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May 15, 2023

Take 1

Dispatches from the Imperfection Lab

Truly sorry that I haven’t posted practice videos for a while—ironically I’ve been making so many practice videos for my own reference for weeks, but I’ve been so wrung out from prepping for and doing things that I haven’t had the leftover energy to pick videos to upload and schedule posts.

My husband came along to last week’s recording session (for moral support for me and because it was fun and interesting for him) and in addition to taking photos, he also recorded some of the recording. Here’s the first full take I did of Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 2:

One of the most mentally distracting things about recording is that every single time there’s an imperfection—a split or dropped note, a little flub, a run that’s not entirely clean—I think “oh, now that passage is ruined and we’ll have to redo it,” and I have to quickly redirect that thought in the moment so that 1) I don’t give up entirely or 2) get distracted and mess up even more. It’s a totally different game from performing, where once the thing is played, it’s gone, whether or not it was clean, and I don’t have to mentally track it.

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