Week 1: A New Hope
Starting on May 4th...
Welcome to the Unfinished Business Challenge — and the beginning of our four-week musical adventure!
Every great journey starts with a first step (and some hope!) This week is about choosing your piece: something you’ve always wanted to learn, something you started and left behind, or something unfinished that keeps calling you back.
This Week’s Mission
Choose one piece (or excerpt) to stay with throughout the challenge.
A few ideas:
- A piece you’ve always meant to finish
- Something abandoned years ago that deserves a second life
- A new piece you’ve been waiting for the right moment to begin
- A small excerpt from a larger dream piece
Big or small, all choices are welcome. What matters is that it feels like your unfinished business.
This Week, Share:
- What piece did you choose?
- Why this piece?
- Is there a musical challenge or goal you hope to work through this month?
If you’d like, post a recording of where you’re starting from — even a rough first read. We’d love to hear it.
Over the next four weeks we’ll build momentum together!
346 replies
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Hello =) My update for the week.
For Mouvement, I have started by revisiting the middle section material that is the most difficult part of the piece (it was this section that drove me the most crazy years ago). This time, I tried to memorize it as quickly as I could since the biggest challenge is getting in and out of the chords between all the F#s. A lot of moderate-slow practice to just try and get the mind to keep up with the fingers. I made a recording of progress so far:
Here is a copy of the score with the section I am playing marked with a blue border if anyone wants to see the music:
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Hi Tammy =) Why thank you. It's actually a setup I have for my online students so I can switch the camera overhead to better demonstrate things like fingering or wrist etc. Here is a picture of the setup I am using (though my microphones are not that close for Debussy). My sophisticated lighting is mostly just the window and a fortunate balance of sunlight!
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Thank you Vidhya =)
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Lovely playing. I enjoyed the clarity and how I could hear everything in all those layers! Very cool. And your set-up reminds me of Thurmond's first private teacher's set-up. She had four different camera angles available (left side, right side, overhead, feet) and a top notch audio set-up, too. Until March of this year, he learned entirely online - finding good camera angles for both teacher and student is so important!
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Loving this, Dustin! The overview cam here gives such a nice view of your fantastic movements in this Mouvement - so delicate and detailed in touch. Looking forward to see and hear more!
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Here’s my week 1 update, the finale/ coda of the Chopin Barcarolle, upgraded from a slasher flick status a few days ago to student pulp fiction. I have to focus on Rachmaninoff this weekend so I’m parking this here for now!
Things to work on next: (1) more familiarity with the notes, (2) vertical layering, and (3) the narrative arc. It’s a bit oom-pah-pah sounding now, but I think that will go away once I know the notes better and work on longer phrases.
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Dear all,
Here is my week 1 update:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYFdXF-OSGO/?igsh=MXQyYndvdXR1NDd5NQ==
Best wishes,
Aaron