Goldberg Purgatory: Day 31 Saturday, May 31 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 7:33 am

Note to self: create Google Spreadsheet that will keep track of how many days I’ve been working on this thing.

Got a lot of work done last night on the first half of Variation 3, which is actually not too hard at the right tempo… and is insanely difficult at my current skill level if I take it at the Gouldian “Hey! I’m a Virtuoso Pianist!” tempo.  The piece overall make take 100 minutes instead of 80, I’m thinking.  The audience is gonna love me.  My vendors will be serving Claritin-D washed down with Red Bull at the intermission.  If you come, you may want to bring crayons and Cheerios to keep yourself quiet.

Tell you what.  I’ll follow up the Goldbergs with Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur L’Enfant-Jesus (total performance time: two hours, ten minutes), and then end short and sweet with Ives’ Concord sonata (45 minutes).  Peter Jackson will come, and he’ll be saying, “Joe, I think you need to make some cuts”.  Bill Clinton will say, “Wow, maybe people DON’T want to listen to one guy for four hours.”

Okay, Enough schtick for now.  It’s going to be a “lecture-recital”, so I have to save some for the big show…

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Goldberg Purgatory: Day 26 Monday, May 26 2008 

Uncategorized joemarier 8:54 am

Well, I might as well say it.

90 percent of the time, practicing a passage “hands separate” is pointless.

Yes, it’s important to phrase each melodic line, and yes, occasionally you need to get the musculature going correctly.  But otherwise, if I’m having trouble with a passage, I just practice the passage a measure or a beat at a time — and I always get it finished faster, with less effort expended.

I mean, do saxaphonists practice one hand at a time? Do runners practice one foot at a time? You are doing one thing when you play piano, not one thing with one hand and another thing with another hand…

I’ve been playing piano for twenty-three years now.  I admit I have my weaknesses.  My lines aren’t always perfectly phrased.  I get pieces up to 80%, and often lose interest from there.  I’m intellectually excited by the process of learning, but not so much by the process of perfecting.  And practicing hands separate is certainly a part of perfecting a piece.  It gets the line in your head.  It gives you a track to run on.

But it also makes you have to go back and learn it hands together… all over again.

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Golberg Purgatory: Day 24. Saturday, May 24 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 2:22 pm

Okay, done with Variation 2.  On to variation three, the Canon at the Unison.

Now, the Canons present a particular difficulty.  Here’s why: a canon is like a round.  You have a basically identical melody in several voices, and the harmony works throughout.

However, unlike a round, with a canon, the composer can flip the melody, do it backwards, start it in different places, transpose it, or any combination of the above.

The difficulty is this.  Instead of practicing, you try and “solve” the canon until your brain hurts, instead of going to Wikipedia like a normal person.  Because it’s a way of avoiding practicing.

I need a nap.

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Goldberg Purgatory, Day 21 Wednesday, May 21 2008 

Uncategorized joemarier 10:32 pm

Another day, another four measures or so.

Note well, pianists around the world: the shorter the section you’re practicing, the faster it goes.  Particularly with baroque music, you take the smallest gestures — a measure, two measures — and you chain them together.

If you can’t tell, I find the work to be immensely satisfying, physically and intellectually.  Unlike when I was in school, and stressed out about it all the time.  I’m twenty-seven now; I have my bearings a bit more, and I’m willing to take it slow enough to get it right.

Well, almost right.  Right enough.

 

Goldberg purgatory: day 17 Saturday, May 17 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 10:54 pm

I’m starting to pick up speed now.

Saturday’s a good day to practice, actually.  I drop my wife off at her meeting, I drive home, put the kids to bed, take a quick nap (natch), and I’m ready to go.  Knocked out the first sixteen bars of the second variation today, and I’m ready to keep going.

What I’m concerned about is not mechanics though.  It’s dynamics, and touch.

First of all, the Goldbergs really were written for harpsichord, and I’m not playing them on a harpsichord.  Harpsichords have tiny, tiny keys for one thing, and I don’t have tiny, tiny hands.  Plus, I don’t have a harpsichord.  Heck, the piano isn’t even in the apartment.  I’m practicing on a fine electronic keyboard.  It’s actually quite nice, serves me well.  Good dynamic range.

Still, I don’t quite know how to play these so they sound good yet.  I can play them so that it sounds like I’m having a good time.  But I keep playing them differently.  As I said before, I keep it pretty detached… but then, I find that a more legato line in the eighth notes in the left hand brings out the 2:1 counterpoint… but it sounds too precious when the eighth notes are in the right hand.  Then I start thinking, maybe Glenn Gould was on to something when he banged out the first variation at forte, and I’m totally wrong to build slowly, since the second and third variation are pretty quiet and bubbly.  I’m going to be putting my friends to sleep with this eighty-minute monstrosity if I play it politely.

And so on, and so forth.  What I try to remember is that… I’m not unmusical.  Really.  It’ll come.

Maybe if I play it on organ instead…

 

Goldberg Purgatory: day 16 Friday, May 16 2008 

Uncategorized joemarier 11:14 pm

Okay, I haven’t posted for the last couple of days, but I have been working on it.  Sporadically.  And now, I’ve gotten the first half of the first variation DOWN.  Kind of.  Well, I’ve done it enough.  On to the second variation.

One thing I’m getting used to again is the strange feeling of exhaustion you get from piano practice.  It starts right below the shoulder blades: since you don’t get a back to your chair as a pianist, you have to support your back with your actual back muscles, which is a change.

And then your brain pops.

When I was in school, and practicing 1 and a half to three hours a day, I knew I was practicing well when my brain was sober-drunk; I could not express a coherent thought, could not find half my books, and really needed that four-hour nap.  That’s the brain that’s making progress on a difficult task.

That’s not how this little project is going, though.  Perhaps it’s because I’m feeling little pressure so far.

 

Goldberg, day 6. Tuesday, May 6 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 11:32 pm

The strategic pause is now called off.

Completed measures 13-16, and here’s how I changed my strategy.

I used an old pianists’ trick: tally marks.  See, ultimately, you have to play through most passages a whole bunch of times in order to achieve mastery.  There’s no way around it: the more times you play it, the better off you are.   So, it’s best to count your reps as you go along, so that you don’t cheat yourself.  Hence, making a tally mark for each rep.

With Bach, I generally go one measure at a time, then string them together in twos, then fours.  My minimum is four measures a day, and with 25 reps in ones, twos, and fours, a passage may take me about a half hour.  A half hour on four measures?  You bet.  After that, you know those measures pretty well, and you shape them to how you want them to sound as you play through.

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Goldberg, day… question mark? Tuesday, May 6 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 9:54 pm

At this point, I don’t even know what day it is in the stupid Goldberg Variations thing. I’m BUSY with OTHER THINGS than sitting in front of my dumb electronic keyboard and sawing away like a grad student. I have a LIFE. I have a career. I have responsibilities. I have a wife in the next room.

It has come to this. I call a strategic pause!

 

Goldberg, Day 4 Sunday, May 4 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 3:26 pm

Variation 1, meaures 1-8.

Feelings toward Bach: still amiable!

In the time management course I took a few months back, they said that the afternoon is the best time for tasks that require pain, because that’s the time of day that our threshold is the highest.

So, I get right into Variation 1, which I will nickname “Bring the Pain.”

Piano requires muscles, and those muscles I have let atrophy. Mentally, everything is there, but the fingers are still a bit jellylike. Right now, my left fourth and fifth fingers are a bit tender from a sixteenth-note passage I was running. It takes time….

 

Goldberg, day 3. Saturday, May 3 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 11:07 pm

Did nothing today, and not gonna.  Too tired.

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