Struggling

Had another lesson. Terrible, in part. The fingering changes is one reason, another is the time off I took, and I'm still getting back up to speed. But Milde 1, the first scale study, was both slower and more uneven than I'd played it at the last lesson. Parts of it he just said, there's nothing I can say to help you there. And the lesson on Elgar Romance covered nearly identical ground as the previous one. Which is to say, I've made precisely zero progress.

Still, I learned things. For instance, apparently my embrochure is wrong too: not enough wrapped around the teeth. I spent a year playing long tones with an incorrect embrochure, I guess, not to mention the decade of playing when I was younger. Anyway, he said that a thinner embrochure, ie less lip on the reed, would damp less, and let the high A4 ring more, and match the lower A's. So yeah, yet another thing to change.

And while practicing tonight, trying to figure out why I can play the second bar of Milde 1 okay by itself, but never after the first bar, I realized that I have two positions for my left hand. If I start in the bottom register, my hand is wrapped a little more, and my fingers extended more, but in the tenor register I put the ball of my first finger a little more in front to support the weight. This affects how I move the fingers, and whether I can only bend from the knuckle or from the ball (not sure the right anatomical descriptions of these). Anyway, I'm trying to learn to be consistent, so that if I play a scale up, I don't need to shift. So that's yet another thing that I didn't know existed, not to mention the things I knew were problems, but hadn't figured out how to fix yet. So much to learn.