another piano-playing post

music

Well, Emma asked for it...

The problem with my piano-playing is, all the music I want to play is just a bit too hard for me. I need to work on it. And I need to do exercises, so my fingers can actually get round the notes, and exercises hurt. They don't bore me like they did when I was a teenager, I quite like the repetition now (patience or brain-damage, I do not know), but it's like any exercise, you're not building your strength unless there's a little bit of the burn. Owwww.

At least I have discovered now that you're not supposed to just suffer terrible pain indefinitely, only exercise to where you can feel some effect and know the muscles are making an effort. I won't be like that famous composer who destroyed his own digits on a home-made rack-like stretching machine (anyone know who that was?). But unfortunately, I am a complete wuss. I don't like hurting my own fingers, even slightly. And before I am ever going to have a hope of playing the last movement of Beethoven's Moonlight sonata anything like up to speed, I will have to make my fingers hurt slightly for probably months on end.

That's the other thing, if you do exercises for a few days then give up in a pathetic huff, your fingers go right back to being as feeble and banana-like as before.

So, it's regular pain, or... well, I don't know what else. Suggestions? Miss Kitchen used to tell us if we kept up our Hanon exercises we'd be able to play anything we wanted. She never mentioned that if we didn't keep up our Hanon, we wouldn't be able to play anything we wanted. I wonder if Vladimir Horowitz ever had this problem.