You listed four options 😁
But you’re still kind of missing my point. Namely, the fifth option, resetting my internal tempo, which is a slightly different nuance from what you’ve written.
Anyway, I think my work with the metronome these last few days, along with a super productive lesson yesterday with my new teacher, is helping me do both, i.e. reset my tempo sensibilities and also improve my accuracy at a slightly faster but still very manageable tempo.
We also worked on how to have a more consistent tempo throughout the piece. I already knew that I have a tendency to speed up when I make a mistake, or when I’m about to make a mistake, but she helped me identify where in the beat I tend to do that and we talked about some strategies for how to circumvent it. She also talked about how, when you stay within the tempo, within the beat, this feeling of space opens up in the music and I felt that expansiveness, it was really amazing.
My new teacher loves my arrangement of the Canon, by the way. I played the whole thing for her for the first time yesterday and she was really impressed with how I’ve arranged it and the changes I made to each section, so that was quite gratifying. 🙂
