Tag Archives: scales

Day 102 – January 10th – Memory and Maquarre

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In many ways today was very uneventful. This morning was both wet and windy, and I practiced all my scales and technique to an accompaniment of wild weather sounds from outside. I was really happy with how quite a bit of it went, particularly on the memory side of things. My Reichert exercises felt easy, even when I pushed the tempo, and compared to where I was a month ago with them I’m really happy with how they’re sounding. Some of the other exercises were also feeling good, and I’ve finally got the first page of Bach’s E minor sonata (half of the first movement) from memory.

There are still things that are frustrating me though, one of them being the Maquarre exercises. Given they’re written specifically to make us play the unexpected, but it feels like I can’t get them into my fingers! I’ve finally got the C major version of exercises one from memory, but can’t then transpose it to any other key with any ease. I think these could be the next candidates for mental practice.

The Moyse 25 Melodic Studies are quite a bit harder than the 24, and all of a sudden I need to spend time learning the notes as well as working on the meaning of the study. No. 5 is particularly frustrating, as it looks like easy arpeggio figures, but some of them don’t sit under the fingers well and then I tie myself in knots. Hopefully most of them will be unraveled in time for class on Monday!

I went for a run just as the sun was setting, and though it was still ridiculously windy made it round my short 2-mile circuit in almost record time. I felt like I could have run further, but forays off into the Kentish Downs probably aren’t a good idea when it’s getting dark.

Day 78 – December 17th – Mince Pies and Enescu

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I have to admit to not feeling terribly prepared for tomorrow’s class, as until two days ago we all thought there wasn’t one! However, Trevor confirmed that there indeed is, and our repertoire piece is Enescu’s Cantabile et Presto. Lovely piece, but a lot of notes for those of us like me who haven’t played it before!

I certainly won’t be putting my hand up to play in class tomorrow, and if possible I might take my turn at sitting out on this one, since I’ve played every other repertoire piece and excerpt so far. That said, I was pleasantly surprised how much of the piece I could get at least nominally under the fingers in today’s practice session – all the work on scale pattern over the last few months is definitely paying off.

This afternoon I finally got round to making some mince pies, though I wasn’t terribly pleased with the result. I bought mince meat ages ago, but never got round to making pastry, so then got some frozen pastry at Tesco on Tuesday. Anyway, the pastry was rather too thick and puffy despite my best efforts at rolling, and didn’t taste like mum’s at all. So I’m treating them as a practice batch for making proper ones and my grandparents’ next week, and will probably finish up the rest of the mince meat with my porridge in the morning!

Day 65 – December 4th – Mei

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After gearing myself up for a tough day playing contemporary music for Trevor, I was pleasantly surprised how things turned out. I still didn’t fare too well in morning warm-ups – though my Reichert exercises were actually quite good, I wasn’t able to pick up on the pattern of a new scales exercise very well, nor play it at the speed Trevor was already setting! Looks like I’ll be adding that one to my practice list for the weekend.

To my surprise, Mei went quite well; Trevor could see that I mostly understood the music and had worked on it, and as a result I ended up having a really productive and rewarding lesson. There was one fundamental thing with the piece that I hadn’t thought about, and that’s the use of vibrato. We’ve been playing ‘standard’ repertoire for so long now that it didn’t even cross my mind to think about playing senza vibrato (and I had deliberately not listened to any recordings), which was a silly mistake. The piece mimics shakuhachi playing, and so “of course” should be played without vibrato, as in the Japanese musical culture it’s an ornament. Lesson duly learned.

From there, however, Trevor kept pushing me to play the music with sharper grace notes, more convincing pitch bends and a greater intensity of direction and dynamics. I enjoyed myself, and when his final comment was “some very good things happening there, but you need to do a lot of work playing without vibrato” I had to stop myself leaping for joy. His praise is so rare that it really means something when it does come!

We went to a nearby pub for dinner, and have just got back. It was a nice place – The Five Bells – and the food was yummy. Everything is starting to feel very Christmassy, especially since we head out into ‘civilisation’ so infrequently.

