an amateur pianist’s rant

It’s a rather cloudy Saturday afternoon, my thoughts equally clouded by something I’ve yet to discover unless I open the little black box hiding at the back of my mind. Now is the time where time has no meaning to me, save having it to do almost whatever I like with it. Since there never is a sure thing, ‘almost’ is the next best choice.

now playing: Mell’s Red Fraction (Black Lagoon OP シングル)

I wonder, what should I do? X3 After lunch and in a cool room, the soporific effect begins to settle itself quite comfortably. Sleeeeepyyyyy….

*blinks self awake*

Later I will practice my pieces; I know I had played rather horribly today, each piece sprinkled with wrong notes. And sometimes my mind will suddenly jump to some trailing thought entirely irrelevant like “I want to eat something sweet now” in the middle of a piece, which causes my fingers to trip and fall over all over the keyboard. When that happens, it’s like resetting the cache contents to zero; at that point, I don’t know what I’m playing, what the next and subsequent sets of notes are or even which page I’m on.

Something silly happened during one of those accidental resets. I think I was supposed to be playing a scale of D♭minor in sixths, which I don’t know why I did badly (I mean apart from the fact that I’d not been practicing – usually at least I can still get majority of the notes right). I kept spacing out repeatedly (I guess the feeling was like how a lift would feel if some idiot kept leaning on the buttons) while trying to get it right. Just when I almost got it correct, teacher Pat asked, “So what scale are you playing now?”

…

“Shit. What was it again?” The question raced through my mind. Seeing my right index finger on F♯, I just said “Er… F♯ minor?” and then seeing my left ghost finger on D♭I went “Oh crap…am I playing the wrong scale? What am I supposed to be playing?” Tried playing a few times in a frantic effort to get it right – I could see her temper was slowly, but surely, rising. All the time I was thinking to myself while playing, “I’m wrong? It sounds correct though…~__~” Then she let out this resigned sigh and corrected me; “It’s D♭minor, dear. You’re playing it right, just continue. I never said it was wrong in the first place.”

…

Someone just slap me.

I absolutely hate my 3rd piece, 2nd movement. It’s frigging fast with so many stupid, wrong-sounding chords that sound like a horrible earful. And it needs quite a display of emotion throughout the piece; usually my patience wears out at the very sight of the set of quavers denoting the 2nd movement. T__T It perks up again at the start of the 3rd movement though. =D I like the rest of the piece (i.e. the first and third movements) cause I’ve gotten used to the weird notes there (hey at least they sound in harmony) and the fact that its abit slower (half the speed of the 2nd movement) makes the notes slightly easier to find.

I realize I cannot do that on a piano instinctively – playing with emotion, that is. I must remind myself and force myself to play the notes gently here, forceful and loud there, and be light and springy on the staccatos and warm, flowing and connected with the smooth quavers and semiquavers. Damn myself, why can’t I get it right! I seem to tense up at the notion of displaying emotion on the piano – or anywhere else, for that matter.

My first piece is a Scarlatti which has a rather baroque-ish feel since there are more arpeggios and scalic notes as melody, and also having a very simple left hand accompaniment. I like this one cause it doesn’t require much emotion apart from the crescendo on the scalic notes and the occasional few emotions toward the end of the phrases. So in that sense, thank goodness for baroque music. In oral they always put baroque music in a pretty bad light (or so I thought it was anyway) as they’re supposed to be very formal, rigid, lacks warmth in the melody and its use of imitations which makes it sound rather mechanic.

The second piece is a Mozart which teacher Pat says is the hardest cause of the dynamics which must be followed; every forte and every piano is crucial for the piece to sound good, and of course the trills, syncopation and feel must be perfected, not to mention the feel of the quavers must be light at some parts, flowing in others, crotchets cannot be held for too long or too short and all that crass which I cannot be bothered to go into detail since it will only leave me irritated and the fact that I must get it right at least by next week if not I’ll get another earful from teacher Pat which I do not want to get.

sigh.