Stringing it together

(In case you are new here or just don’t remember: my process is to memorize notes by rote BEFORE I can play the music, aka building a mental scaffolding that isn’t based on muscle memory. This is why early-stage practice videos of new pieces make me sound like a child.)

It was a little hard for me to really get into memorizing new music this past week, largely because I was consistently torn between wanting to work on the FMH concerto and wanting to get a move on getting new rep into my brain. (I know myself, and if I don’t get new rep learned now, the new year is going to roll around and it will feel too “late” to get started on stuff and then I will feel Bad.)

I managed to memorize a few measures here and a few measures there of the Florence Price Fantasie Nègre No. 2 from Monday to Thursday, but did not seem to have the brain cells to put them all together. Finally on Friday I sat myself down and sternly told myself that I wasn’t getting up until I strung all the new material together. It took some patient brain wrangling before I was able to achieve flow and really make any sort of progress.

There’s always a disconnect when I record these just-learned videos, because I feel so triumphant and accomplished having strung a passage together, and then I listen back and realize that it sounds SO DULL under tempo with no dynamics or articulation. Ah well, such is The Process.