Week 3: Italy in 19th !

Eric Phillips greetings from Ibiza Eric. Just finding time to catch up a bit with what's been happening. I'm not really familiar with Legnani but it's sounding good. Thanks for posting the score!

Eric Phillips thanks so much for sharing this! His 36 caprices are definitely one of his most famous works, although I wasn't very familiar with 27. I love how playful this piece is! 

Eric Phillips For the listener, the second take represents a big step forward, I would say. What for for the player may feel like small improvements can in fact mean a far more satisfactory performance.  As a teacher once told me, quoting Tolstoy, ‘art lies in the details’. I’m not sure this is quite what Tolstoy meant, but it strikes me as a useful interpretation nonetheless. My main criticism is that you play the piece a little too slowly. It doesn’t need to be much faster - I think a 15% increase in tempo would be about right. Now, it may be that you prefer it at your tempo, and if that’s the case, you should change nothing. But I suspect (having experienced this myself) that you have a sort of phobia about playing quickly. I think this is normal - as we increase tempo, we begin to lose a sense of conscious control. We become dependent upon processes that operate automatically. We lose confidence, we begin to get nervous, our hands become moist, we eventually fall apart, performance-wise. I think we all know the routine. And so we develop the habit of never leaving our comfort zone. But we need to if we want to get to the ‘next level’. For myself at least, I can only manage this with the assistance of a metronome. It’s a laborious process that involves a lot of time and discipline, something we amateurs generally lack, almost by definition. It may seem as though the goal of this approach is to get our fingers to work faster. But I think this is wrong - the goal should be to get our minds to work faster. Let me take an example from the world of sports. I believe it was the great Joe DiMaggio who was said to be able to see the spin of the ball as it came towards him. I don’t think this was a matter of acuteness of vision; I suspect it was an ability to process a great deal of information nearly instantaneously. (In hockey, Wayne Gretzky - surely the greatest playmaker ever to lace on skates - has said that when he was on the ice, everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. I suspect this is the same phenomenon.) This is all speculation on my part. Like you, I’m most comfortable in ‘slow-mode’. It would be interesting to hear what some of the accomplished players here on ToneBase (and that includes a few of the ‘amateurs’) have to say about this.

Eric Phillips great job with this one Eric! I love the way you are bringing out the non chord tones!

Eric Phillips It is sounding very good, Eric. Wow, I wish the pieces I work on could like that after an hour! It takes me days, or even weeks to get something palatable.

Eric Phillips This is already sounding good, Eric. (And no complaints about tempo this time! ) I concur with Blaise, by the way - I think you could manage the majority of these Caprices if you wanted to. (A couple of them are indeed reserved for the virtuoso.) Out of interest, when you say that you can’t play even a one octave scale ‘fast’, just what do you mean? After all, we’ve heard you play at moderate tempos, with no difficulty whatsoever! Could it be (to paraphrase the slogan of one of our Canadian banks) that ‘you’re faster than you think’?