I've heard the expression "Use it or lose it" a lot in my life and have always been a bit confused by it. How can you lose a skill just by not doing it for a while? And let's also remember that a lot of things are "Just like riding a bike. You never forget how." Recently, I've been finding that both are true at the same time. Let me explain.
Over the last few months, I have been playing mainly songs that do not require octave stretches. It was not a conscious decision, and, in fact, I didn't notice until I pulled out Mozart's "Rondo a la Turca" again and was working on the passage that is all octave reaches in the right hand. I started getting a bit frustrated because my hand didn't want to reach it like it used to (I have pretty small hands and cannot reach beyond an octave anyway). I could play the octaves, but my hand, wrist, and arm were tensing up and getting fatigued pretty quickly. I could still do it, but did not have much endurance. So, it is just like riding a bike, I do still know how to do it, but it's also something that I didn't use and lost...at least the endurance to keep going.
So, what am I doing about it? I've added a playing octaves portion to my daily scale and cadence warm up. This way, I have to keep doing the octave reaches and build up endurance, but not in the context of a song (when I'm practicing part of a song, I tend to ignore the tension and work myself too hard to get it right, which is not a healthy choice). So, I am working on other parts of the Rondo that are less taxing and just playing though the octave portion until I have built up the endurance to really attack it again. So I guess it's not all lost, but I have lost some ground that I need to go over again. It's a bit of extra work, but it will be worth it.
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