Just had lesson #3 from Robert Cowie yesterday. The lesson hit me as particularly profound. We did a lot of the same types of exercises that we had done before, playing clumps of notes together, transposing up a half step, outlining phrases. But this week the general theme of the lesson was playing with your ear, not your mind.

I've been taking piano lessons this year. It's one of the skills I always wished I had. Also, I used to plink around on the piano all through high school and college writing music. I miss it, but this time I'm going to learn to play correctly in the hopes that I can write something more than just chords and a melody.

One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to learn piano. I started with someone that I had found on craiglist. It started off well. However, I felt like I outgrew him rather quickly. All of the pieces that he picked were frenetic finger exercises and I often grew bored of the pieces. One of the first pieces that he had given me was a Back minuet. I liked the piece, and got the fingering down realtively quickly. However, the more I practiced it, the less like music it sounded. It kept sounding more and more plodding, forced, and "scale-like".

I had been stuck on my latest writing project. I spent a couple of months working together act breakdowns, scene breakdowns, character analyses, etc. I had all the pre-work done and ready to go, all I had to do was starting actually writing. I kept putting it off. So clearly something was wrong. I told myself that after I get the first couple of pages out, I'll get over my "fear" of writing and the rest will flow easily. I got myself to agree to only write 2 pages - to help me get over the initial hump. Those two pages came somewhat easily, then there was another delay.