Hearing voices

This is a little segment near the end of Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 2, which this past week I completed my first pass of memorizing on. The video documents my first step now getting the segments more into my hands and stringing smaller sections together.

I have such a love-hate relationship with passages where the melody is scattered between the hands and between other voices; on the one hand, it is a PAIN to slowly train my fingers to pluck out single notes in the mass of everything else going on—at one point in the passage here, three consecutive notes in the melody are played by the right hand thumb, then the left hand thumb, then the left hand pinky, all while both hands are balancing another voice at the time.

On the other hand (oh, ha!)…there is something really fucking fun about work like this, which I’m fully aware you have to be a certain kind of psycho to enjoy doing. When you overcome the false impulses your hands and ears want to act on, it is incredibly satisfying to have created some semblance of order from chaos.

This lil video is the result of roughly half an hour of work, taking a passage I’d barely just learned, way under tempo and at mismatched speeds, and steadfastly drilling it with the metronome until I could play it with some level of coherence. It’s extremely unmusical at the moment (phrase shaping? what’s that?) because my immediate priority was to just get the basic voicing worked out, so in the video I’m just thumping out the main theme with no refinement whatsoever.