So far it has been a quiet beginning to what is hopefully going to be a better year for me both health-wise and music-wise. My last checkup with my trusty GP revealed no health problems requiring immediate attention, and my cholesterol level is sufficiently low for me to be able to enjoy the occasional fried chip once again.
On the music front things have been fairly quiet but I have noticed some positive signs that auger well in terms of my reclaiming some lost skills from last year. The main one is my eyesight. I am adjusting well to looking out of my right eye and I’m finding that the left eye is not interfering nearly so much as it used to – the brain is finally getting the message that things have changed with regard to my visual acuity and I’m finding my way around the keyboard with more confidence than I have had for a while now.
A second one is my memory. For some unimagined reason I’m beginning to memorise music much more easily that I did previously. I’m commented about this in this blog before but I really don’t know the reason. However, the overall result of these is that at least to my eyes I’m playing much better than I did even late last year, and I think I may have some idea about why that may be.
I’ve always thought that playing the piano was a complete loop of skills and activities which produced an overall result called ‘music’, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Ears -> Brain -> Fingers -> Piano -> Ears
Once this loop is working effectively the production of music becomes automatic in the sense that everything flows and is totally integrated.
My problem has been that the link between the brain and fingers (my eyesight) has been disrupted and this has thrown off the entire system – I really struggled at times to make sense of what I was doing.
But now things are getting better and I’m beginning to ‘feel’ the music again in a way that at least to my ears is getting back to what I know I can do. Add on to this the capabilities of the Stuart piano and I’m getting to the stage where I’m controlling the piano in the way I want to. That’s not to say that my technique is brilliant – far from it and that will never change, and also my vision will not allow me to make large jumps up and down the piano with any degree of certainty, at least not yet. However, it is the ‘feel’ that I’m after and my use and control of the sonorities of the piano is getting to the stage where a number of pieces are good enough for me to think about recording.
I will test this out over the coming weeks, but I will not make any definitive recordings until the piano is tuned again towards the end of this month. The piano is still in remarkably good tune considering, but I know how much of a perfectionist Wayne is in this regard and given that I want to focus on the vertical nature of the sound as much as anything else, we’ll need to get things pretty much right, especially in the upper registers.
All in all, a good start. Let’s hope it keeps going.