don’t get me wrong … I have no intention of playing this piece from memory in a couple of weeks! I’m allowed to have the music in front of me, so I’m using it. Still, it pays to memorize. Personally, I don’t find it at all necessary to be able to play from beginning to end of a piece without the music. What I do find unbelievably helpful — if not necessary — is to be able to look at a passage and to be able to play that passage without really looking. It is really the same concept as being able to look at a word and instantly know what the word is without having to go through it letter-by-letter, then expanding that to looking at a sentence and knowing the whole sentence rather than having to look at each word. 

Hitting a Wall

No, this doesn’t have anything to do with a remodeling project … or a real wall! During the life of the learning process for any piece, I’ve always experienced a period of time that becomes so frustrating that I start thinking of literally hitting a wall. There is always a period (at least for me) during the learning process during which I feel like I’m making absolutely no progress no matter what I do. Intellectually, I realize that it is extremely unlike that I’m not making any progress, but it sure feels like it! Reality — there is a point at which just about everything in a piece is learned — most of the fingerings are down, most of the musical content — there are just those pesky details — a measure here, a connection there, maybe an altissimo note in another spot — that just seem to refuse to quit being  a problem. My best solution isn’t one I’m comfortable with in this situation. This is normally a good time to put the piece aside for a few days or weeks and come back to it. But when there is an immanent performance looming, I don’t consider that to be the best choice.

My second choice is actually something I started a couple of weeks ago. I set up a microphone and recorded a couple of the problem passages back when I wasn’t doing so great with it, so now I can go back and listen to where I was 2 or 3 weeks ago and realize that I really am making progress — even if it is slow!

Fighting boredom…

AKA the Glazunov Syndrome! When I first heard and played the Glazunov Concerto, I loved it. Then, there was a point in my undergraduate days that I could have sworn every single saxophonist in the studio was performing “that stupid Glazunov Concerto” and I got to a point that I was so bored with it, I had a hard time tolerating sitting through a performance. A couple of years later, I still heard the Glazunov at least as much, if not more, but there was no longer an issue with being bored. What had happened was that I had gone from it being a new and exciting piece to thinking I knew it pretty well and then finally, to really learn all of the little nuances of the piece and loving it all over again. I’m hoping the learning curve I’m on with this piece is similar — but much faster! I haven’t come up with a really good strategy for this one, other than to just work through it and try to practice without thinking about whether I love the piece or hate it. We’ll see!

So, down to 2 weeks until D-Day! More to come…

Holy time warp, Batman! Week three is done and I haven’t even gotten my week two entry done!  The whole idea of starting this blog was to organize my practice time, but I’m finding the more I practice, the less interested I am in writing. I guess that makes it a good thing that I’ve fallen behind, since it means I’ve been practicing!

Heiden is coming along nicely, maybe even a bit ahead of my schedule. At any rate, I was looking over what I wrote last week, and I realized I failed to mention why I started this piece. That’s sort of central to my point in journaling my progress on this one!

When I was at IU, I was one of Eugene Rousseau’s students, and believe it or not, he turned 76 this year. In honor of Dr. Rousseau’s 76th birthday, there is going to be a “Rousseau Celebration” hosted at the University of North Carolina – Greensville. As one of Rousseau’s former students, I have the opportunity to perform a piece either recorded by or dedicated to Dr. Rousseau. The Heiden “Solo” was dedicated to Rousseau back in 1969  — AND he recorded it. It also happens to be reasonably approachable, which is really important to me since I’m still in the “rehab” phase of my performance. Although I perform nearly every week, it’s been about 8 years since I’ve done any sort of high profile/major performance, so I want to be sure that this is successful for me.

So, here’s what I’ve been up to. One of the things I’ve been really focusing on has been identifying and working out what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, “nuisance” passages. One of the biggest nuisances in this piece, at least for me, is at the top of the third page:

If you look at this passage at the level of a single beat, there isn’t anything really hard about it. What does present a challenge, at least for me, is that each beat is similar, but enough different to trip me up. One of the strategies that I find especially helpful with sections like this is to work out each beat, then start building the passage by practicing two beat blocks, then three beats, then four … until I’m comfortable with the entire passage. I also prefer to start at the END and work back towards the beginning so I’m always playing to something I know and am comfortable with — really helps to keep me relaxed.

The other things I’ve been really focusing on are pushing tempi and identifying what fingerings I want to use when there are alternates available. Those two things — tempo and fingerings — are not only important, but they are also related.  Tempo first….

Now, I know, the common wisdom about tempo is to practice as slowly as you need to to play without making a mistake. I’ve repeated that mantra to students and to myself over and over and over and over again — and it is extremely important. Don’t think for a minute that I’m not spending a lot of time working out the kinks slowly and methodically. The other piece of the equation, though, is that you need to spend some time teaching your fingers to move at the performance tempo and, when a piece has technical passages that extend of several beats (or lines or pages!), you really need to get your brain thinking and processing all of that information at the speed you need it to go. I’m not say this very eloquently, and I’m not sure if that was really clear, so if you don’t understand, leave a comment!

The other thing I need to do is to at least get to the point that I can play passages a couple of beats at a time, at or above performance tempo, fairly quickly so I can really hone in on fingering decisions. Take this passage, for example:

If I’m plugging away at a nice, slow tempo, I’m inclined to just use standard fingerings the whole way through this, but as I approach performance tempo (somewhere around quarter note = 120 bpm) the palm key E down to the F and back up to palm key E is a bit of a pain.  The biggest problem for my fingers is in my right hand, moving from right side key 3, getting my first finger down for the F, then shifting back up to get back to RSK3. Simple solution — don’t use the first finger to play the F, just use the middle finger. That simple shift keeps me from having to move my right hand/wrist to get to and from RSK3. If I’d taken my time gradually easing the tempo up, yes, I would have eventually made that decision. In the process, who knows how many times I would have played it using my first finger before I made the decision, which in turn would have meant having to UN-learn before I could LEARN. Plus, when I get nervous, I find that if I haven’t been 100% consistent in my use of specific fingerings, I have a tendency to make mistakes simply because I choose the wrong one, drop a note, then break my concentration and drop a few more notes.