March 27 Lesson Recap

Friday's lesson probably went better than I like to admit, but frankly I didn't play any of my pieces as well as I would have liked. The exception was my first, "Nannerl's Minuet" from the Denis Agay "Bach to Bartok" collection. I got the distinct impression from my last lesson that this is something I should have hit out of the park long ago, and my teacher basically said she'd give me one more week on it, so I spent a lot of time smoothing it out. I don't have any trouble understanding what's going on in it; I just have a lot of little accuracy and coordination issues to iron out, and I suspect that I just need to keep working over pieces like this to overcome them.
I played through it twice with only minor glitches, so at least I feel like that one is up to speed.

Clementi, movement two has a lot of rough spots. I'm actually amazed that I made it all the way through; I got lost several times, and in other spots I just blew right through, wrong notes, wrong fingers and everything, like a runaway car through a road block. I'm surprised she had anything good to say about it at all, but at least she acknowledged the rough spots too. Sometimes I feel like I'm being humored, but then she drops hints that some things shouldn't be giving me as much trouble as they do.

Burgmuller's Ballade is coming along too, but because I spent so much time worrying over the block chords, the major middle section didn't get as much attention as it needs. Fortunately, there's a lot of repetition in this one and I should have it done in a couple of lessons.

She assigned me two more pieces; Soldier's March by Schumann (more block chord reading!) and the A section of Clementi, movement three. I'm still ironing out a lot of the second movement; the fingerings are all very logical, but they just dont' stick in my head without constant repetition. I keep trying to find mnemonics, like shapes and patterns to help me remember, but I think the key is really just in getting the habits down, and I can't see doing that without a lot of repetition. I can already see a few patterns that recur from piece to piece, but there are also a lot curve balls out there to overcome. I've specifically asked for more pieces like Soldier's March so that I can get more practice reading vertically.

I think there are six lessons left to go this semester.