I’m addicted
I Dreamed a Dream - from Les Miserables, performed by Ruthie Henshall.
Metaphorically speaking, that is, today. But I did make the dishes rattle on the other side of the room :o).
Today I had one of my best-ever runs through Rachmaninoff’s C# Minor Prelude - particularly that furious rush down the keyboard of the dueling triplets of chords. I nailed it so hard and so surprisingly easily that I was able to mentally step back and almost passively watch myself about half-way through it. Schmoley, it was impressive!
How did I do it, and why today? Two things contributed, I think, though I’m not sure exactly how they did. First: I warmed up for upwards of an hour, going through almost every exercise (of the 21 that I do in Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist) at least twice, some probably close to 10 times. For as abysmally-little as I have played in the last two years, I was stunned that I didn’t get fatigued from the exercises alone. The extensor muscles in my forearms only burned a couple of times. Amazing. Inexplicable.
Second: I wasn’t concentrating on the piece fully when I played it. In fact, I was simultaneously thinking about a conversation I had had with a friend about him learning to play Rachmaninoff, and what advice I would give him. I have the prelude memorized, at this point, primarily in terms of kinetics (movements, positions and spatial relationships) and sounds. Merely thinking of the sound that I want brings to mind, instantaneously and effortlessly, the feeling of what I have to physically do to get it, and the impetus to do it. I feel it the way you anticipate the next step of a dance you can dance in your sleep - you don’t think of specific steps or muscle contractions, just where you want to go, what you want to emphasize, how you want it to feel. If I think of the actual notes themselves, my hands utterly forget what they’re supposed to do, my playing comes to a screeching halt and the whole thing falls apart into a million pieces. (I’m not saying other pianists, especially ones far better than me, have this particular trouble; it might be a function of how I learn - or don’t learn - a given piece.)
Anatomically (to the extent I have my neuroanatomy correct - and it’s one of my weakest areas of knowledge of anatomy at the moment), I think I’m partially disengaging my frontal lobes, which are responsible for self-conscious, deliberate, analytical thought, and giving most of the responsibility over to my cerebellum, which is responsible for muscle memory, body-space awareness, learned-but-habituated movements, and the like.
Because of this, playing piano strikes me very much like writing or speaking. First, you have to know a lot about your subject matter. But once you do, you can just hold an idea, perspective or point in your mind and the words to express it just flow. If you thought self-consciously about each word, or tried to double-check every phrase as you wrote it, your mind would jam up and nothing would come out. The more you focused on a particular word, the more you would lose sight of the whole idea to be expressed, thereby losing the ability to decide which word is best, and the whole venture crumbles before any words hit the paper. But if you keep a single, general idea confidently in mind, words just pour out - and sometimes beautifully (and sometimes not). Only when it’s out can you see what you’ve got, what needs work, what you’re fuzzy on, etc.
Playing piano is like that, once I know a piece inside and out. As soon as I reflect on it, critique it in real-time, or especially if I think of any of the concrete mechanics of it (specific notes, where exactly my hands must go), I have given up expressing it at that moment, and cannot. But so long as the sound that I want, the total picture I am aiming for, the single distillation of my feeling about it, is my only thought about the piece, I can create it.
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I also decided today what pieces I’m going to learn next. It’s been … about five years since I set out to systematically learn a new piece. If the difficulty level is at or above the hardest piece I currently have mastered, it takes me a year, on average, if I take lessons, to learn one non-trivial piece. But all these new ones I can sightread cold for both hands simultaneously with the main melodies recognizable. So they’re pretty easy. I think this will be very good for keeping me motivated, so I play more often (which will keep my hands healthier), and I’ll be in a better position to borrow someone’s piano to play while I’m in Kenya so that I can play while I’m there. I love multi-pronged solutions. (Come to think of it, I’ve borrowed the pianos of perfect strangers for several months at a time in Wisconsin, Arizona and Australia, which doesn’t include pianos owned by a roommate or a university).
I’ve decided on a Valse by Chopin (Op. 64, No. 2), his Nocture in E-flat Major (Op. 9, No. 2), and Rachmaninoff’s G# Minor Prelude (Op. 32, No. 12). It’s been a while since I learned a piece in a major key. Probably Chopin would have had to call that Nocture a Petit Requiem if he had written it in a minor key.
For some reason, I have little patience for blithely happy-sounding pieces (which are often in major keys). I just can’t bear to learn them, and I don’t know why. But I have noticed that I have far more interest in and patience for slow songs now. In fact, I have no intention of playing the new Rachmaninoff prelude at its specified tempo (120-168bpm - which for this piece works out to 480-672 notes/minute). Instead, I plan on playing it slowly. The tone of the notes is just fantastically beautiful (ode to minor keys), and I see no reason not to dwell on it.
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