My Finger Peeled

My middle one to be precise. I've been training individual fingers, by God, to do my bidding. I'm training them to shift from chord to chord without me looking. or to be perfectly honest, looking from the edge of my peripheral vision. The fingers enduring the most wear-and-tear are my two middle fingers (what we call in piano parlance the third finger) and my right middle finger developed a callous and is now peeling. It's a little annoying.

The culprit is this jazz piece I've been working on with great fervor from Alfred Year Two which has an FF notation in several places. FF means you hit the keys quite hard. There are also accent marks, which look like this (>) over some of the notes, which mean the same thing: hit those suckers. I think all this drama gave me a callous.

I've also been working on the realio dealio Joplin Entertainer fingering for the first measure. It has octaves with an added third voice in eighth notes. Yes, that's as insane as it sounds. You play these pretty fast, even thought the composer notated his piece was to be played "not fast." This requires a finger-spread like King-Kong's left foot. Here is the passage in question. it looks innocuous, but as you can see from the bass line, all that activity occurs in the space of four beats. It's the melody part of The Entertainer that goes (and I'll try to convey this in print) La- de-dah Dah-dah Ta-ta Ta-ta Tah.

I can only practice it for ten minutes at a time before my tendons ache. So between the peeling callous and aching tendons, I'm a festering dungheap. I'm ruined. Well not really but it goes boo-boo.

Autumn has dribbled in so my moods are phasing in and out like Lady Ophelia's from Hamlet, so I'm given to crying jags followed by laughing fits, depending on which aisle I'm walking down at Wal-mart. This has added a poignant tone to my playing however, so even my upbeat jazz piece has a cynical edge to it, like Rock-a-Bye-Baby played by The Ramones.

I have a week off from lessons so I'm practicing independently. I'm having a lot of fun dabbling around with my independent study pieces and stretching my skills. I still sound like butt, but maybe one day I'll have a breakthrough and be able to play one piece all the way through without making a mistake.