Tag Archives: Pinkie Polka

Day 76 – December 15th – Abnormal Mondays

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Instead of class today, we had another practice day, a trip to Tesco in the afternoon and then a chamber rehearsal in the evening. I’m rather glad of the extra day – I’m feeling about as confident as I’m going to with all my various studies for tomorrow, and looking forward to the concert.

Following my chat with Trevor on Friday, I’ve thrown myself into all the technical work with renewed determination, and was particularly happy with Reichert No. 2 this morning. Taffanel and Gaubert-style scales (from memory) are feeling good in major, but I still keep second guessing myself in the minor keys and then falling apart. I good proof of how much I’ve improved in the last ten weeks though was that I played the Pinkie Polka at crotchet = 80. I haven’t touched it for a couple of weeks now, but wanted to see where I was at, and rather surprised myself! The first metronome marking I’ve got down on the page is crotchet = 56, so it’s been quite a good step up.

Lesson: Remember the bigger picture as well as the day-to-day.

Our flute history paper is due tomorrow, and I’m rather glad – I need to stop proofreading it and move on to other things! At this rate I’ll probably launch straight from this one into the 1700-onward paper due in March!

Day 28 – October 28th – Bizet and Griffes

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Dark evenings certainly make a difference, it’s 8:50pm and I already feel ready for bed! On the other hand, I did go for a lovely run this morning, so not all bad.

We went to Peri Court Farm as part of our shopping trip today, so I was able to get some dark chocolate-coated ginger as a reward for my practice. Yummy!

Practice itself went quite well, especially scales! After a few days of them sounding and feeling utterly shocking, today suddenly worked. Several possible reasons why:

– We switched back to Moyse finger exercises this week (and I only did them at crotchet = 96 today to iron out errors)

– I had lunch and a break between Moyse exercises and scales, which may have given the muscles a chance to recover

– I’ve been practising and it’s paying off!

I’ll have to see how things progress tomorrow, but hopefully this is a permanent improvement.

Yesterday Trevor added another set of exercises to our list, Daily Exercise No. 1 by Marquarre, which can be found on page 40 of Complete Daily Exercises. I had to sightread it solo in class yesterday and found it really hard! The first bar in the C major version is C – D# – E – G, and I could not get my fingers to follow the pattern. Trevor did confirm that this is exactly the point of the exercise – to make us play something unexpected and non-scalic – but I still need to do some work on it. I also spent a good solid 10 min on the Pinkie Polka today, and can now play it at crotchet = 63.

Our repertoire for this week is the Griffes Poem, and the orchestral excerpt the Menuet from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne Suite No.2. I haven’t played the Griffes before, and so have rather got my work cut out learning notes, but have found it to be a lovely piece. I’m quite keen to program it for something further down the track if I get the opportunity.

As for the Bizet, well it’s just such sparkling, stunning music, like having a warm hug without it being too overpowering. I’ve been listening to the Berlin Phil/Karajan recording on Youtube, which is bubbly and delightful. The flute solo starts at 5:22, but why not listen to the whole thing and feel inspired?