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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Goldberg, day 2, part 3. Friday, May 2 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 11:12 pm

Aria, measures 8-16, learned.

I’m starting to get the feeling that J.S. Bach (1685-1750) is just toying with me. As if… the piece gets harder as it goes along…

Still, an excellent start. I will mark it all on my official Goldberg Spreadsheet.

 

Goldberg: day 2, cont. Friday, May 2 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 3:43 pm

You see, it’s not just about the practicing, and the memorizing, and the so called “hard work.”  It’s also about the ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL STEP of… modding my sheet music.

I tend to be a bit rough on my music, you see, and I can’t have it looking dogeared and sad, with the binding cracking and splitting on that bottom edge where it sits at a most unnatural angle for hours at a time… I have my standards.

So, I took my Henle edition of the Goldberg Variations to my local Kinko’s.  Got the binding cut off, double-laminated the front and back cover, and spiral bound it. 

Not cheap, but worth it.

 

Goldberg, day 2 Friday, May 2 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 7:35 am

Learned: Aria, measures 1-8.

Feelings towards Bach: neutral. Not awake enough to feel strongly one way or another.

One note on the Henle edition I’m working off of; it’s fingered like it’s a nineteenth-century organ sonata. Lots of thumb, lots of finger crossing, lots of finger switching on the same note, as if Bach is meant to be played with a lugubrious legato.

Wrong. Baroque music is not legato. It’s detached, more or less. I’m rewriting the fingerings as I go.

The way I define “learning” a section is this; I work out the fingering in the right hand. I work out the fingering in the left hand. I play it together with the music in front of me. I play it with the music closed, and remember the fingerings that I worked out. If I can do that, it’s learned, and I move to the next section.

I spend virtually no time “reviewing what I did yesterday.”

This is a duel. The Variations are my honorable adversaries. To review is to retreat, and to retreat mindlessly is to surrender. I press forward, always.

 

Goldberg: Day 1 Thursday, May 1 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 11:03 pm

I picked up my copy of The Goldberg Variations today.

If you don’t know, the Goldberg Variations are a series of thirty variations on a theme, written for harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach, made famous by two landmark recordings on the piano by Glenn Gould in 1955 and 1981.

It is one of the most challenging pieces in the literature.

I haven’t played piano seriously in nearly five years.

I’m learning them all.

Try and stop me.

~

In my initial count, The total number of measures, not counting repeats, is nine hundred forty eight.

So, that means I need to learn about three measures a day to have gone through the whole thing in a year.

I’m hoping to learn more than three measures a day, but I’m not counting on it. I have two kids, and many responsibilities aside from the piano (I’m a singer by trade as well).
I begin tomorrow morning, with the Aria, and my explanation of how I learn a piece.

 

Day -x Monday, Apr 21 2008 

Goldberg joemarier 8:20 pm

Okay, so I called in to my local music store.

“Hello?”

“Hi, do you have a copy of ‘The Goldberg Variations?’”

“And that’s by…”

“…Bach”

Somehow, I haven’t lost faith in the human race, despite it all.

But why would I be ordering a copy of the Goldbergs?

Stay tuned.

 

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