The point is to strike and then be at rest. That is why the energy, the tension, must be concentrated in the fingertip, why the rest of your hand—the rest of your body—must remain neutral, balanced, supportive. Slow practice is about preparation. In slow practice you learn to conserve energy so that at tempo you have the stamina to support your speed.
The B-flat has sounded, rounded, and died while you rested, alert, upon the key. Next is D-flat, your thumb. It’s easy to misuse gravity with your thumb, easy to make a harsh tone using the same force that had elicited a rounded one with your pinky. Your thumb has more natural weight, more natural gravity behind it. The trick here is to play decisively but not crassly, and this time you attack with the side of the appendage and not its tip, the black key against your thumb from its tip to the first joint, the rest of your hand returning to its default position, resting, relaxing, preparing.
Those are the first three notes.
Eventually, after practicing like this, deliberately, thoughtfully, in slow motion, one note, then two notes, then three, then enough so that the first phrase was executed and the next part was just a repeating of the pattern, I was allowed to think about my other hand, the left hand accompaniment. Eventually, I was allowed to put them together. Eventually, after weeks of painstaking, focused work, I was able to hear the difference between the sound Mrs. Kim wanted me to make and the sound I actually made, was able to feel the difference between the way Mrs. Kim wanted my hand to be and the way my hand actually was. Eventually, I was able to play the piece at speed, in all its fiery, quick dazzle, and while I didn’t understand exactly what it was I was doing all the time, or whether I was doing it the way she wanted me to, I began to understand there was a way to think about playing music that was different from the way I’d thought about it before. At tempo, the étude was hyperspeed, fingers blurring through virtuosic passages, sounding light and effortless, dancing on the keys. But it only got there through the slow, deliberate, intentional work of slow, deliberate, intentional practice.
In the end, I was thwarted by the showmanship of the last measures, a double-octave black key scale before the final cadence of the piece. My small hands weren’t able to wrap around those octaves, no matter how much slow work I did, no matter how much resting and preparing was built into the practicing of it. There are some physical limitations even smart practice can’t solve. But this exercise in patience, in approach, in practice, laid the groundwork for me for the rest of my time with Mrs. Kim, and the rest of my life as a musician.
Later I would learn how the work doesn’t end once you gain a new understanding of it. How once you’re able to play it through without snagging on difficulty or tugging the thread too tightly, the next stage begins. How you must allow yourself some perspective. How you must recognize the ways in which the piece has changed from your deconstruction of it—that slow, deliberate practice. How you must reimagine it in its new context. How you must attempt even newer ways of understanding it.
How you must take it apart again.
Left-hand only, to even out the bass, to comprehend the way it grounds the melody in this particular piece but perhaps not another; to dissolve the rest of it away until only the skeleton of the structure is there, guiding you toward another way of listening.
Right-hand only, the voicing, the phrasing you thought was one long breath but is actually several groups of thoughts in this particular piece but perhaps not in another; hearing now so clearly how in isolation the information this melody imparts is completely different than what is conveyed when it is integrated, grounded by harmony and structure and form.
Then how you must put it together again. Right and left, with this new understanding.
And take it apart.
And put it together.
And take it apart.
How you must perform it as though you are discovering it all as you go, inventing it right at this very moment as the perfect expression of what you might say if you only had words to express it.
And how later, when you have truly forgotten, when the piece has fallen out of your hands and ears and mind from lack of practice, you go back to the beginning and start again.
36
I don’t start with one note, like the one my teacher had relegated me to in my first weeks at the conservatory, but I do start at the beginning, with the most basic part of being at the piano: sitting.
Although my dura is no longer as sensitive as it was in the early weeks after my procedure, when slumping or having my chin down even slightly provided immediate, painful feedback that my posture should be corrected, at four months out, it is still sensitive enough that sitting for any length of time gives me a near immediate headache. The dural sac extends past the end of the spinal cord, and sitting creates a kind of compression of this sac and the fluid within
