Gah, has it really been ten days?

Since I last blogged? Yipes. My parents actually thought I had given up the practicing. Not so. I'm still practicing daily, and today I was actually able to bump up my average to an even 60 minutes per day in February. I was feeling rather uninspired today, otherwise I would have spent a bit more time working on my pieces. I worked on Beethoven Sonata no. 8, drilled a few portions of it and then played through the whole thing to see how it sounds. Ugh. Not so pretty. I have some work to do on that one! I'm hoping part of my problem was the lack of inspiration I had today. Oh well.

I also worked on Clair de Lune a bit, just playing it through a few times. I'm working on memorization with this one, and there's not really any big problem areas right now, though I could stand to do some drills at the key change, and I think I need to slow it down a little bit.

Next I worked through the Nocturne, drilling my speedy parts. I also made a discovery-- at the first super fast run, I was actually playing too many notes. I was playing 43 notes when actually only 41 are notated! It's not going to make that big of a difference in getting the speed to where I want it, but it's nice to know I was playing it wrong all this time before I got it totally ingrained in my memory. So I drilled it a few times to work on the actual way it is supposed to be played, then I played the song through once. Again, it sounded awful, hopefully due in part to my lack of inspiration today.

I was going for 65 minutes of practice today to bump up my time, and I had three minutes to go, so I played May Song from memory. I'm pleased to say that I still remembered it! It didn't sound so great, but I know it, I know the notes, I know the dynamics, but I just didn't feel it today. Perhaps I'll feel music tomorrow.