So this week I was pretty serious in my piano practices, played for one hour everyday except on Friday, it has become an important part of my daily routine.

Previously I am more casual in playing: pick a piece I like, practice the piece until it’s 60% - 70% fluent and try some instagram recording, and then continue to polish it until I lose the interest or the drive. Many of the pieces I liked and played are left in this awkward state: I can play through the piece, with mistakes here and there, but I have never been really satisfied with any of them.

To be fair, I do sometimes “feel” the music during certain parts of the music, but I would not be able to fully immersed into one during playing. I am not sure whether it is because I am bad at it (not able to control the music with finesse), or because of my over-reverbed environment, or simply just my piano sound quality. I think most likely it’s a mixture of all three.

Starting on Monday this week, I decided to try the lovely-small-hand-unfriendly waterfall etude by Chopin. It’s not the first etude I have attempted composed by Chopin, but I feel I should at least completed this, even at half of the speed. So I started, on Monday, at the speed of crotchet equals 70, the first 10 bars of the etude, and kind of stabilized it to 95 by Thursday for the first 16 bars. It’s pretty slow I know, both the tempo and the progress, but I did feel the joy of playing etude, which I had never felt during my childhood while practicing Czerny.

I will probably leave Schubert’s impromptu 4 aside for a while and focusing on this, because my hand gets really tired after one hour of practice, and I kinda get fixated on this, hope by the end of this journey my apperggios could be as smooth as babies’ skin (guess this will also serve as a preparation for Beethoven Moonlight sonata 3rd movement).

On a side note, I do need to semi-polish my Moonlight 1st, might need to play it on Saturday. I am not sure what else to play honestly, I don’t want to butcher Mozart in front of other people though.