I spend hours every day learning how to play Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto in A Minor. It's terribly addicting. I can't play it as well as Artur Rubinstein, mind you, but even being able to play small segments of the concerto as well as he does makes buying this piano completely worth it. The same goes for Schumann's Träumerei. As short as it is (just one page), it is deceptively difficult to play the way he meant it to be played, as I quickly learned. Still, I am determined to learn both pieces (though I'm sure mastery of the latter will far precede that of the former).
I should also note a new tactic upon which I stumbled during my early struggles with this concerto. There are certain portions that seem almost absurd - one hand spanning several octaves in the same measure playing nothing but sixteenth-notes, for example. I realized, however, that if I train my eyes to pinpoint the target keys just before my hand reaches them, the accuracy of my fingers increases logarithmically. I know this sounds petty, but it's something I rarely do with simpler pieces; my eyes tend to wander and focus on several groups of keys at a time rather than on one specific key. With this new technique, my eyes are quite literally playing the entire concerto one step ahead of my fingers.
In other news, this morning Ralph (our technician), Swetha (our biotechnology grad student) and I were in the lab, and Jeff walked in and said, "I have a favor to ask of you three. I know somebody who is appearing on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and I'm one of the candidates for his Phone-A-Friend lifeline. So if the phone rings today anytime between 11 am and 7 pm, make sure I'm the one who answers it."
That, I must admit, was not even in the same league of favors I expected him to ask of us. How bizarre.
I should also note a new tactic upon which I stumbled during my early struggles with this concerto. There are certain portions that seem almost absurd - one hand spanning several octaves in the same measure playing nothing but sixteenth-notes, for example. I realized, however, that if I train my eyes to pinpoint the target keys just before my hand reaches them, the accuracy of my fingers increases logarithmically. I know this sounds petty, but it's something I rarely do with simpler pieces; my eyes tend to wander and focus on several groups of keys at a time rather than on one specific key. With this new technique, my eyes are quite literally playing the entire concerto one step ahead of my fingers.
In other news, this morning Ralph (our technician), Swetha (our biotechnology grad student) and I were in the lab, and Jeff walked in and said, "I have a favor to ask of you three. I know somebody who is appearing on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and I'm one of the candidates for his Phone-A-Friend lifeline. So if the phone rings today anytime between 11 am and 7 pm, make sure I'm the one who answers it."
That, I must admit, was not even in the same league of favors I expected him to ask of us. How bizarre.
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