Friday, January 17, 2014

New Year 2014

I've been away from the piano and avoiding typing for a couple of months, after hurting my hand while wrangling boxes in search of holiday decor. And then I started the new year with two weeks of a cough so evil that I suspect influenza, so I didn't really get to leverage the new year to reflect, and refine my approach toward my various goals. 

This lack of ritualized transition has been extraordinarily frustrating for me, so now as I resume playing piano, I'd like to do some of that reflection and refinement.

One thing I've been feeling pretty good about, and which I want to continue, is my purposeful regression toward material I can work toward playing with Kenny Werner's "Effortless Mastery", and thus concentrate my energy on staying "in the zone".

To the extent I can cultivate that "in the zone" experience, I've been exploring what it feels like to establish a more relaxed yet energized relationship to the keyboard, and listening for the for the more subtle effects of dynamics and timing I can achieve via developing that kinesthetic/proprioceptive relationship with the instrument.

One much more tangible thing I would like to follow through on, is to do more recording of myself. This is pretty easy to do with my DP, I just need to RTFM to remember how. I've been finding the mere threat of recording myself highly motivational in terms of listening to what I'm actually playing (as opposed to drifting into superimposing what I *want* to sound like over the accident-prone sonic reality).

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