Lesson Journal: Lesson #22

I forgot my recorder again, so don’t have a recording of this unfortunately.

I had my lesson at 8:00 AM this morning. She seemed impressed that I did so well with remembering those measures and speeding them up. It was obviously a lot better than when I left last week.

I learned 10 measures today (measures 5-14), which is 2 and a half times more than last week. I must be getting used to memorizing again.

It is hard because there are so many notes, and so many small changes. The melody is easy to memorize, but then there are the supporting notes in both hands above and below that melody. There are 8 notes in every single beat, without a rest, so I suppose that’s really 320 notes I learned today.

It went pretty well, though, and I was happy with myself that I memorized that much. She was saying how she’s told other students about me and how I’m able to memorize so much, because many of her students just won’t memorize for recitals and such.

I did get confused on measure 14, though. Well it was beat 4 of measure 13 and beat 2 of measure 14, because I knew they were very similar but couldn’t remember the difference in the right hand in both. However, I called her and asked about it. Well she wasn’t there when I called this morning, but she called me back at 11:30, and I was able to ask her about those notes then.

Below is the recording of me asking her about the notes in measures 13-14 and her looking it up for me.

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Incidentally, the right hand in beat 4 of measure 13 is C#-E-G-B, while the right hand in beat 2 of measure 14 is C#-E#-G#-B. As you can see, they are very similar (only the two notes in the middle are sharped).

That was the only thing I had trouble remembering, though, though obviously I have to work on getting more comfortable with it, playing it perfectly, and playing it faster.

So now we are on the second page of the piece, apparently. I’m very happy with my progress today.

I will try to remember my recorder next week! It really helps me to learn faster when I have it, since I can go back and review if I forget anything. Then I don’t have to call her to look up notes for me, lol.