When you don‘t see any progress

Sonja writes that her dream is to reach other hearts and souls while conveying the happiness organ and the music of its great composers bring. The three things that are holding her back from realizing this dream are bad education from her past, missed any stimulation from her environment, and her health.

Perhaps some of my other readers feel, like Sonja that their lack of decent musical education is interfering with their efforts to progress in organ playing. Perhaps in the past they were diligent students who didn‘t have caring and experienced teachers and had to find out everything by themselves.

If you are in this situation, you might experience the moments in your practice when it seems like you are not progressing. This is because based on your previous experiences you don’t actually know how progress looks like.

Over a period of several months, when you take new pieces and try to master them, you still struggle at the same two-part combinations, you still miss those pedal notes, you still can’t play your pieces fast enough, and you still stumble with your musical ideas when it comes to improvisation.

So you think you are just spinning your wheels.

However, you will only know the true level of your advancement when you look back at your previous abilities from the distance. And when you look back, you’ll find out you don’t want to go back to that state you were before.

From this place, you only want to go forward.

Sight-reading:
Part III: Priere a Notre-Dame (p. 9) from Suite Gothique, op. 25 by Leon Boellmann (1862-1897), French Romantic composer and organist.

Hymn playing:
Take My Life And Let It Be