Sun 1:00 (1410-1510)

So, The Thing for today is relaxation. And I don't just mean the putting out the deck furniture and sitting in the sun kind, though that was nice, too. The most dissatisfying part of Thursday night's quartet performance is that as we waited and waited to go on I got more and more chilled and more and more tense, and when we finally played I was unable to release enough tension to play the way that I know I can, and that I did 1.5 hours before, during our warmup. It's not the nerves per se, it's the resulting tension.

I had a nice discussion with @EmilyCello regarding how to practice "not getting tense," looking for the best single thing to focus on while I practice, since I can't really OD on epinephrine and cope with it any time I want to. She suggested focusing on the sensation of relaxation to the exclusion of anything else I was working on for a part of my practice. And she proposed a challenge: video a run through of Apres Un Reve (current project) while focusing on relaxation, and post it. (A little epi-inducing, anyway.)

For today's practice, I divided the opening, pre-screechy part into two, and practiced each phrase 25x, pulling my focus back to relaxation as many times as I lost it, which was frequent. (You can see my counting abacus on the top of the piano.) Then I set up the camera and recorded it once off. That run through was less relaxed than the practice run throughs, but I am not entirely displeased. It definitely shows progress. Watch my face, which shows far fewer ticks than usual. (For some of my practice runs I actually kept my mouth hanging open - easier to feel the minute workings of the jaw that are the beginning of tension.)



Next time I'll do a couple of screechy lines. Be afraid.