The Mozart Project

Consider your schedule and your priorities.  If you are an adult and you are responsible only for yourself then you can decide on your strongest mental time.  If you are a younger person then you are at the mercy of the other persons in your home.  Whatever time you have, I encourage you to set small, manageable goals and practice phrase by phrase.  Look for a phrase and master it.  Even memorize it.  Consider learning music not note by note but phrase by phrase.   Sing to yourself whenever possible-learn some scat.  This is a non-verbal language so grunting is allowed.  Finding time to grunt musically is key.  

I enjoy practicing first thing of a morning.  Then, I leave the music open and sit down a couple more times throughout the day.  However, if you attend school or leave for several hours at a time for work you can still leave your music on the stand and sit down at the piano when you get home and again before you sleep.  But beware: you might dream about music.  Not such a bad dream.

Allegro

For the last 2 days I have been playing the First Movement.  One page per day and gradually speeding it up.  This movement seems rather sporadic in its form.  Granted, this was Mozart’s first published Sonata-1774.  It has the markings of experiment and short 4 measure phrases.  It is almost as if Mozart had a few ideas and decided to put them all in this movement at various intervals.  It is not melodious or seemingly well thought out.  This is not a difficult piece to learn though the trills in measure 14-15 could be tricky to fit in once the tempo is up.  Lots of arpeggios, scales, and trill practice.  On a technical level I think it is a fine starting Sonata for an early advanced student.  

Andante

I find this to be a more beautiful, flowing piece than the Allegro.  It seems much less cut and paste and more of a big-picture composition.  It fits under the hands nicely as opposed to the randomness of the Allegro.  A nice surprise.

A piano student emailed me recently, wondering if I knew the Mozart Fantasy in D minor, K 397.  I looked it up and indeed I had heard it but, never learned it.  After a few days of enjoyable sightreading I realized that a Mozart reading project would be beneficial to my fingers and mind.  Also, the book, Sonatas and Fantasies for the Piano, Edited by Nathan Broder, has 332 pages.  Or, almost a page per day for a year.  So, the goal is to play a page of Mozart each day, review the previous pages of the Sonatas and Fantasies until I have learned all of them.  I hope to finish this project within a year.