I spent about half an hour this morning mapping the a minor etude that I think of as “the tantrum.” It’s long, with lots of fast notes in both hands, and I hadn’t really looked at the big picture of it. I scheduled five minutes to map it but I kept resetting my timer, like hitting snooze, because I got so interested in the structure of the piece. So today is the day I officially fell in love with the a minor etude. I had been feeling intimidated by it, because it’s lots of emphasis on the pinkies, with a pattern that’s 51543 (that’s pinky, thumb, pinky, ring finger, third finger). My pinkies are both shorter than usual (not quite making it to the joint on the ring finger) and also, irritatingly, in the habit of collapsing the middle joint. I don’t know if that’s something that has been happening for years and I just didn’t notice, or if it’s something that started in the pandemic when I went through a phase of only wanting to play easy music, so I didn’t have to be careful about my technique, or if it’s just a thing I’ve lived with forever and not noticed. But now that I’ve noticed, I’m deliberately working on strengthening my pinkies, and I’m also feeling like I need to be careful about that and not hurt myself. So the a minor etude has been feeling like something I didn’t quite want to deal with yet. But it was really fun this morning to just play the outside notes and see the larger harmonic patterns. Once I have my pinkies as strong as I want them, I think it will be really fun to play. I can also be smart about having that piece be part of my training my pinkies to do what I want: let the etude sculpt my hands like it’s meant to.
I also have to be careful with the octaves etude and the—gulp—tenths etude. The octaves I’m mostly practicing with my thumb for now; I want to make sure my hands absolutely know where to go before adding in the octaves. The tenths are broken, thank goodness, meaning that instead of playing the thumb and pinky at the same time I play first the thumb, then the pinky. But I still have to be really thoughtful about how I play them. I’m having to think about my technique a lot, which is of course what a good etude is supposed to do. But it doesn’t necessarily make me the most compelling conversationalist, these days.
I also made a discovery that I’m trying not to be downhearted about. I’ve been playing the sonata for about a year and a half now, and just performed it last week. Then the next morning I was looking at a tricky part in the left hand in the first movement—one right at the beginning, and a similar spot in the transition to the slower theme later, and I realized that THERE’S AN EASIER WAY TO DO IT. When I first learned it I was assuming that Agnes had much bigger hands than mine so I needed to do it the stretched out way, because that’s probably how she did it. I do think that’s true. But I hadn’t really taken seriously the idea that I could do it in a way that meant more hand positions, but easier ones, so I hadn’t tried to find an easier way. (That, by the way, is exactly the opposite of what I preach to my students and anyone else who will listen, which apparently in this case did not include me. Drat.) I don’t think I was entirely wrong to learn it the open-hand way—it IS possible, but what’s interesting is that playing the left hand in an easier way makes the right hand part feel much easier. And as soon as I tried it it felt easier in the way that feels like it’s the obvious choice. This is good news, exciting in the long run, but oh man is it going to be tricky rebuilding those habits. I’ve practiced those spots so much, because they’ve been so hard, and now I have to make an entirely new habit, and make that new habit stronger. So there’s partly a feeling of “hooray! It will be easier!” and partly a feeling of “oh no…undoing the hard way is going to be a big project.” I learned the sonata before from the gorgeous printed score that Kyra Steckeweh made for the Kapralova society, but I think when I relearn this I need to learn it from Agnes’s handwriting. That will help me build the new habit, because the visuals will be so different.
