Progress

It seems this RCM Level 8 book is about right for me. I am finding the etudes just challenging enough to be making appreciable progress every day. I know, for instance, that being able to play a full few bars of the second etude (in D minor) means that I've improved because the stretches for the arpeggios (and their conjunction with close finger passages in the other hand) was too difficult to do even at andante when I first started looking at it. I've also noticed that now, about six weeks after I started it, the fluid aesthetic I'd been practising regarding my hand motions has become solidly integrated into my general technique. I find evidence of it now in older pieces I'd practised before November 26 and in new pieces I've taken up since. This is good, since I'd been wondering if I was always going to have to be actively working for that kind of fluidity in my playing. Still, I know it's necessary always to keep refining it. I know it might be exaggerated right now and may need to be tempered in the future.

But what I'd really like to record is that on January 6-7, 2017 I noticed that the run passage I started working on as a kind of etude in September has finally begun to lose the patched character it used to have as a result of the thumb crossings. It's the passage from the end of Chopin's Nocturne in C# Minor, which is an RCM level 9 piece, and which I've been preparing for (in advance) by practicing that run. I know this will likely increase in difficulty once I switch back to my own piano—which has keys of the right size and weight (larger and heavier), but getting the thumb crosses solid is a good start. And it took four months! Granted, the scalar passage in Haydn's Menuetto from the E-flat Sonata took over a year to get smooth, so this marks improvement of about sixty-six percent--more perhaps, because it's a harder/longer passage. Patience... 

Incidentally, I had also (in early December) previewed the descending arpeggios of Chopin's Nocturne in C Minor and found them incredibly difficult. I started practising one of them 3 or 4 days ago, and I find that it's getting somewhat better. I'm not sure of the fingering yet--maybe I'll find a better way. But it's funny how the impossible gradually becomes less so.

I haven't practiced this LH piece in a few days—Felix Swinstead's Study in D Major. Though I'd only learned the first four bars, I've very likely forgotten most of the notes. Sigh...

Nevertheless... Onward!