Week 3: Discovering Schubert Month

Hi Hilda, for me, all it took to build Schubert into my life was being exposed to more of his music, downloading a few pieces from IMSLP and trying them out.  Also, picked up a volume of his Sonatas and was surprised to learn he had 3 volumes of Sonatas in total--while Beethoven just has 2 volumes and Mozart, one. 

One thing I've noticed with the Schubert piece I'm working on is that it's relatively easy to get it mostly learned, but to really polish it, I need to focus my practice time on just the problem areas in the piece.  If I keep trying to practice the piece by playing it from start to finish each time, then that leaves too little time to really work on the problem areas.  Also, because some of the progressions in Schubert's music are so subtle, it's sometimes difficult for me to tell if I'm making a mistake or not as a wrong note here and there may not be completely obvious.  But those subtleties are what makes his music so beautiful.

Hilda  Firstly, please accept my apologies but I shall not be in your session on memorising later today.  I shall hear it later on the play-back.  We're off to a concert - the Black Dyke Mills Band, which has its origin in the industrial north of the UK, which is where I lived as a child.  I once took my grandmother to a concert of theirs, which would be about fifty years ago.  She loved it! 

Schubert has been in my life, on and off, since my early twenties, when I took piano lessons with a teacher who was obsessed with Schubert.  She worked with a soprano on the lieder, had a duet partner too for all the big Schubert 4-handers.  She could not quite manage the whole of the Wanderer Fantasy - just a few bars were beyond her grasp sometimes, not always.  I think now that it was a pyschological.

I managed to make a few recordings this week, at last, which are not fit for public consumption, but I shall incorporate this into my practising.  I think your session on memorising will be really useful to me.  I discovered from this week that I am pedalling too heavily sometimes.  I saw your session on pedalling on re-run as I did not see the email soon enough last week.  I need to trust myself to play the chords without using the pedal as a mask.  I am focusing on more intentional use of the pedal, as my pedalling is part of my 'memory' at present and sometimes I am not sure at all what I am doing and why.  The dynamics are a real problem too.  How do we play so quietly - 'piano' almost immediatly after a fz?

This challenge has been so useful, as it has brought a new light to pieces that I learned many years ago and would benefit from a fresh perspective.  My greatest challenge is lack of technique.  I am now playing all of the major and harmonic minors from memory [sometimes I need to check the fingering] - two octaves hands together - at a moderate speed to ensure accuracy.  I am doing half of the scales for a fortnight each so I cover all of them in one month.  I have completed all of the broken chords too and have started to incorporate arpeggios - basic position and two inversions - hands separately and together.  Again, they are on a weekly work programme so I should do all of them in a five weeks timefame.

I am striving to have more fluency.  I have just listened to Brother Will Green   playing the first movement of the B flat sonata.  I would settle for a tenth of that facility.  I am now returning to other pieces [I still have the music] that I learned many years ago but reading through them in order to get more immediate fluency. 

I am a flute player and we use a combination of some, and sometimes all, of nine fingers to produce each single note.  My eyes look at a note on the page and there is an obvious immediacy from my brain as it 'tells' my fingers my fingers what to do.  I do not have to think about it consciously, which has come from thousands of hours of practice.  That's the aim for the piano - two years may be?

Have a lovely session later.  I am sorry not to be there 'live'.

Roy

To answer your question: patience! Schubert's music for the most part spins small ideas out into extended pieces of music by exact repetition, and it is sometimes hard to stay focused and not play (or even listen) in a rote sort of way. It is not instantly dramatic like Beethoven, Chopin, et al.

It was great to join the journey of Schubert with all of you. 3rd week I am working on 3rd movement. I would like to finish this piece and also want to play more of his music!

To build Schubert in my life, I think he is teaching me to be more romantic. Schubert tells me to soften my heart and don't look at material world but to bear a romantic pure heart, be brave to feel the world, don't be scared to get hurt or feel sad. it's not destination that matters but the journey.