The Use of "I REALLY REALLY LIKE THIS PIECE"

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.