Sitting in the "Other" Chair

     I was working with a student on a Villa-Lobos' Prelude #1, a piece that I had learned years ago when I was an undergraduate.  We were at one of the measures and she looks at me and says that I played that wrong.  I looked at the music and sure enough, she was correct.  I felt a little embarrassed at first, worked out the new fingerings, and finished out the piece.  This really bothered me at first, and the thought ran through my head for days. 

     What I finally came to realize is the reason why I had learned this measure wrong was because when I first learned the piece, I was in the "other" chair... the student chair. As a student, you are trying to learn so many pieces each semester, and our teachers are trying to fix as much as they can.  However, they sometimes may not notice a misplayed measure for multiple reasons, especially in a piece as complex and intricate as Prelude #3.  

     So, regardless of where we are at in our professional levels, we need to go back and look at some of the older pieces that have been in our repertoire for years. What we may find is that we may have made mistakes on these pieces, and can fix them.

     Conversely, we might be surprised to see how we analyze the music much different now.  For example, on Villa-Lobo's Prelude #3, I found some areas that I could utilize my increasingly-efficient legato abilities to create some absolutely beautifully flowing melodic lines that I was not capable of years ago, which made me really excited to relearn and play the piece.