Day 63 – December 2nd – Cold

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With the start of December it has suddenly started to get cold in earnest. I can’t quite believe that on the weekend I was in London and Cambridgeshire walking around in a light jumper, and now I’m snuggled up in my room trying to convince myself that another layer (I’m wearing four, one of them thermal) is not yet necessary. Alas, I think part of the problem is that my room is not as well-insulated as the rest of the dairy. I’m just going to have to develop a thicker winter skin!

Though we had out weekly shopping excursion this morning, I feel like I’ve had a productive day. I tried to shake my practice up a bit in two ways, with the first being more astute with my Complete Daily Exercises routine. I tried not to repeat any of Reichert No. 2 or 4 unnecessarily. Rather, I tried to start out each key in a tempo that I thought was achievable, and play through without scaring myself into mistakes. If it was super easy, I repeated it at a brisker tempo, if it was super hard, I went for a really slow, deliberate version. I’ve still got a bit of a way to go trusting myself with no. 2, but was pleasantly surprised how no. 4 is coming along.

I also spent a bit of time playing exercises in thirds the way Trevor showed us in class yesterday, though just majors for now. The exercises is like Taffanel and Gaubert No. 4, beginning the scale from the tonic, mediant, dominant and finally leading note, though rather than following this pattern back down the final descent is two octaves long. A nice variation is playing little moon the way on the way back down, though I only tried this if I was feeling relatively confident with the rest of the pattern.

As for sequences: I am no longer scared of them, I can play them, they just need to keep getting faster.

With all my various studies, excerpts and pieces (and there are a few) I tried not to work on anything for more than five minutes at a time. Most of this time, this meant that I isolated one element of a study that I felt needed work and focused on it for that time. With things like Andersen No. 9 (single and double tonguing) this worked really well. With others, such as Mei, it didn’t work so well since I was trying to think in bigger chunks. I ended up instead by prompting myself to move on from things if I didn’t get them within one or two tries. As a result, I know very clearly what still I need to work on with it tomorrow, and can hopefully target areas the way I was with my studies.

Day 35 – November 4th – Rain, sun, thunder!

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View of last night's sunset from my bedroom window. Please excuse our washing line!

View of last night’s sunset from my bedroom window. Please excuse our washing line!

It was raining at 6:30 this morning, and I almost didn’t go for my run, preferring to turn my alarm off and go back to bed! Then half an hour later the sun came out and I managed a quick 2.5 miles before the weekly Tesco trip. I’m still fascinated by the sky here after rain and storms, particularly at sunrise and sunset. The clouds, rendered turbulent and brooding, seem to twist the light and fling it across the sky in dazzling colours and brushstrokes.

Moyse and scales are getting gradually faster. The Moyse exercises were at crotchet = 118 today, but felt relatively comfortable, so will be pushed up to 120 tomorrow. As for scales, I’m now at:

Majors = 104

Melodic minors = 88

Major and minor arpeggios = 104

Dominant and diminished 7ths = 92

Augmented and diminished arpeggios = 88 (still feeling a bit shaky though)

Whole tone scales and chromatic = 104

I can certainly feel my fingers after my three hours of exercises and scales in the mornings. Hopefully that means everything is getting stronger and quicker, but I am making sure not to cause any pain with what I’m doing.

The repertoire for this week is Sonate en Concert for flute, cello and piano by Jean-Michel Damase. To be honest, I think it’s a little bit twee, and it’s certainly not the sort of repertoire I’d choose to play myself. Not that it’s easy, some of the trills and grace notes in the allegro sections are a killer. However, I have also borrowed out the Berio Sequenza, ideally to have a read through, but I’m not sure I’ll find the time.

Modelling my lovely new scarf.

Modelling my lovely new scarf.

Despite the onset of a rather ferocious thunderstorm this evening, two things made me feel warm and snuggly in a wintry sort of way. First off, my St Mary’s College scarf arrived in the post. It’s lovely and woolly, and a nice reminder of all the friendships I made at the college (and how much I miss them). Then for dinner I made a hearty sound using up some of the superfluity of potatoes, cabbage and carrots that we have. Bring on winter!