BREAKTHROUGH

Well, if yesterday was a breakDOWN day, today was a breakTHROUGH day.

In Invention #7, I've run up hard against a trill in the left hand. I've reached the maximum tempo at which I can play it, and that tempo is already below where I can play the rest of the piece and is substantially below the finished tempo I'm shooting for.

The trill goes on for 9 beats, a little over two measures, and it feels like an eternity. The same trill appears earlier in the right hand, where it goes on for 6 beats. Each beat is 4 sets of triplets, for a total of 12 alternated notes per beat or, as we say, 6 "repercussions" per beat.

What has been happening is that, beyond a certain tempo, I can't sustain the LH (left hand) trill for the full 9 beats.  It gets off track at some point, so that the repercussions are no longer in strict tempo and therefore stop lining up properly with the notes in the RH. It turns into a mess.

I thought this was a physical problem.  I thought that I had maybe run up against a hard limit in my physical abilities, and that I'd have to simplify the trill -- reduce the number of repercussions per beat to a level I could handle -- so that I could finish getting the piece up to tempo and go on with my life already.

But then I got to pondering the implications of an interesting fact: I COULD PLAY THE TRILL IN THE LH JUST FINE, STRICTLY IN TEMPO FOR THE FULL 9 BEATS OR EVEN LONGER, IF I PLAYED IT ALONE WITHOUT THE RH. At some point it sank in: what that means is that, at this tempo, the problem is primarily COGNITIVE, not physical.  That was the breakthrough moment. In retrospect, it seems completely obvious.

With that realization, I could take a different angle on boosting the tempo of the trill.  Instead of merely playing it at one tempo until physical mastery was achieved and then moving to the next tempo, I needed to make a cognitive shift of some kind.  But what?  What, cognitively, was the problem?  Why did adding the RH make a trill that I was physically capable of playing fall apart?

ATTENTION!  That's it!  When I was playing the trill alone in the LH, my full attention was on it.  When I added the RH, my attention subconsciously and automatically shifted to the RH and the LH was left to wander in the wilderness.  With that insight, the solution became obvious: While playing the two hands together, I consciously and deliberately shifted my attention to the LH, and like magic it began to stay on track better.  LIKE MAGIC!  WITH JUST A SHIFT OF ATTENTION!  It's going to take some practice to be able to put this together, but I realize now that I generally put my attention on the RH while I'm playing the two hands together and depend on habit to carry the LH along.  Good old Johann Sebastian won't let me get away with that. His music demands more flexibility of attention.  I think he was probably one of those people who have multiple music channels built into their brains.  He could probably hear all those lines of polyphony simultaneously and fully.  It must have sounded marvelous in his mind. What a stupefying talent the man had.

Anyway, I know that I'll probably run up against an actual physical limitation with this trill at some point, but I'm not there yet.  I've broken through a cognitive barrier.  It'll take some hard practice to consolidate this and make it habitual, but it will carry me along much further than I am now.  I'll deal with the physical limit when I get there.

Hmmm... Gotta relax that tension in my jaw while I'm playing this trill, too.  There's another cognitive problem.  And where else am I holding tension?

[Before beginning this blog, I was sending emails to a friend.  I'm incorporating those into the blog, and embellishing them here and there. This entry was from 1/31/2012.]