8/20/20: New Piano Song: C_L2

This week I've started practicing a new song for piano. I chose it because it sounded nice but mostly because my piano teacher said it would be a good challenge. Especially with the dynamics. The first few days of any new piece is sight reading. However that never posed much of a challenge for me. What was  challenging for me with this song was the small yet dramatic dynamic changes as well as the technique behind the wrist movement. I decided to put those aside for now and focus on the notes. Once I picked up the notes and chords and was able to do hands together I was ready to integrate the challenging parts. To deal with the dynamics, I discovered that playing hands separately with dynamics before putting hands together worked best for me. I think it's because it helps my brain and muscle memory remember the dynamics for each hand as a separate entity, which makes it easier to combine both hands later on. For the wrist movement, that would be more challenging. I have been playing piano for many years and have always had the problem of the "stiff wrist". It also made it harder to create smoother dynamic transitions. However, as I worked on putting hands together with dynamics I saw that my wrists had naturally loosened up and moving to create a more harmonic and melodic shape within the piece. This week I learned how to kill two birds with one stone. As I was working to over come the challenge of implementing the dynamics, I unwittingly figured out how to solve the problem of loosening my wrists. Now I know two things for the future: practicing the dynamics hands separately is the best way to create the correct muscle memory and that by being more dramatic with the dynamics, my wrists will automatically loosen up. I would call this a productive and successful week of piano practice!