August 16, 2015

For some reason, each week I've been adding another hour to my organ practice. As a result of this odd habit, today's practice lasted 8 hours, almost without a break. An hour spent playing through the Prelude in F written last week led to a few minor improvements in the counterpoint, and I was surprised to be able to read through it almost steadily at a slow tempo. Bach's Fugue in C Major BWV 545 is coming along reasonably well, though I still fight my way through a few awkward passages in the pedals. Measures 56-57 are killing me.

When I find out I can't play something, I use a divide and conquer strategy to figure out what it is exactly in the passage that is difficult for me, and then isolate each aspect of the problem to become more comfortable with it. In this passage, the combination of things throwing me off are as follows.

1. leap up of a 10th in the left hand
2. the pedal is all leaps, requiring both legs to swing out of resting position
3. the rest on beat 3 in the soprano the first measure is easy to forget
4. the D on the downbeat in m.57 has to be taken by the left hand
5. the tenor repeats the D on the and of 1 which is held in the alto (effectively turning the alto's written quarter note into an eighth note)
6. these measures also happen to be the last on the page before a required page turn

Put all of those little snags together and for me those are two extremely difficult measures. There are a couple of other places similar to this which I also hacked away at. Little by little I will get there.

Having lost the slip of note paper listing the hymns I was supposed to practice, I spent probably a good 15 minutes looking for the hymns in order to practice them. (I'm good at remembering tunes, but not so good at remember texts or the names of hymns.) I simply could not remember one of the hymns, but was happy to give the three I found their due rehearsal, as well as some time improvising to get some ideas going for for possible introductions.

The work of the week was taken up mostly by programming for Mather Point Software and some website design work I'm doing for a client in Indianapolis. I also wrote a new composer's résumé — something I haven't done in years. According to my friend who knows more about these things than I do, it "doesn't flow". Still working on it.