Florence Price made me all Gandalf-y
Dispatches from the Imperfection Lab
I totally messed up—I’d recorded a practice video last week and then seemed to completely forget that in order to post videos I have to like, upload them and schedule posts to go out! So there was no practice post this week even though I totally did my homework. My bad.
So today you get TWO practice videos!
The first, from last week, came from a couple of days of me painstakingly relearning sections of the Florence Price Fantasie Nègre No. 2 that I’d learned at the end of 2022 and then not touched for over a month. It’s not unusually difficult or hard-to-grasp music, so I didn’t think it would be that hard, but when I started reading through passages I’d actually memorized earlier my brain just went
COME ON, BRAIN.
Hence this video of me painstakingly plodding through a big middle chunk of the Fantasie, complete with stumbles and memory slips galore.
My goal this week was originally to finish re-memorizing the entire piece, even if it meant it would take me 20 minutes to trudge through the whole thing, and then in the middle of the week the part of me that loves creating beautiful things and having fun revolted and went
and basically demanded that I halt the painful stitching-together process and to instead start making actual music out of what I’d already relearned.
I would not go so far as to sincerely call this “actual music”—it’s too square in places where it should flow and the little playful section is so muddled at the moment—but getting it just to this point required me to start making some artistic decisions and honestly it felt pretty great. It was a reminder that I need to structure my work to have variety, or else my brain will riot and go on strike.