doing it because i love it

November 5, 2005 at 5:41 AM

So the costume....I opted to not dress up in the interest of my ability to perform the pieces i needed to play. Of course though, me being highly organized and generally always well prepared had to mess up the recital time by 30 minutes. I arrived what I thought would be half an hour early but ended up being the start time. Hmm...oops. How I managed to get the time mucked up, I don't know. I did get everyone tuned though and all my students did a great job. When it came to my turn to play I felt completely calm and relaxed. My vibrato which I've struggled with lots was really loose and relaxed and even. It was one of those performances that once you are in it you just never want it to end because everything feels so good and right. I was in complete control the whole time and felt completely free and at ease. It was great! Too bad it wasn't recorded.

This week has been hectic both in music and at school. Lots of homework, teaching, practicing and all the regular craziness of life! One thing that made this week really great is I had my first piano lesson since the beginning of June. My first piano lesson in nearly half a year!!! I had managed to practice over the summer and in between things I managed to squeeze in time here and there to sit down at the piano and play. I picked out a new work to learn by Ernst Schneider called "Homage to SR," SR being Sergei Rachmaninov. It's a difficult piece but I love playing Mr. Schneider's music and it's been a long time since I've done one of his piano works. It is loaded with different Rachmaninov theme's and some challenging passagwork where the patterns are not anything aside from rhythmic in order making them hard to remember which notes you jump to when. There are points in this piece where you stop figuring out in those massive chords which notes have accidentals, you figure out which chords don't have accidentals. It's a really fun piece and I'm loving it! I'm also working on a Bach Prelude and Fugue. Bach fugues have got to be the hardest, most stressful things to play on any instrument. The prelude, now that it's under my fingers, is a lot of fun to play though and a very sweet, lyrical piece. Now I'm going to boast a bit here, my piano teacher asked what i wanted to do in regards of piano this year because I'm not at this point planning on trying for the ARCT exam, I just want to be a good, competent pianist who can sit down and play a Beethoven Sonata just because I want to. Anyways, part of being a competent pianist is technique. I absolutely loath practicing technique on the piano so I told my piano teacher I want her to make me do technique at every lesson. We are starting off easy, not tons of technique but a few different scales and things that I have to do. This is where the boasting comes in. Everyday since my lesson on Tuesday (all of three days) I have sat down and practiced through my entire set of technique things that I was assigned before playing a single note in my repertoire. *listens for the applause*

One thing that I really appreciate about being able to sit down at the piano and play is I don't have any obligations or things that I have to do. I'm playing purely because I love to play and want to play. It's also kind of ironic that the busier I get with everything the more time I seem to be able to make to sit down and play. It's like a release of all the stress and anxiety of the day and days to come. I can just live in the moment for awhile and focus on making something beautiful for me and only for me. It's not because I have a gig (as fun as those are!) or because I have an exam, it's because I choose to.

Tomorrow morning I have a violin lesson and I intend to find my bed earlier tonight. I forgot some of my homework assignment at school and have finished more or less all of what I brought home that needs to be done so an early night is managable tonight!

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doing it because i love it

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