Lesson #1

Today began a new series, and unfortunately the last, of lessons with my piano teacher.  The inevitable question is always what pieces do I want to work on, so I selected a representative sample of about 60 minutes of music that would complement well for a recital.  I have to admit that I often program on instinct, but since I've never actually performed a full piano recital, my theories of programming have never exactly been tested.  So ultimately today begins with kernels of repertoire, and pieces will be added as these have been worked up to a certain level.  They may be the pieces that I selected alongside them yesterday.  They may be pieces that suit my situation and ability level more appropriately at that later time.  But if one lesson I should have learned by now is that I look at the larger picture, but never actually work the foundation to actually support the success of the project.  Start small, and grow larger.  Not think large and have the entire idea tumble down.  

And then the process of micromanaging my process.  I cannot look at an entire work and learn it simultaneously, I need to break it down into sections, and build gradually.  I cannot learn a work by just playing it over and over again; the nuance never develops and it continually sounds choppy and unrehearsed.  The measures that technically need the work never get the focus they needed, and will always sound the weakest.  But ultimately, the word of the day ispatience.  I don't have the training I wish I would have had, and it takes a lot of work to get to the point to where it comes easily for others.  

And today was a painful reminder of my lack of training.  She asked me to play a scale.  And it made me realize the basics of techniques which are taught in elementary school piano lessons through high school I have never learned.  Those years of discipline lost, when I was studying a now forgotten instrument.  The choices of not practicing as a youth and being pulled out of lessons.  The years of a quixotic journey towards finding, but never finding myself, and where my musical focus really laid.  And I am now where I am now.  Thirty-two and starting over.  

But a scale.  Even though we started with C Major, we explored a complicated pattern of both parallel and contrary motion, growing and lessening in intensity, and wrist motion.  Jesus, my wrists.  If there was ever one, singular bad habit that I've developed in all my years of playing badly, it is that.  My wrists.  They're stiff, they're not fluid, they don't do what they are supposed to do, because they've never been trained right.  In fact, over twenty years of playing badly have taught them in such a way that makes it virtually impossible to unlearn.  And this is the lesson of the first lesson.  And the selection of three pieces of music, though we never actually looked at any of the repertoire.  

But I guess I'll be looking at my scales again and brushing up on the Hanon exercises.  And all of a sudden I wish I would have done this twenty years ago, instead of feeling like I'm starting from the beginning, touching a piano for the first time.