Living life on the edge: a practice technique discovery

I am a very safe person.  I am a very thorough person.  And I pride myself on accuracy and discipline.  These qualities are painfully obvious when I'm practicing and they usually serve me well.  

But I recently hit a wall, a humongous wall - the C# minor Fugue from book II of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.  It may only be a 3-voice fugue but it's fast...really fast.  And there are lots and lots of notes.  It's one of those pieces that when you look at the pages, all you see is black.  Some people might think that's just an exaggeration when a musician complains of black pages, but I'm here to say it's true, it really is.

I didn't do anything different to begin learning this fugue; I started from the end, working in small chunks until I reached the beginning; I took time to choose and write in fingerings; I worked out which hands were going to take which notes.  Once the notes were learned, I did what I always do with technically difficult pieces, I started working it up with the metronome, being sure to bump up the metronome marking only when I could nail it at the tempo I was currently at.  Brava, Erica, Brava...so responsible, right?

Well, not really.  Perhaps it was responsible but it simply wasn't working.   

Thankfully, while twittering the other day, I read that an accomplished pianist, Valentina Lisitsa, was going to live stream her practice sessions every day this week.  She practices 12-13 hours a day (I'm not so sure that's a great thing, by the way) so there's a lot of time to catch her at it. (Click here to watch some of it.)  I decided to watch a bit and I was amazed by the fact that most of her practicing, even of technically difficult passages, were practiced quite quickly and I sensed that a lot of the time she was trying to just memorize gestures - there wasn't as much of a concern about each and every individual note.  It dawned on me that perhaps I should just live life on the edge, throw off my security blanket, and simply go for it.  

So that's what I did.  I was careful to try this method without jeopardizing my commitment to not repeating the same mistake twice and to keeping a relaxed mind and body- two of the maxims I live by. I also wanted to maintain musicality throughout the process in spite of the fact that my body and mind really wanted to panic.   Here's a video showing how it all went...

This is a new way of practicing for me and it really is a bit scary but I think it was starting to work by the end of just a half-hour of practicing.  What a relief!  And thank you twitter friends and Valentina Lisitsa.  Just goes to show you that there's always something new to try and new to learn!

So here's hoping that I'll finally be able to record this Prelude and Fugue so that I can move on with my Bach project.  Now please excuse me...I have some more cliffs to jump off of!