Panic practicing
Dispatches from the Imperfection Lab
Discovering, with a few days’ notice, that I had to go into a studio and record myself playing through excerpts of a piece I haven’t actually learned yet for national radio sent me into a panicked spiral, followed by a practice session in which I realized that you cannot practice in a panic, it’s no good.
In a way forcing myself to calm down and focus on the music was really helpful and reminded me that I can play the piano and it’s all going to be okay.
I feel pretty good about the opening of Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 1, which was in this shape with minimal preparation:
…and after recording this video and playing it back I realized there was still a lot of room for more nuance and shading, which gave me something musical to actually focus on.
Then I panicked over the fact that one of the passages I sent over as a potential example to play through was this gnarly section with left hand octave arpeggios, which is not easy:
So I put the metronome on and started drilling and about a half hour later I had this:
You can tell my octaves are a little hesitant, but I’m hoping that sleeping on this will help things gel and that my hands will feel more comfortable in this section over the next couple of days.
[breathes into paper bag]
I GOT THIS.