Retrouvailles turned out to be a good starting point for addressing Carter’s piano music. Rhythmically, there’s nothing in it to defeat mere mortals, just sextuplet semiquavers, and triplet quavers divided into semis for different emphasis. Granted, some of these have rests in the middle, but its eminently possible to understand and hear these on sight.

So, off I went. To my surprise, I’ve managed to get the bulk of the piece learnt in about three weeks, spending between half an hour and an hour a day on it, although going back to the piano regularly to reinforce what I’d been doing.

As I got Retrouvailles under my fingers, I learned a few things that wasn’t expecting to learn from this piece.

Firstly, Carter is extremely expressive and lyrical. This is something that didn’t jump off the page at me to start with, especially when working slowly on the mildly intimidating flurries of notes.

The only experience I can relate this to is the moment I realised what a wonderful expansive melody the theme of the last movement of Webern’s Variations op. 27 has. As I said in my previous post, converts will be aware of this already, but Carter writes great tunes.

Secondly, it’s strangely memorable music; I’m lucky in that I don’t find memorisation too difficult, but in any case Retrouvailles worked its way into my head without my having to give it any real assistance.

As I played it from memory, I came to my final discovery. I realised that I had effectively stopped counting. In essence – rhythmically at least – I found myself playing Retrouvailles by ear. It was at this point that the spacing of Carter’s phrases started to feel completely natural.

And I wonder, especially with the more rhythmically-complex works, whether that isn’t the approach I need to take: learn how the rhythms sound, then stop counting. That would certainly tally with Joe’s comments, on my last post on the subject of Carter, about the first of the Diversions.

I’m now doing battle with the much harder 90+, and will be interested to see whether this approach works.