A Sad Time Leads to Breakthrough

A Sad Time Leads to Breakthrough RFT Music Stories
20
A Sad Time Leads to Breakthrough
I got married to my first wife when I was 19. It was one of those pathetic kid things that was doomed to failure from the beginning, so when she threw me out, two years later, it was a statistically predictable thing; but it also defined one of the lowest periods of my life.
I got a little room in a college men's boarding house, a shared bathroom kind of thing, and slouched through the next three months like Atlas bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. I sporadically attended classes, I worked a night job at the student union cafeteria, and I hung out with all my old bachelor buddies. My normal waking hours were from 12:00 noon until 4:00 in the morning.
I was so sad. I would wake up in the morning, feel my good morning stab of pain through the heart, and then drag myself to the clavichord, my part of the divorce settlement. I would sit and sigh, and play one note at a time for hours, out of a little study score of Bach's Inventions, Goldberg Variations, and the Italian Concerto. I just sat there, played a note, sighed, played another note, sighed, and so on.
I was not practicing slowly because of some clever stratagem—I was practicing slowly because I was completely depressed and had no energy to do anything the slightest bit fast. The surprising thing was this: after a couple months of slow depressed practice, I suddenly discovered that I had become a much faster and more accurate piano sight-reader. It was ironic because one of the sources of tension between myself and my first wife had been that I could not accompany her very well—it is ironic because accompanying has been one of my strongest suits as a pianist for the past 20 years.
It can be said that my career as a pianist, such as it has been, began at this point. Once I was able to read faster, I was able to take in much more literature, and learn what you're supposed to learn from being able to play the piano. Doing all this on a clavichord made it impossible to study the music of composers like Chopin, or Liszt, or Brahms, but I became something of an expert on the keyboard music of Bach.
The moral to this story is simply this: when you practice so slowly that you never miss a note, you get better and better at not missing notes;

A Sad Time Leads to Breakthrough RFT Music Stories
21
when the sight-reading process becomes more enjoyable, learning new literature, in a serious or casual way, can become faster and more mistake- free. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bunger Prodigy/Fingering

Bunger Prodigy/Fingering RFT Music Stories 22 Bunger Prodigy/Fingering My piano teacher, Richard Bunger, was a child prodigy; when he was 9 years old he could play the Chopin Revolutionary Etude—he said, "I was the only kid on my block who could play that piece." "The thing is," he said, "I can't play the piece now; if I try to play now I remember all the childish bad habits, tensing, and stretching, and straining, that I had when I was nine, my brain reads back to the program of that piece that was put in when I was a kid. The only way I could play the piece now, is if I completely re-fingered it and made a completely new memory of it." My teacher made a big deal about putting the programming for a new piece into your brain perfectly the first time, so you wouldn't have alternate versions running around in your memory waiting to mess you up in a performance. This is why...
Read more

Table of Contents

RFT Music Stories Stories, Parables, and Essays About the Transforming Power of Music  by Richard Freeman-Toole  Table of Contents  Introduction......................................................1 General Musicianship .....................................3  $100 Music Lesson ..................................... . 4 The Land Where Everybody Walked with a Cane .......9 The Village Idiot and the Band Leader .............................12  Hit on Head with Hammer ............................15 The Sick Soprano's High Note ................................16  Massive Doses and Quantum Leaps ...............17 A Sad Time Leads to Breakthrough .........................20  Bunger/Prodigy/Fingering .............................22 Don't Pound on the Piano .......................................23  UCLA Audition ......................................
Read more

Handel and Corelli

Handel and Corelli RFT Music Stories 63 Handel and Corelli History is filled with stories of conflict between great musicians. The distinctly defined, often quite egocentric, personalities of truly great artists, may easily come to grate against each other, since these people are often socially abrasive, and hypersensitive at the same time. Well, to set the scene for this story, we have to first give some background on Corelli. Arcangelo Corelli's traveling band of violin virtuosi were spending a year in London, performing for the king etc. Correlli's music, through publication, had been exerting an influence on the baroque musical scene all over Europe; and his chamber orchestra was one of the hottest performing groups of the time, and did very well financially. So, it was natural that they should spend some time in London; London was not really the Big Apple of the period, and the English elite were all...
Read more