Self Evaluation

For the past two weeks or so, I have been working on “Amazing Grace.” The piece was challenging for me because it had movement in both hands, not just the right. Getting my left hand to move with my right hand proved more difficult than I originally thought.
When I first started practicing the piece, I only did separate hands. I did this until I could do each hand perfectly alone; I had the correct time, notes, and dynamics. Then I began the dutiful task of playing both hands. At first, I tried to play the whole piece at once. This was not a good choice, as I stumbled through the piece and made too many mistakes. However, I continued to do it this way, and yielded little results. After the extra help session on Wednesday October 7, Professor Yi had given me some tips and better fingerings to help me with my struggles.
I then decided to go line by line, and be very strict with myself when I practiced. If a line was not perfect, or I did not feel comfortable enough to move on, I continued on the same line. When I felt like the line was good enough, I moved to the next line and did the same thing. Then I tried the first two lines until I could do them together perfectly. I did this for the whole piece.
As I practiced this way, I began to notice some trouble spots. They mostly occurred when two hands were moving contrary to each other, or when the pattern of chords changed. While I knew where the chord changes were and what they were, I was unable to do them quick enough to keep in time. I slowed down the speed, which helped a lot, and then gradually brought the speed back up to where I thought it should be.
In terms of the musicality of the piece, I knew I had a lot of leeway. “Amazing Grace” is a traditional piece, but this arrangement was a jazzy style of it. I knew I could play around with it and sort of feel it out. It’s very interesting how musicians can just tell how a piece should go based on how it feels when they play it, and this is how I figured out where I wanted the piece to go. I decided on starting out calm, and building up to about five measures from the end, and then bringing it back down for the last two measures. This happened very naturally, but yielded a very nice sound.
When I first saw the piece, I thought it was going to be easy, and I pushed it aside for a while. However, when I first practiced it, I knew it was not going to be as easy as I thought. Through careful practice and time, I was able to perform it to the best of my abilities and think it was very successful.