Humoresque hopes everyone had a wonderful summer, perhaps even a musical one! Did you play “Summer Is A-Coming In”? If so, I hope you enjoyed it. It’s a sparkling, lively tune which should have put you in a great mood for the holidays.
But – now it’s September again, and we’re all back to work, or back to lessons, or back to school, or – well, whatever you’re doing!
So Humoresque is going to give you a gentle start, a relaxing eeeeeeeasing back into music learning. Lower yourself gently into your favourite armchair and read on…
Starting From Anywhere
You know the old joke? A traveller is driving through the Irish countryside and becomes hopelessly lost. Eventually he sees an old man standing by the roadside.
The traveller stops and asks, “Excuse me, could you tell me the best way to get to Dublin?”
The old man thinks for a moment, looks up the road, then down the road, scratches his head and says:
“Well, I wouldn’t start from here, if I were you.”
Here’s a nice little task for you this week. Choose a piece, study or exercise you’ve been working on. How long is it? As in, how many bars? Let’s say it’s 32 bars long. Now cut some paper up into 32 little pieces and write a different number on each one, from 1 to 32. Turn them over and jumble them up, then pick one at random. This is your starting bar. So if you pick, say Number 14, you have to start the piece from Bar 14. No cheating by beginning a few bars back, and definitely no wails of “But I can only go from the beginning!” Start at Bar 14 and play to the end. Don’t worry about mistakes or hesitations, you’re practising a particular skill today. It’s called Starting From Anywhere.
Now put the little Bar 14 paper to one side, ruffle the others up and pick a new bar. Maybe it’s Bar 31. Great! Now you only have to play two bars! But it’s not always that easy, because “picking up” from Bar 31 might be harder than you’d think.
Then choose another number, and so on. You could spend just ten or fifteen minutes on this and it will help you so much!
Now, you may be thinking: “But I’m learning a Beethoven sonata and it’s got 299 bars!” Fine. Don’t panic. Divide your longer piece into sections of, say 30-40 bars each. Then pick a section and do the exercise. You can, obviously, use the same little pieces of paper (your “Anywhere”) every time, no matter which piece or which part of a piece you choose.
It’s really important that you start at the actual beginning of the bar you’ve picked out. Even if the two quavers just before the barline look incredibly tempting, you must ignore them! That’s the point of the exercise. Starting From Anywhere could mean in the middle of a bar, or the last note of a phrase, or anything at all, but we’re going to use the start of a random bar every time. If you do this regularly, you’ll get really good at it, I promise.
One last reminder: this isn’t a way to practise the piece. You are not trying to fix that tricky bit at the top of page 2, or to add dynamics, or to improve your fluency in that awful passage with the triplets. All you’re doing here is Starting From Anywhere. Start at Bar Whatever and play to the end of the piece. Or the end of the section. Or wherever your teacher has told you to stop.
You may not get to Dublin.
But you’ll really start to understand your music.
I’d love to know what you think of this Humoresque. You can put a comment in the box below this post, or you can email me directly. I read and respond to everything.
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Humoresque = a whimsical or fanciful piece of music. Be whimsical, be fanciful, but play in time!
This is Humoresque Number 46