easy.

my lesson went fine. i chose to move on from milde #5, though I had the option to spend another week "polishing it". i guess i kinda felt like i'd learned everything in a musical sense that i could, and the technique has reached a long slow plateau. doesn't mean it can't be played better, doesn't mean i can't play it better, but it does mean that i felt ready to work on the next one.

this one is #6, full of F arpeggios. i tried it kinda slow on friday, and yesterday, after almost missing a complete day of practice during a day of chaos, i forced myself to sit down and play, if only briefly, before heading to bed. wanting to take it easy, i soaked my most vibrant reed, played some relaxed scales, then took a look at #6. looked pretty easy. and i wanted to take it easy, so i played it as if it *was* easy. no metronome, since the notes were all so easy i wouldn't need to spend hours in metronomic practice, laboring to work up a few bpm, straining for every note, then struggling to calm the fingers and everything. no, it's all easy, so i could just focus on making a beautiful tone, and a beautiful line, and finding beautiful music. sure, i didn't know all the notes, since i'd just starting, but since it is so easy, they would come naturally, i wouldn't need to worry about them. if i'd goof on one, i'd run over it a few times, they are all easy, so that should take care of it, and keep the fingers from interfering with the phrase. and because it's easy, i could start thinking, right from the beginning, as to how to stretch and pull the phrases, where the dynamics should be to bring out the changes, how the articulations and leading tones can be used to outline the key notes of the phrase.

it's all a crock of course. i don't actually think it's any easier than any of the others, but this is a conscious attempt to work it up while being beautiful the entire way. no straining, no struggling, no fighting to relax the fingers and fighting to get the notes, just easy, the whole time. we'll see how it goes.

(i tried playing the mozart as if it were easy too. and maybe it helped, inside of my head anyway, although i certainly didn't hit every note.)