Jan 20 (Var 3)

Hi! Thanks for reading :)

Did you know that so far I'm only playing half of this variation? There's a page turn after it and I haven't been brave enough to make it. Maybe tomorrow. The good news is, we're making progress here. The stuff I've been drilling is starting to go a lot more smoothly, although there are still plenty of stops and starts. A lot of those are for fingering rather than notes, now, which is kind of interesting to me. That means I'm playing the right note with the wrong finger, which means what I'm learning is the notes, and not the muscle movements that play those notes. That's good news, because I've definitely learned some other pieces mechanically; if I get lost in one of those, good luck finding my way back. But if it know the *notes*, then I can just pause, breathe, and start again.

Still, I'm missing those fingerings.

There's an awesome moment toward the end of this first half that I missed both times through. I'm sorry. I actually took the repeat just because I wanted another shot at that moment. I hope you notice how smoothly that last measure goes, though -- that's a little trick from Jane Bell, who taught me in college. She told me to always practice the last measure first, that way I can always finish strong. It's good advice for a piece like this, when it's *struggle struggle struggle struggle aaahhhhhh*.

Mentioning the repeats, I should probably address them. Sometimes they're optional and sometimes they aren't (i.e., sometimes Bach gives a first and second ending and sometimes it's just the repeat bar). Mr. Feltsman takes all the repeats, but he plays an octave higher the second time through (coach doesn't like that). I don't know about others, but I imaging I'll be skipping them in general. None of the variations is all that long by itself, but taken together we're talking more than an hour of music. No need to draw that out any longer than necessary. A lot of times on these recordings, I'll take a repeat if I make a mistake the first time through that I don't think I should've made; it's a chance for redemption. I'd say my redemption rate is like 50-50.

OK, enjoy! And thanks for listening :)

Jan 19 (Var 3)

This is gonna be a long one. I worked on 2 (TWO) measures tonight. You can sort of tell. Looks like I got what I asked for - a piece that's hard in every measure. Let's suffer along together!

Jan 18 (Var 3)

Phew. This one is touuuugh. I urge you to go find a recording of someone competent playing this song, and then listen to the following recording. I'm going super super slowly, and *still* missing tons of notes. Here's my first thought on why it's so hard. There will be other thoughts, no doubt.

Much of the piece is 8ths vs 16ths. And there are normal scale patterns that usually show up in 16th note runs like this; normal in the sense of whether the bottom or top note of a run is on the beat or on the off beat. Bach does both, seemingly randomly. This is a piece where it's very hard to hear the throughline when you're playing it slowly. There's a nice ringing melody that comes through in the Feltsman recording that I can't even find on the page yet. I've been here before, notably with that fantasie-impromptu I mentioned some days ago, but it's a tough place to be. You practice the notes mechanically until you can play it fast enough to start picking out the melody.

The difference here, the new part, is that in the fantasie impromptu, many of those difficult parts are essentially arpeggios - the notes of a chord played in some order, but still basically a chord. That's not what this is; this is a canon. That means there are several voices intervweaving throughout, which is really different to play. This is gonna take a while, so let's get comfortable together. I recommend tea.

Jan 17 (Var 2 Final)

We're dogsitting! It's been a blessing and a curse; having only one dog we are her main source of entertainment. With two around, suddenly there's somebody to wrestle with *all* *the* *time*. You will hear wrestling in the background of this recording. You will hear panting, and you will hear the jingling of dog tags. I don't *think* any squeaks happened, but I'm getting better at getting into that flow state, just like I hoped I would. That I played this whole thing well enough to feel ready to move on, *while* 100 lbs of dog rolls around on the floor mere inches from my bench is really satisfying! That said, it's not perfect. Enjoy anyway! :D

Jan 16 (Var 2)

I'm getting close now, and I'm getting excited! Variation 3 is so tempting, being on the same page as the end of Variation 2, just sitting there - 

- I doubt I'll be able to avoid its call much longer. But tonight I held strong and worked the ending quite a bit, with pretty good results! Definitely a couple of rough spots, where the pinky has to cross under the ring finger. And some weird fingering in the left hand. But I'm sure you'll agree I've come a long way in a week or so!

Jan 15 (Var 2)

My lamp rattles. And it's getting worse. If it were anything else, I could just take it off the piano. But I need the lamp. It's dark in Duluth! And we don't have overhead lighting. Thus I suffer through the rattling. You probably won't be able to hear it, but trust that it's driving me batty.

I played through the first two movements today, just to make sure I still could, and I still could! That's going to be a bigger and bigger challenge as time goes on; a single performance of all of this runs well over an hour. I'll probably have to set up a schedule for which days I practice which movements. For now, it's fine though.

Here it is, by the way. Systematically attacking the ending for the first time today; If I have enough time tomorrow I think I'll have the whole thing figured out. Then it's just a matter of polish!

Jan 14 (Var 2)

Happy weekend! Practicing in the daytime is undoubtedly more effective than practicing at night. 




Here's a puzzle for you: listening to this recording, can you tell me which parts of the song are hardest to play? I'll give you a second...














While you're thinking about that, here's a little anecdote that may or may not be true but has that ring of 'truthiness' that people love. In World War 2, the Royal Air Force was sending planes on bombing missions into German territory. The Germans, of course, were trying to shoot those planes down. Now a plane can only be so heavy if it wants to fly, and they want to pack as many bombs on there as possible, so they want to use their armor plating (solid steel, basically) as efficiently as possible. The planes go out in good shape, and some of them come back. The ones that do come back often sport bullet holes where the German planes shot them. So the question is: where should they put that heavy armor plating to best protect the planes? And the naive answer is: put it where the bullet holes are, that's where the planes are getting shot!

But it's the wrong answer, because that's where the planes that *made it home* got shot. It's the ones that don't make it back who needed that extra armor. So you put more armor where the bullet holes *aren't*.

Like I said, it's probably not true; I'm sure the engineers had better ways to answer the question than that. But! It suggests the answer to my question above.











You have it? Of course, the hardest parts are the ones that sound the most natural! At least, that's true now, once I've just about got the song figured out. At the very beginning, the hardest parts sound the worst, of course, but they're also the first parts I practice. And I don't stop practicing them until I've got them. So by the time I'm playing the song a tempo, I've practiced all the really hard parts to death, and the mistakes I make are the parts that I haven't spent much time on. That's why I find it paradoxically easier to learn a piece that's difficult all the way through. Maybe through this project I'll learn how to practice even the easier parts. But, knowing me, maybe not...