By the Lake of Wallenstadt

I'd rather actually be there. I have begun working on the bass clef of the first 4 measures. It's in both the book and the CD of Lizst pieces that Jody gave me for Christmas and, by ear and eye, seemed like perhaps the easiest piece in there. Daunting.

Czerny #14, revisited

I think I got it! At least so that the mistakes are just stupid mistakes. And I can actually play it with a little humor. Am ready to give myself a sticker and move on.

New Drills!

Yuliya (who celebrated the 20th anniv of her arrival in the US yesterday, remembering that she had at that moment $314 and spoke no English) has taught me the "Russian" way to play minor scales, in which the hands do 2 octaves, then diverge, with the right hand continuing the melodic minor and the left descending with the natural. And she taught me a way to do arpeggios in which you begin by doing every conceivable arpeggio that uses (in whatever inversion) the same base note. I'll start with C, thank you.

Arpeggios

The harder ones for me are the ones where you get no leverage from the black key/white key height difference - - C, F, G and F#. I guess the fingering of the others is intended to take advantage of that leverage, using long fingers for the black keys and anchorage from the thumb on a white key.

Czerny

I approach Czerny with an element of despair. For several months I have been working on #14 from the School of Velocity. I have worked out a strategy for every little beat. Sometimes I remember all those strategies when I play the piece. Sometimes I can actually apply the remembered strategies. I am now bold enough to try to struggle through it with the metronome. It's marked "molto vivo e velocissimo." I play it largo. If I set the metronome at 40, there's not enough pulse to get me to the next beat, so I set the metronome at 80 and pretend it's written in 4/8 instead of 2/4. And even that speed is "aspirational" - - as in the ABA's generous statement that the expectation that lawyers will perform 50 hours a year of pro bono service is actually an "aspirational" standard. I can follow the beat for a while, and then I start getting behind. I imagine that an aspiring world-class tennis player might feel that way when playing a real champion - - he can keep up a volley for a while, and then he just loses it. When I start a new Czerny next time, I'm going to mark it for each time I play it - - as if I'm in prison, marking off the days of a sentence on the cell wall. And my aspiration will be that the succeeding pieces in School of Velocity will have fewer and fewer marks. Hope springs eternal.

Drills

I really like drills. The satisfaction probably comes from the belief that they improve my mental grip on the keyboard, and I can bask in that even when they sound lousy. I do major scales, simple arpeggios, minor scales (harmonic, melodic, and natural), and 3rds and 6ths. I think it's time to find a way to learn a drill that will show me something about 7ths.