Feb 3 (Var 3 Final)

Hi! It was a beautiful morning for a walk; lots of lovely little snowflakes everywhere. Georgia had a great time, but she's not much of a conversation partner. When we got back, I sat down at the piano. It's a nice change to have time in the middle of the day to practice; usually I'm squeezing it in around dinner time. It's undoubtedly better practice time, too. If only I could be a house-husband, practicing the piano and cooking delicious food all day... 

Anyway, here you go: my final recording of Variation 3. This one's been a long one, even longer than my allotted 2 weeks per. At this rate I won't finish in a year, but also I don't really mind. I'm enjoying myself a lot! I hope you are too.

Feb 2 (Var 3)

Coach and I had a debate over whether it's time to move on. She said yes, I say no. I think at slow speeds it's too hard to hear the two lines in the right hand as distinct. But I'm not sure what "slow" means.

I do know that I played both halves without mistakes at 112 bpm tonight. The recording is probably 116, since I tend to rush when I hit record. I'm setting my sights on 120, and once I get a clean recording at 120bpm, it's on to the next jaunty piece.

If the focus on tempo seems a little strange, it's because just tonight I discovered the true value of practicing with a metronome. Sure, it forces you to keep an even tempo and not cheat (slow down) on the difficult parts. But it does something else I never appreciated until tonight: it provides an objective measure of progress for that part of the learning where you know all the notes but still sometimes make random mistakes. It gives you a number: today I went "no mistakes" at 112bpm; can I do it at 120 tomorrow? I think for the next piece I'll start doing it that way much earlier, and watch that needle tick up. Plus it'll give you, the reader, something a little more concrete.

Feb 1 (Var 3)

Well, I'm getting tired of this one, how about you?

No, that doesn't mean we're moving on. That's OK, it's a lovely variation! Or, it's growing on me anyway and now I hear it when I close my eyes! There are worse things to hear as you fall asleep, anyway.

I got rid of the rattling; poor Maurice is such a selfless soul, cushioning the lamp to keep it from rattling:

Also! I've been playing this measure wrong. 

See how the D is suppose to be held through, so that the B should be played alone? I've been playing them both together, like this whole time, and today I worked on fixing it. Succeeded in the recording! Yay! In fact, the recording might be the best one of this variation I've made so far. There's two restarts in the second half, but *between* the restarts...

Also, enjoy the metronome! It's 96 bpm (I was practicing at 100 and set it back one notch for the recording. Is that cheating? Do you feel cheated?) Without it, the restarts would not have been necessary. But I think it might be the key to getting faster, so I'm going to be using it a lot in the near future.

Jan 31 (Var 3)

I'm starting to lost perspective on this song. Am I getting better? Am I not? Am I playing faster than I used to? Is it time to start looking at the next one? Do I still have a ton of work to do? I really don't know. I'll let you know what I figure out!

Also, you might hear a rattle in the recording. That rattle is the lamp. That I need to see the music. So I can't make the rattle go away, even though I would really like to. Sorry about the rattle.

Jan 30 (Var 3)

This evening's practice session really strained my ability to get into the flow of the music. Strike 1: later than usual. Strike 2: I had a beer instead of my usual herbal tea. Strike 3: Coach kept interrupting with tax questions. I don't think you're going to hear much improvement over yesterday. WELCOME TO THE SWAMP! I HOPE YOU LIKE IT DANK AND FULL OF MOSQUITOES.

Jan 29 (Var 3)

Lots to talk about!

This variation bills itself as a Canon. You are no doubt familiar with Pachelbel's Canon in D, a beautiful piece that I played at my mom's wedding. Thinking about that piece, you get a sense of repetition, or moving melodies playing above a background of chord changes to anchor the harmony. Well, that's not how I think about this Bach piece at all. Nonetheless, a canon it is, because the whole thing is repeated ideas with slight variations. Those are the variations that are driving me crazy, by the way.

Take a look at that - four different measures (out of only 16) all have the same bass figure, 
albeit in two different keys. And of course, the fingering is different for all of them. Notable is that the right hand ascends against it each time, and in different ways. I think I photographed them out of order so I don't want to make any claims about call and response, but there's definitely a skeleton of three ascending notes that is decorated variously by Bach. And of course three ascending notes is a really really common motif throughout; study this image and you'll see it *all over*. But I want to zoom in just a bit on the second of the above:

So there's the bass line, again, but this time look at the right hand. Ascending, then an E-D#-E to resolve it. The melody in the right hand is exactly the same in these two images, but I bet you wouldn't even notice it happening when you listened for the first couple of times. They sound completely different due to the other lines that weave through. I'm trying to bring it out, really I am, but boy oh boy. Incidentally, Chopin does something really similar in one of his beautiful nocturnes, Op Post 72 (the post. means it was published posthumously). There's a middle part where a really similar 1-7#-1 turn happens several times in a row over increasingly arresting arpeggios (around 1 minute in the recording on that wikipedia page) that I love to listen to but love to play even more. It's really magical the way a master composer can make music that is satisfying to the ear and to the mind.

Here's the recording, and I'm ready to do both halves at once now. 

Jan 28 (Var 3)

This sounds like progress, to me. I'm finding that the better I get at a given piece the more I like it, and I'm starting to really enjoy this one.

By the way, the recording today is just the second half of Variation 3. I did just the first half yesterday, and the results were better than before. It's going to be helpful for me to split these up a little while I'm still learning notes; I was finding previously that I would practice the second half really hard, then go to record the first half and make mistakes. By the time I was settled into the first half it was time to play the second half, and at that point I had forgotten a lot of it so I made a bunch of mistakes there. I was finding that the recordings weren't matching what I was able to do while practicing, and recording the halves separately seems to have helped with that problem. Don't worry purists, I'll put them together before I go to the next variation.