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!
334 replies
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I‘ve chosen the Chopin prelude no 13 because it’s one of my favourite pieces. I‘ve enjoyed playing it just for myself for years but the challenge for me is to properly memorise it and find an interpretation I’m happy with so I can enjoy playing it for others. I‘ve only recently started having piano lessons again after over ten years off (since leaving music college and also developing a chronic health condition which restricts what repertoire I can manage) during which time I’ve kept playing but often without much focus or direction. I hope that picking something small and manageable to work on for this challenge will help me build trust in myself. And I‘m excited to hear what everyone else is working on!
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I’m going to give new hope to Scriabin op.9 no.2 Nocturne. I learned it two years ago and played it halfway something. It was not good and with a lot of very bumpy rubato. It is my first and only Scriabin piece so far. I like it for its pensive tschaikovskyesque mood and the calm that comes over me when I work on it. It’s an “unfinished business” par excellence, because I dropped it quite suddenly, felt I reached my limits and quite discouraged. It has haunted me since and given almost unbearable pangs on conscience.
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Some random practice thoughts, as I am relearning my piece. I notice how hard it is to apply the "spring in the step" that I learned to add to my technique over the past year. This shows how relearning is so much more difficult than learning.
My old sound comes back uninvited. Too heavy, too legato. Yet I know the only way I can correct this is not by thinking technically, but musically. I managed to correct some parts, but most of the time the old habits creep back. I remember an old video here where Dominic said we have to exaggerate during practice in order to just barely make it in performance, something like that. Definitely true. Practice with exaggerated (musical) goals. It has to sound weird during practice so that when performing under pressure it sounds right! I see it like a photo negative (remember those?). It looks horrible, yet after processing (cf. music performance analogy), it comes out just right. So in my case, I have to practice producing a ridiculously light sound, and everything non-legato!
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said:
poor Clara didn’t have it easyThank god for Johannes😉.
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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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Gotta say, I love your delicate touch.
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excellent. The layering of sound between the chord sequences and the octave figures is lovely.
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what a beautiful video! The playing, the lighting, the piano, the camera angle!
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Gorgeous! Really enjoyed your playing and looking forward to more. Have to go listen to this whole piece now.
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Oh thanks! I appreciate that =)
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Thanks! I'm glad thats coming through =)
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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.