Week 1: Beethoven Birthday Challenge – Choose Your Piece! 
Welcome to the first week of our Beethoven Birthday Challenge! In celebration of Beethoven’s genius, we invite you to select a piece from his repertoire to explore and perform this week. Whether you’re drawn to his sonatas, variations, or shorter works, the choice is yours! Let’s dive into his music and share our progress throughout the week.
Happy practicing, and may the spirit of Beethoven inspire you!
Challenge:
- Pick your Piece!
- Share your first video with us - it could be sight reading, playing, or talking about why you love the music!
-
Week 1: Playing hands separately. I'm having difficulty with the chords - my hands aren't super small, but small enough that reaching and playing 4 notes at once is a challenge.
-
Michelle R Love your disciplined hands separate practice! Sounding really good already!
-
Michelle R Great job Michelle! Definitely need to follow your example and do more hands separate work
-
Vidhya Bashyam Judy Kuan Thanks so much, Judy and Vidhya. I've found that if I'm patient and achieve a certain level of proficiency hands separate, that hands together just works better! And then I play hands together really slowly for a while until something "clicks," and then I can suddenly play at tempo.
-
Michelle R , in her new book, _Learn Faster, Perform Better_ (based very heavily on peer-reviewed neuroscience), Molly Gebrian points out that hands separate practice, among other things, introduces variability (playing under different conditions, or in different ways). She has an entire chapter devoted to the enormous value of variability for preparing for performance, as well as for speeding up learning.
-
Jeff I'm reading that book right now - I've done a lot of reading and research into sports performance/practice, so there is much that I knew before reading the book, but I'm learning a lot, too. It's a great book!
-
Michelle R Agreed - great book. I also have been reading in this area for the past few years — mostly via Noa Kageyama’s blog and one of his online classes. I’m liking Molly’s book a lot nonetheless — I think she’s organized the material really clearly, and she transitions from the experimental evidence to pragmatic practice strategies so well (and provides *lots* of the latter)
-
-
So many wonderful pieces of Beethoven to choose from! This year, my New Year’s resolution was to learn a BeethovenSonata every month. Well you can imagine how that went as life stepped in and teaching took over! So whilst I managed to do some of the sonatas fairly thoroughly, some of them only had a little dusting of attention.
So I’m going to go to Opus 10 No. 1 in C minor and try and record some, if not all of three movements before this challenge finishes.
-
Angela Fogg looking forward!
-
