Practice is the patience to remain within what is not yet clear, and in the trust that what is sought is also, bound to and yearning for the one who returns to it

The new pattern to my life of 4 terms last year and the fullness of term one this year have brought me to a closer understanding of what vacation time means for the working artist. Jumping between campuses, rehearsals, meetings, more rehearsals, performances and exams, work at the instrument seems to stop in term one and become more of an obstacle course of ever increasing difficulty and ever increasing time demands, such that by term end, more than 5 hours of sleep a night seems like an unheard of luxury - indeed, spending time maintaining skills an impossibility.

With the advent of Easter break, and the return to an almost "novice in the cell"-like type of solitude and commune with the instrument, it has seemed at times that the work does not proceed in a straight line, nor even in what one might comfortably call progress, but rather unfolds in a series of returns—each one approaching the same material from a slightly altered vantage, as though the music itself were waiting to be recognised rather than learned, and as though each return participates in a wider system of relations that only gradually discloses itself.

The re-imposition of the Pomodoro method has, in this respect, introduced not so much a discipline of time as a reconfiguration of its experience. These intervals of twenty-five minutes, followed by their brief suspensions, do not divide the work so much as give it contour. What might otherwise dissolve into an indistinct duration is instead gathered into discrete moments, each one bearing its own particular quality of attention. Four, sometimes six, of these intervals form the larger arc of a session; yet their coherence lies not only in their sequence, but in the network they establish—each interval acting as a reading of the last, and a preparation for the next.

On the morning of 6 April, the opening bars of Bach’s A minor fugue became such a point of return. Labelled, reduced, repeated—ten times, and then again through rhythm, voice, fingering, coordination—they seemed at each iteration not merely to stabilise, but to alter in meaning. To sing a line, to tap a pattern, to speak the notes aloud: these were not auxiliary acts, but parallel inscriptions, each tracing the same object through a different medium. In this way, the fugue begins to resemble less a fixed text than a field of possibilities, approached through successive acts of attention.

Rachmaninoff, in the same session, unfolded across its opening bars with a similar insistence on process: rhythm, notes, voices, coordination—each layer articulated, then recombined. Yet here the work seemed to depend less on separation than on the gradual accumulation of resonance, as though each repetition left behind a faint imprint that shaped the next. Dutilleux, by contrast, resisted even this degree of immediacy. Figures were not only played but written out, transferred into notation software, externalised in order to be understood. The act of writing became a second form of listening, no less essential than the sounding itself.

By the evening of 6 April, the practice had shifted from construction to traversal. In the Gillies, a passage before the key change was isolated and examined through hands-separate and hands-together work, the coordination negotiated as though deciphering a particularly dense line of text. Martinů, with its emphasis on a defined structural point, seemed to sit between these modes—its clarity dependent on both detail and direction.

When the work resumed on 8 April, it did so not as a simple continuation, but after a day given over to rehearsal—advanced vocal and early string repertoire—where music exists not as something constructed in solitude, but negotiated in real time between bodies and sounds. This intervening experience did not interrupt the studio work so much as refract it. There remained, beneath the outward activity, an awareness of another thread—suspended, but not broken.

Thus the return to labour on the 8th carried with it a particular intensity, as though re-entering not a task, but a process already in motion. The morning opened with an extended technical ritual: scales and arpeggios in multiple forms, across registers, intervals, and inversions. This was not merely preparation, but calibration—a reordering of touch, a re-establishment of relation between body and instrument, without which the subsequent work could not fully cohere.

From there, the Bach fugues once again formed a centre. Bars 5–7 were approached through an array of transformations: singing individual voices, clapping rhythms, tapping coordination, combining and recombining these elements, naming notes and fingerings, proceeding through the chain method. What emerges here is not simply learning, but a multiplication of perspectives—each Pomodoro an interpretive act, each return altering the significance of what precedes it. The A major fugue, worked in parallel, reinforced this sense of dialogue within the practice itself.

Rachmaninoff continued through similarly articulated processes—clapping, counting, naming—while Dutilleux advanced through further inscription: figures written, extended, clarified. The later session on the same day deepened this trajectory: further writing, sectional integration, and the gradual clarification of internal relationships within the material.

Alongside this, the Beethoven introduced a different order of engagement. Here, the development section was worked bar by bar, separately and together, each repeated with deliberation, as though testing the internal logic of the material against the physical realities of the instrument. The coda of How Glory Goes presented a contrasting challenge: its piano writing, resistant and at times impractical in reduction, required a distillation of the left-hand harmonic progression—a skeletal understanding that remains available should the surface become unstable.

Within this structure, the Pomodoro does not merely organise time; it produces meaning. Each interval is both complete and incomplete, a unit that contains its own intention while pointing beyond itself. The work is left unfinished, necessarily so; yet it is precisely this incompletion that sustains the possibility of return. The pauses between intervals allow the material to settle, to reorganise, so that what is encountered again is neither wholly new nor entirely familiar.

Thus, across these sessions, practice begins to resemble not a linear accumulation, but a network—of repetitions, of inscriptions, of returns—through which the material gradually discloses itself. The fragments—bars of Bach, figures of Dutilleux, passages of Rachmaninoff, and the unfolding argument of Beethoven—do not yet resolve into a single whole. Yet they are bound together by the relations established through attention.

And perhaps this is where the work reveals its quietest truth: that practice is not only in the playing, but in the reading, the writing, the listening, the returning—in the patience to remain within what is not yet clear, and in the trust that what is sought is also, in some way, bound to and yearning for the one who returns to it.