Ahhh, Bach

In one episode of M*A*S*H*Radar tries to impress a young woman. Hawkeye tells him to say "Ahhh, Bach" whenever the conversation turns to music. Of course, Radar overuses it...

You can't belong to a church choir and escape J.S. Bach's music--hymns, cantatas, etc. For flutists, there are a couple of fairly "easy" pieces for flute and piano (like the Arioso, which was originally written for violin--no place to breathe!!). They come in handy for weddings and the like. The only truly solo piece is the Partita in A minor.

Yesterday I pulled out my copy of the Partita and played through most of it. I've had it for a while, but I'd never really worked on preparing it for performance. Today I decided to tackle it seriously, so I started on the "Allemande" section using the metronome. Setting your metronome for its slowest setting is not exactly a confidence builder. I'm thinking the Partita probably won't be ready by the beginning of October, though that wasn't the reason I pulled it out. What I wanted was to start practicing an actual piece of music along with all the technical stuff.

One of Linda Chesis' suggestion during her Open Master Class at the NFA Convention was to get a notebook with three sections and photocopy music you're working on to be cut up and pasted into the notebook: Section 1 for measures you can play pretty well, Section 2 for measures that need some work, and Section 3 for those measure that give you grief. On the way home from work today I stopped at Posner Books in Grand Central Terminal and bought a Moleskine Music Notebook. It's small, so taping measures from a cut up copy of music into it is out of the question, but I knew that when I bought it. I'm not even dividing it up into three sections. I'm simply writing the measures that give me trouble in it. That way I can practice my notation skills, which need work. Plus a Moleskine is pretty easy to pack when I travel.

So right now it contains a couple measures of the "Allemande" and the measure from Taffanel-Gaubert #4 with the high b. My own little exercise book!

And an update: Waltzing while playing "The Margravine's Waltz" is getting easier.