(picture caption: My piano teacher and me, playing at a piano concerto competition last November)
I have to tryout at my college in early September in order to take private piano lessons, and I thought it would be a good idea to keep practicing while I am in DC. My aunt Rosemary, owner of Double R Productions, helped me secure a practice room at the Sitar Arts Center a couple days a week. It worked out perfectly because Double R did video productions work for the Sitar Arts Center long ago! Sitar is about underprivileged kids in the community having a local resource to take music lessons and do all sorts of artistic things that they otherwise wouldn’t have. I will talk a bit about what I do in my practice sessions and what I hope to accomplish before my internship at Double R Productions ends.
At home, I’m used to practicing AT MAX an hour per day on most days of the week, but that is not the case here. Here, I only have two sessions a week of an hour and a half each. This necessitates me to be efficient with my time since I have less total time per week of practice. It’s hard to stay focused on learning the intricate rhythms and notes for an hour and a half straight, and frankly, at the end of each session, I am exhausted. You need to have an incredible amount of patience to learn a new difficult piece because progress is oftentimes unnoticeable. I’m thankful that I’ve been assiduous enough to keep up with this process for so long! In a way, it’s sort of like video production, which I’m learning the ins and outs of at Double R.
I have been practicing Scriabin’s fourth sonata, and I hope to have it memorized by August. (I’ve actually been obsessed with this piece for around three years (!), so you could say I’m happy to be trying out with it.) I can go through about half of the piece at a steady pace, but after that point the process becomes more and more tedious as I try to figure out where my fingers are going and what notes I need to be playing. At that point, I go measure by measure and repeat until I can play it at a steady pace. Often I am tempted to continue onto the next measure even when I am not comfortable enough yet to do so. This is definitely my downfall!
My advice is that if you really really want to play an instrument or learning anything new like video production, I encourage you to do so. In the end, patience and passion trumps anything else when it comes to learning things on your own. (You could also make your own background music to insert in videos at Double R in order to avoid copyright infringement, to get really specific.)
-Brianna Ray
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