Music/Life

New year, new teacher

2012-01-25T16:20:00.000-05:00

The other two lesson situations I ended up with this past year were so discouraging that I didn't know if I wanted to venture into another one, but I have gathered myself together and found a new teacher. I am hopeful that this is going to be good; the first few lessons have been extremely promising.

We are working on the exact thing I have been wanting to do, which is how to approach and release the key and how to coordinate all the elements (fingers, wrist, feet [pedaling]). To start, he showed me a few simple finger exercises, which I will try to describe here for the benefit of anyone who may be interested:

First exercise: play a C major scale with one finger (starting with the thumb and working through all fingers, one hand at a time), using the weight of the hand with the wrist as the point of motion. Play each note twice, without lifting the finger, and move to the next note again without lifting the finger. Feel the resistance of the key as it comes up.

Second exercise: play a three-note first inversion chord, starting with C-E-A and going up the scale, again keeping the fingers on the keys and using passive weight as much as possible, as with the first exercise. Do this with each hand separately.

Third exercise: starting on C, with each hand, using 1, 2, and 3, play a pattern of CDE, DEF, etc., to the top of the scale and then back down, as quickly and softly as possible, thinking about getting off of the key for the most clarity. Then play a four-note pattern (CDEF, DEFG, etc.), and then a five-note pattern (CDEFG, DEFGA, etc.).

Then, he asked me to practice the easier Chopin preludes (2, 4, 6, 20), attempting to apply what I'm learning with these exercises.

That's pretty much what we've covered so far, though I am also practicing some other things (Bach WTCII, C major; Chopin Nocture Op. 9 No. 1, etc.). After I've spent a half hour or so on the exercises and the preludes, I can feel a big difference when I play more difficult pieces. Everything feels springier, less tense, and more secure.

So we shall see!

"Something Almost Being Said"

2012-01-16T21:22:00.001-05:00

There was a repeat broadcast (originally aired in December 2011) today of "The Diane Rehm Show" on which Diane interviewed Simone Dinnerstein. Her latest CD is titled "Something Almost Being Said: The Music of Bach and Schubert." There's so much fascinating stuff in the interview that I wanted to share a link here:

Something Almost Being Said - transcript

Audio and other goodies

Enjoy!

This wasn't supposed to be quite this hard

2012-01-10T10:17:00.000-05:00

Last August, I decided to learn Debussy's First and Second Arabesques. The First Arabesque is a favorite for the developing student; you can go on YouTube and watch eleventy-million videos by pianists of all ages and stages. The Second Arabesque is less well known and more difficult, though still a foundational sort of piece.

I basically thought, "How hard could this be?"

The answer, as always: "Much harder than you think." Getting every note crystal clear, with the right mood and rhythm and articulation, turned out to be a finicky sort of exercise. It reminded me of my first piano teacher talking about learning "The Little Shepherd" (from Children's Corner) when she was in college: She said it took her two months to play this two-page, slow piece to her teacher's satisfaction. "I could smell those stinkin' sheep" was how she put it.

So I have worked on these pieces steadily for the past four months, and I am still working on them. Barging through them is actually not so difficult, but when I listen to the playbacks of my attempts, if I'm being honest with myself, they leave much to be desired.

I thought, though, that I would post a progress version of the First Arabesque. The Second Arabesque is not even ready for late night, let alone prime time.

First Arabesque, in progress

Chipping away

2012-01-04T14:02:00.000-05:00

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

Michaelangelo

This thought occurred to me last night as I was continuing my struggle with "Pezzo Capriccioso." To the player, the notes on the page are the stone, and the performance is the statue. You learn the notes and try to shape them to express feelings that can't be put into words. Unlike stone, musical performance is fleeting and variable, which is both good and bad. But a satisfying performance does have a solidity of intention and inevitability. I think that's what we all strive to achieve.

Image: Detail of the hand of Michaelangelo's David

(from: http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/arts/artwork/michelangelo-sculptures7.htm).

