Back to work...

I feel like tonight was my first real practice since coming down with the flu almost 3 weeks ago. Though I nominally haven't missed a day on my MOYD/sight-reading commitments, really all I've done is a few token pages of sight-reading per day. With the exception of the few good days between the end of the flu and the onset of my BPPV (during which I started this blog), I've been too exhausted and apathetic to focus very well at all.

So perhaps today went well because I was able to resume with lowered expectations. I started out with hands together scales in C, G, and F, which went better than expected. Before I got sick, I had recently had a breakthrough with my hands-together scales (which had been a particular nemesis of mine), and even graduated to doing them with eyes shut. The muscle memory seems to have been stored in brain cells which survived the flu, because these all came back nicely. I decided not to push my luck, and didn't try D or Bb.

Then I decided that I had pretty much sleepwalked through all the sight-reading I've done while sick, and not really gained much skill from it. So I decided to go back to the beginning of the John Kember book and start over, only playing with the metronome this time, and being stricter about not "stuttering" back to fix mistakes. Playing with the metronome was kind of invigorating, and definitely helped with the stuttering, I used the metronome built into the DP, which has different meter settings so that the downbeat of each measure gets a bell tone instead of a click. That way, if I stuttered i would lose my place in the metric pattern, which proved motivational. Did quite a few pages, but it was pretty easy stuff, being the beginning of Book 1...

I also tried to focus more on reading by interval, which doesn't come naturally to me -- too many single-note flash cards, perhaps? It was hard, though, because there's a lot more space between the notes in each measure in the Kember book than there is in Hannah Smith, so the eye has to travel further without losing track of the lines & spaces in the (melodic) interval. Also I had the metronome set a bit faster than I should have, so I was scrambling  to keep up, and often didn't have time for scruples about how I was reading, just needed to get the next note under my fingers.

And then I put in some more practice on my little "Starter Rag," which was fun. Somehow I forgot all about my little Telemann Gavotte, which I have been shamelessly neglecting for weeks...