Once more, with feeling

Day 20
I started learning a difficult new piece today that I have to perform in about a month.  As I sat down to sightread through it for the first time, I was super annoyed by the looks of it.  It didn't look idiomatic or fun to play, and it seemed mostly unnecessarily tiring.  I got through it painfully, missing just about every note and every other rhythm, yelling a couple choice obscenities along the way.  Then I grumbled into the kitchen, made myself a cup of tea, and realized that one 15-minute sightreading session does not a blog entry make.  So back I went to the music stand, this time starting from the end of the piece.
Given that I've been a musician for about 93% of the time that I've been alive on this earth, it should no longer surprise me that practice actually works.  But guys, it really does.  I spent a little over an hour working on the last page of the piece, taking it apart and getting it in my ear and my fingers, repeating each lick 10+ times until I knew what atonal note would come next.  And hell, I actually learned a quarter of the piece.  Within 60 minutes I went from dreadful, abject imaginings of how the performance would go to, "oh, this'll be fun to put together!"
I laughed out loud at the end of all this because I'm writing a goddamn practice blog, you would think I'd have some faith in the art of practicing.  But I'm still surprised how dramatically one can improve merely by repeating something.
||: Merely by repeating something :||