Just taking a break here from working on a Barrios study. Now, this piece was I thought making reasonable progress. That was until my lesson, where my teacher changed nearly half the left hand fingerings and also added a bunch of right hand fingerings that were quite different to what I normally do.
And I found that it has pretty much set me back to the very beginning. Seriously, it’s almost exactly like learning a whole new piece. Very little of the work I did on it before applies now. It’s frustrating to say the least. The new fingerings will definitely be an improvement in the long run, but it feels like – no, it isn’t just a feeling – that my whole effort at first was essentially wasted.
It’s a little disturbing to be honest, because it calls into question how much of the music is really in my head, how well do I understand the music itself, and how much of it is simply my fingers making the same movements that they have been accustomed to, in the nature of trained mice navigating a maze.
Well, lesson is on Tuesday and there’s no way I can get it to sound better than the last time we looked at it. I’m going to start a new piece entirely, and with luck we can get it all sorted out and ready to learn with no changes so that I don’t have to go through this two steps forward, one-point-nine steps back annoyance again.