It's Starting to Pay Off

I didn't practice Sunday because I drove down to New Jersey for friends' annual Labor Day Weekend picnic. Yesterday I just took the day off from everything and read. Taking a break didn't seem to hurt, especially after my experience Saturday afternoon.

I continue to work with a metronome for most of the time while working on the week's two pages of Taffanel-Gaubert #4 and Frederick the Great Daily Exercise. It really is helping my rhythm and articulation. The fact that I could read through this week's Frederick the Great Daily Exercise (#3), then play it at the tempo for #2 that I finished last week with, and THEN work it up even faster (by about four clicks on the metronome), really made me feel good.

Later, I worked through the Allemande section of the Partita, still at the slowest speed on the metronome, focusing on a cluster of measures that were giving me trouble. Once I'd done that I figured why not read through the whole movement with the metronome? If nothing else, it would give me a good idea where I'd need to focus in the coming days. By the time I got about halfway through, I found that many of the measures that would have given me trouble before weren't. There are all sorts of odd chromatics and intervals, and I played right through most of them.

Hello? There's a reason you've been working on the Taffanel-Gaubert Exercise #4, even if you're only doing two pages of it at a time.

Hello? This is why you spend time on the technical stuff. Is it sinking in yet?

It's a fact that you really can't play music on an instrument without learning the mechanics and the techniques of it. It's a fact I've known since I took up the flute at 16. But today's small break through went beyond that. It feels like the technique piece is becoming part of me rather than something simply labored on because I need to do it.

I know this kind of break through will be rare as I continue practicing and playing, but it's still a major AHA moment that will carry me through for a long time.

Waltzing Update: This evening I was able to play and waltz without missing a step and only making one mistake in the tune.