- Edited
It's painful to admit this, but after too long at Alfred's Adult All-In-One Adult Course, my music reading skills are shockingly non-existent. I've got nil fluency with it beyond familiarity with certain landmarks, FACE, and other useless mnemonic gimmicks.
Sometimes I can spend days or weeks struggling to learn a piece from sheet music, but I've discovered that the only time I truly make a breakthrough in my progress with the piece is when I've memorized the part I'm trying to play. Only then does the pace of progress pick up and I feel like I'm finally getting somewhere.
Due to circumstances, I need to memorize two pieces of music in less than two weeks for the Music Artistry Program. Dr Yuna Roh will be the Visiting Artist.
Why did I sign up for this??
Since I have so little time to prepare, I'm simplifying my life by playing pieces I'm already familiar with. I've got Bluebird just about under my fingers and, due to some earlier insight from Roger which I'm grateful for, I've decided to bring back Canon in D to my repertoire.
For the first day I could barely play anything from the Pachelbel piece. I could play a little from memory and could gradually reconstruct more and more of it, but looking at the sheet music didn't help me at all and ground me to a terrifying halt. Looking at sheet music has been a complete drag and completely stalled my progress on the piece.
Instead, what helped was trying to recall the piece from memory. The hardest parts were the easiest somehow! My fingers want to fly. Once this started coming back, it did wonders for my confidence. The easiest parts are the ones I do have to double check against the sheet music for subtle differences.
Eventually, once I'm more confident with my reconstruction from memory, I will have to check my recollection note by note against the sheet music for mistakes. Or let my teacher do it for me!
Needless to say, I'll be playing both pieces from memory and the Visiting Artist can have the sheet music to herself.
Oh, and the YouTube algorithm made me feel a little less bad today by surfacing this video on how Chris Martin from Coldplay (not the Kratt brothers) wrote Clocks:
That's one piece I certainly have to learn!
Update: I got an Honorable Mention!
--
Beach L168, Wish, baCh, WOW Petrof, Fake Steinway, VS
TIME