I splurged and bought new music the other day. Actually, I was looking for the sheet music
to the Pirates of the Caribbean
arrangement that the Piano Guys did and discovered that some dude I’d never
heard of, named Jarrod Radnich, had tweaked and arranged it and they just
played it. The link let me to Radnich’s
website, where I found…gasp! Christmas
music!!!! ^_^ I’m a sucker for Christmas arrangements. I can never seem to find enough really good
ones, and if I do they are buried in a book of other Christmas songs that
aren’t particularly my favorite. But
this book contained a lot of them…nearly half of the selection was made up of songs/carols
I loved, such as What Child, We Three
Kings, the Bell Carol, The First Noel,
and a few others. Plus that, “for a
limited time only”, the CD/MP3s were included with the arrangements, like
getting a Christmas book with the CD stuck in the back cover. It made it a bit more pricey, but…yeah. Anyway, I ended up getting the book as well
as the PotC arrangement, downloaded in PDF format, which I printed off at work
after supper.
Actually, I was trying to make myself go practice when I
went to print off the music. I’m failing
quite miserably at meeting the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the
summer. At first, I decided that I would
practice 30 minutes every day.
Fail…that’s too constraining, and I found myself playing for an hour and
a half at a time when I did go practice, and it wasn’t consistent at all. Then
I decided to try a vague five hours a week, which has now turned into 3-5 hours
a week. Still though, it’s hard. I’ve known and heard and played my pieces now
for over a year, some of them longer, and sometimes it feels like heating and
reheating leftovers in the microwave over and over. I’m bored with them…and yet I know that as I
learn them better, I will move away from the technical aspects and discover
instead the freedom to play them well.
But for now, it’s like boring through granite. I thought I’d spice it up
by going to print off new music and playing that, and possibly ending with Amy
Beach or Beethoven (actually, not Beethoven…he is missing and I can’t find where
I put him when I moved house). And in
doing so, I discovered a practice technique.
The prospect of new music is always exciting, especially
after I’ve heard the song and fallen in love with it. I started with the God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen arrangement, right hand alone, and
played it all the way through. It fit
very nicely to my fingers…rippling and chordal, which is a style I’m fond
of. I played the right hand again, just
to get the feel of it and learn what I had absorbed the first time around. Then I did the left hand all the way through,
and tried putting the hands together just to get the feel of the rhythm. The timing is 4/4, but the grouping of the
notes is in six sixteenth notes for both hands and each hand has a different
emphasis – the right hand feels like two groups of three per beat and the left
hand feels like three groups of two.
It’s different, but moves smoothly once the brain catches on. Anyway, by the time the hour was up, it was
half learned.
I did the same thing with PotC, only my ear was accustomed
to the music already and I started out very slowly with hands together. Between my ear and sight-reading, I learned a
lot, and they worked both ways. The
crazy runs I’d been hearing and trying to figure out turned out to be chromatic
octaves in both hands, offset from each other, and it turned out to be simpler
than I had anticipated once I saw them on the page. The rhythm of the arpeggios on the third page
stumped me…it had something to do with a chord on beat one and then a run of
seven notes against five or something the rest of the measure.
However, I remembered how it sounded and was able to fit it all in evenly
without having to count it in mini-subdivisions.
So my theory is this: the next time I have a new piece to
learn, I’ll go ahead and spend an hour of intense practice on it…right hand for
a while, all the way through (providing that it isn’t a ridiculous amount of
pages long), and then the left hand. The
going will be slow, but that’s the way it should be in order to get all the
notes in the right place the first time.
I think that way, it will help so
that the piece doesn’t get old so quickly, because then the freedom to express
myself through it will come more quickly.
There are only a handful of pieces that I’ve played over the years that
have become a part of me, that have woven themselves into the fabric of my
musical being, and each time something like this has occurred first. I’m wondering, assuming that this is a valid
practice strategy, if it is wise to use it every single time…or if I should
combine it with other practice strategies…or use it as an opening get-my-feet-wet time to set notes and finger
positions and muscle movements in stone.
I don’t know. But I do know that there is a certain excitement with a new piece of music and a momentum that goes along with it. It can result in a burn-out, especially if it's really intense. But certainly it can be channeled into something profitable.
