My teacher and I haven't been able to get together for a lesson during the last couple of weeks, but that hasn't kept me from working hard on Ode to Joy and the other two pieces I've been studying. Tonight, we finally hooked up, and I nailed Ode to Joy and the Spanish Waltz!
My teacher was extraordinarily pleased with my progress, so much so that we're moving on to learn another piece, and one of my favorite songs, The Hall of the Mountain King! This week also marks our official foray into chord theory. He's assigned me a classic hymn from Christopher Parkening's book to study, and wants me to be able to identify the chords for it next week.
I'm really excited about learning chord theory. I want so badly to be able to look at a piece of sheet music and instantly identify groups of notes by their chord names.
Eureka! I had a revelation last week, and have finally figured it out musicality! It isn't about feeling, rather, it's about expression. When we add musicality to a piece, we communicate feeling through expression!
My teacher and I had a great chat about this during Monday's lesson, and the concept makes a lot more sense to me now. I went to work improving my musicality on Ode to Joy last night, and the whole piece sounds so much more dynamic!
The subject of this week's journal entry is the titles of the three pieces I'm currently studying out of Christopher Parkening's Guitar Method Book 1. I'm actually very happy that we've gone back to this book, because it means I don't have to keep track of lose sheets of Spanish arpeggio studies for a while (grin).
All three pieces are going very well. I'm finally starting to hear and feel, once again, significant progress in my performance since returning to a structured practice routine. I still have a lot of work to do in injecting musicality into the music, but I'm definitely making some headway.
I think that part of why I'm having so much trouble with expressing more feeling in my playing is that I don't feel anything when playing the music. To me, the songs I'm learning are just a means to an end, exercises I'm using to improve my skills. With that thought in mind, I wonder whether I'm supposed to feel anything. In any event, I can at least rest easy knowing that the techniques I'm being taught for adding musicality to songs will prove invaluable when playing music I'm actually interested in performing.
As for my current routine, here's the complete schedule I've re-assigned for myself:
10min - Finger Stretching
10min - Finger Calisthenics
10min - Scales
30min - Ode to Joy
30min - Spanish Waltz
30min - Andantino
30min - Previous Studies (back to basics)
I used to practice any one piece of music I was learning for only 10 minutes a day. I've added another 20 because I want to devote as much quality practice time, every day, as possible to achieve the most significant progress that I can each week.