Midterm Self Evaluation

I chose to perform the piece “Amazing Grace” for my Keyboard III Midterm, because I was so familiar with it. For me, this piece presented a challenge that I’ve always had trouble with, which is switching the chords and melody from one hand to the other. This challenge for me was both technical and musical, because it challenges both your coordination and your interpretation, as you have to switch from making the melody loud in the right hand to then making the melody come out in the left. This has always thrown me off, and I had to do some work to ensure I was comfortable doing it in this piece. In order to learn this piece well and avoid this mistake, I went through the piece several times with each hand separately and then put them together measure by measure. After I was playing through the piece with both hands, I isolated the places I was still having trouble coordinating both hands together. Both of these things proved to be really effective for me in my overall understanding and performance of the piece for the midterm.
My conception of the piece after learning it was very similar to my conception of it before. I was very familiar with the song “Amazing Grace” and so I already had an idea of how this piece would be like to perform in my head. This idea did much for shaping things I incorporated into the actual performance like dynamics, phrasing and the general tempo throughout, and it also gave me a good indication as to what to do with things like emphasizing the chromatic parts of the piece. This really helped in my conception of the piece.