MP Days 10-13: Phenomenal Cosmic Power!
I seriously can't believe how long it's taken me just to get to this point. I feel like i started this a month ago, but it's only been about 2 and a half weeks. It's been a busy two and a half weeks, what with a wedding (not mine), family relations visiting (mine), and just a ton of day-jobbing it.
All that to say I was either too busy, too emotionally destraught, or too tired to be productive and practice my Moyse. Those days that I did practice, there wasn't enough time to write a coherent sentence about my findings, which is why you're getting 4 days crammed into one update!
Days 10 and 12 were the first set of exercises, which by day 12, I finally got up to 100bpm! It doesn't seem all that impressive, now that I've read it, but the goal for me was not to get through the exercise as quickly as possible, but to do it cleanly and accurately, while consistently increasing the tempo. I do fimrly believe in slow practice, but at some point you do have to be able to play fast! Next I aim to do the same thing but on piccolo, which will require some clever edits to avoid the low C and C-sharp.
Day 11, scales in sevenths... where to even begin? These were the exercises I was dreading, with good reason. They are VERY awkward, to the point where even my ridiculously slow tempo was still too much and I turned off the metronome all together. It was a struggle to get through the whole thing, especially the triads and seventh chords. I focused on air, but frankly a downward leap of two octaves is not going to be the smoothest thing ever played on a flute. I figure that after these exercises, anything is easy by comparison!
The octaves in day 13 were, in fact, much easier than anticipated. By the end of the broken seventh chords I had reached that magical level of resonance where you can feel the whole flute vibrating in your hands. Whenever that happens I feel like I'm holding the universe in my hands, like PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER!
I still avoided the metronome at the beginning so that I could focus on smoothness, but ultimately I was able to get it to around 72bpm. The issues here were with air, not fingers, so it's great to know some of the challenges I had earlier in the project are being resolved. By day 26 I should be a master!
Stay tuned for next week when I start this whole thing over again with a piccolo bonus round!
