arabesque progress
Linked here is a video I took this morning of my progress learning Arabesque No. 1 by Debussy, a little project of mine for the last few days.
It's riddled with mistakes, but I think it's important to acknowledge the progress even if it's still far from polished. I'm just feeling pretty proud of myself considering it's the first completely new piece I've learned since 2020. In the clip, I wasn't using any sheet music, as I've finally memorized it! Not perfectly, but that's just a case of muscle memory and not of knowing what's coming next. As I do more and more runs, it'll sound a lot more confident.
The really cool thing for me has been that as I learn more and more and get past the stage of memorizing into slowly tweaking things like dynamics, tempo, things like that, the lessons that I had when I younger are starting to refresh themselves in my mind. Things that subtly improve your playing that you only learn through lessons and experience. Things like:
Keeping your heel to the ground and not lifting your whole leg up and down when using the sustain pedal as to not tire your leg out, as well as reduce sound and time between the pedal reset
Keeping your fingers curled as to only have the pads and edge of your fingers on the actual keys, as opposed to leaving your fingers flat down. This makes it so much easier to do fast passages, as your fingers are less likely to get caught between keys, and just generally it makes you tap lighter, more control of dynamics, endless benefits!
I'm leaving for Greece tomorrow, so I won't be able to play for a while. The progress I've made in the last 4-5 days has been more than enough to make me happy though!