Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Dizzy again

I've been having good to very good practices for the last few days, so it was kind of a disappointment when tonight's didn't go as well. Maybe it was just that I had such nice practices yesterday that my expectations got raised, but I felt pretty let down when, in the middle of working on my Telemann Gavotte, I started feeling dizzy and nauseated again. So I quickly phoned in my mandatory pages of sight reading and called it a night. Now I'm drinking strong ginger tea, which seems to help with the nausea.

My practices have been simplified because of the BPPV, consisting of some major scales, hands together and eyes shut, then work on the Telemann and that little "Starter Rag", and finally recycling some easy sight reading, but using the metronome this time around. I think that the sight reading is actually more fun with the metronome, but perhaps only because this one-hand-at-a-time stuff would be mind-numbingly easy without the metronome to spice things up.

I'm having trouble finding sight reading fodder that's focused at the level where I need work, which is playing hands together, but in a very, very simple way. The sweet spot is what the Hannah Smith book does at the end of each of the beginning sections. where she switches from hands playing in unison to having more notes in right hand, with fewer long notes in the left hand. Most of the sight reading fodder seems to progress too quickly past this stage to where it starts having unpredictable or irregular note patterns in the left hand (though still fewer in the left than in the right). What I seem to need is for the left hand to be rhythmically very predictable while I simply get used to reading and playing different notes with both hands simultaneously.

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