Not sure why I do this to myself

2011-12-27T09:10:00.001-05:00

I have gotten myself into a situation. It began last spring, when for some unfathomable reason I volunteered to play a concerto with my chamber orchestra. Initially, the idea was to do something big. The Dvorak concerto was mentioned (not by me). The conductor asked me to send him some suggestions, which I did (and I was getting all excited about playing C. P. E. Bach -- I love those pieces though they are not traditionally showy; I also thought the orchestra would have a chance of sounding pretty good on one of them). Some time went by, and then I got an email asking if I could play Fauré's "Elegy."

As they say these days, meh. It's one of those stereotypical sad cello pieces that sounds like someone's funeral is either taking place or is imminent. It's also at the technical level of approximately junior high, but does not lie particularly well. It would take lots of work to get it to sound good, but it would never sound like I had put so much into it. I dreaded spending the better part of a year working on it. At first I thought, okay, not my favorite, but I'll be a pro, learn the piece, play it really well, et cetera. The only problem was that every time I sat down to work on it, it made me depressed.

So I approached the conductor at a rehearsal this fall and asked if he would be okay with another piece of the same length. The upshot was that he agreed to change from the "Elegy" to Tchaikovsky's "Pezzo Capriccioso." And now I must make sure that I am in shape to play all those spiccato 32nd notes and jump around in thumb position by this coming June.

My experience of these things is that it is not enough to practice only the piece; I need to work on other things that include the same technical challenges but are more difficult. So my plan of attack, at least to start, is Popper (Etude No. 6, and maybe some others) for bowing; Bach Prelude No. 6 for thumb position and intonation; and scales and arpeggios. We'll see how it goes.

Here is a video of "Pezzo" that I liked when I came across it on YouTube. Very clean and expressive.

"You and the Piano": A lesson with Seymour Bernstein

2011-12-16T22:58:00.000-05:00

This was posted today on a forum I read:

A friend received this email from his old piano teacher, Seymour Bernstein an author (With Your Own Two Hands) and concert pianist living in NYC, aged 85 now and still going strong.

"Here it is, my video made in 1986 entitled YOU AND THE PIANO. , I believe that this video is one of the important accomplishments of my professional life. Having had a lot of distance from the time it was made, I now consider it to be a powerful educational tool for all pianists of any age and level of accomplishment; and even for other instrumentalists who often ponder what to tell their pianists concerning balance of sound.
Now I need your help. I want to establish a partnership with YouTube. But they won’t consider it unless there is measurable activity for my videos. A hit occurs when someone clicks onto the video file. So please, send these files to your friends. They need only open them up and that constitutes a hit.
Thanks so much for your help, and my warmest wishes to you.
Seymour "

I Thought you may be interested in his techniques etc.

Part 1: YOU AND THE PIANO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXasoC4SdUc

Part 2: YOU AND THE PIANO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_2q7U5A34Q

Part 3: YOU AND THE PIANO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIFQUrhdT2k

Part 4: YOU AND THE PIANO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNYH8GQrdrc

These are wonderful videos. If you are at all interested in piano technique, please check them out. I have been meaning to get a hold of Mr. Bernstein's famous book mentioned in the note above, With Your Own Two Hands, and now I will really try to do so.

Interesting experience

2011-11-28T22:04:00.000-05:00

"All right, Mr. DeMille . . ."

Almost two months ago, I was asked if I'd be interested in playing the piano for a two- to four-minute video to be posted online. My first thought was, "What's wrong with good old audio? Got plenty of those already." My next was, "Hmmm. A challenge. Why not? What's the worst that could happen?" So I agreed.

Next I had to decide what to play. First thought: "Better do something easy." Second thought: "This is a great opportunity to display my obsession with Bach -- and find out if I can do it under pressure." After some more consideration, I decided to stick with my most recently learned prelude and fugue set -- WTC I/18, in G sharp minor.

