I’m still plugging away at this Bach minuet plus minuet – in yesterday’s lesson after Teacher checked my etudes we went to start in on the piece, but I stopped us to confess that I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the G melodic minor scale.  I’m working with this scales book, but for some reason I’ve been unable to follow and play this one very well – I’m having trouble hearing it well to practice it on my own, and I think not having it down is really impacting my ability to play the piece as well as I want.

Teacher smiled and said, “You never have to twist my arm to work on technical stuff!”  That’s nice to know, since things seem to be getting more technical by the measure!  And of course I am a bit of a geek in all pursuits, digging the technical nitty gritty of most.  So we did it, up and down, over and over, and I think I might have it now.

Speaking of more technical by the measure – a measure is almost the extent of the new material I worked on in yesterday’s lesson.  We had gone up to this particularly interesting spot not too far from the end of the piece in last week’s lesson, so this week we tackled it.  The fingering is quite a challenge – I’m doing all sorts of things in this piece that I’ve never done before (as I’ve mentioned, position shifting as well as this minor key and a good deal of appoggiatura I’m supposed to be trying to bring into to the first part of the piece, the part I already know how to play).  But in this new bit, at one point I use my first finger to play on the spot where I usually play with my second finger.  “Just slide it in,” Teacher says.  There’s slurring all the while, and string crossings galore.  This little bit of tricky is all of five notes long, but getting those five notes into my fingers is going to be a major chore!

Teacher left me with that, and told me that I’d have no trouble figuring out the rest of the piece on my own by next week’s lesson.

Alrighty then.

Thanks for reading.

Ryan