Schubert: Ständchen (Serenade) D 957 No 4 from "Schwanengesang"

I learned a technique that I just made up on my own called Proactive Left.  When you're playing really hard chords or fingerings on the left hand, its natural to simply apply more strength and crush the strings into playing the right notes, but when you have a really lyrical melody this will inevitably result in a galumphing sound like you're just Hulking your way to the finish line.  Also if you're left hand is way way too strong then this will also influence your right hand where even if you want to pluck the strings softly, ultimately all the notes will have a dynamic range of kinda loud to loud.

So you're sitting there trying to tell your hands what to do, but the music is telling your LH its going to have to work harder to play the right notes.  This creates a conflict because now your Right hand is trying to follow instructions from your mind and is being persuaded by your LH as well.  So Progressive Left is getting your left wrist, elbow, and shoulder way more involved on the crazier passages in order to apply more leverage instead of strength upon the difficult fingerings.  You can't have overactive joints throughout entire pieces because that will lead to tension and stress that can spread all the way to your back which will then make the music sound stressed out - but when you have hard maneuvers coupled with a gentle / lyric melody you gotta get help from the rest of the team for your LH to smoothly navigate the passage.  At least thats what I did on this one.


Probably the most famous representation of this song is from Milo and Otis where Otis gets pissed off at Milo for getting a girlfriend and decides to run away and just figure out how to get home by...by himself.


There are still missed notes, but I've been working on this for so long I just have to move on.  


Ishida