I thought I knew these pretty well, and of course I had already recorded and posted them here, but continuing to practice them for another six+ weeks was, as usual, enlightening. Every time I sat down at the piano, I would play them first, cold, from memory. I could play through both pieces with assurance as long as no one else was in the room. But I knew I did not know them as well as I should. For one thing, though I could look at a measure, put the book away, and play to the end of the piece, I could not do this from any place in the piece without taking that look first. But I kept chipping away, trying to get better at this. I also kept trying to play as slowly as possible, which is harder than one might think. Every place I stumbled or hesitated, I went over: Am I using the best fingering? What exactly is going on there?

The date for the taping grew closer; my performance jitters increased. The video aspect stepped this up many notches. I had to think about how I looked, raising all kinds of personal demons. I also didn't know what the piano would be like, or even what the people involved would be like.

The night before, my normally resilient stomach went into overdrive, and I sat up until 3 a.m. feeling like I was going to hurl. I finally crawled to bed and was able to go to sleep with my intestinal dignity intact.

After that low point, the experience itself turned out not to be so bad. The people were very nice and easy going, the piano was a lovely older Steinway in a calm setting, and I was able to play with some semblance of mastery. We did more than one take so we could get several angles, and by the fourth one I was even enjoying it. I think I did okay. But even if it turns out I didn't (the proof is in the playback), this was really an excellent thing for me to have done. It was a great lesson in how to put aside thoughts of inadequacy and just work with what I had at the moment to try to make music.

But it was so tiring!!!

So it's in the can (unless the camera wasn't actually on or something). I will post a link when it's available.

Blog cross-post: Reaching Beyond

2011-11-26T21:41:00.000-05:00

My fellow blogger, Shirley Kirsten (see her link in my blogroll: Arioso7's Blog), posted a link to this documentary about an inspirational piano teacher, Irina Orlov.

If you have about an hour and a half to kill, it's well worth spending the time on it. I may even watch it again sometime.

Reaching Beyond

Note: the site linked here is in Russian (I believe), but the video itself is in English.

(I was interested to note that she is in my locale, and several people I know are interviewed.)

From the archives: Stravinsky

2011-11-21T17:53:00.001-05:00

This past weekend, I played in the second season concert with my chamber orchestra. The program was the most interesting one we've done, I believe: Stravinsky Pulcinella Suite, Mahler songs (Das Knaben Wunderhorn and Das Himmlischer Leben), Debussy First Rhapsody for clarinet and orchestra, and Waltz of the Flowers from the Nutcracker.

Playing the Stravinsky brought on some cringey memories of my attempt at the solo cello version of the piece, titled "Suite Italienne." The cello part of the orchestral version is pretty easy (even the separate "solo cello" part). Stravinsky later arranged the solo version for Piatigorsky (or rather, Piatigorsky arranged it and he and Stravinsky collaborated on the royalties), and it, on the other hand, is extremely difficult. I learned it for one of my master's degree recitals, but really, my skills at the time (both virtuosic and organizational) were not completely up to the task. I struggled with it for months and never felt satisfied. I have carried around for almost 30 years the idea that the performance was a disaster.

However, when I got home from the concert last night, I pulled out the recording of that recital, fired up the tape player, and burned a digital copy of it and was (somewhat) pleasantly surprised. It's a prim and slightly timid version, a bit light on interpretive genius, but not necessarily untrue to the composer's original conception. Stravinsky apparently wasn't terribly interested in the cello (this is his only solo work for it), so a cool, non-schmaltzy interpretation actually seems about right.

So here are a few movements. If any of you out in blogland want to hear the rest, let me know and I'll post the others. This performance took place on March 9, 1983.

Introduzione

Tarantella

"The numbers all go to eleven"

2011-11-16T13:54:00.000-05:00

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...

Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?

Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.

Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.*

I have always been a Nerd (that's with a capital "N," thanks). When other kids were going to rock concerts and smoking pot, I was at home baking bread and listening to NPR. So I can count on one hand the number of rock'n'roll events I've attended. Oh, I do like a lot of the music and listen to it happily on a home stereo, but there are many things I dislike about the live shows. Among them:

Expensive!
The audience more often than not has to stand up the entire time. It's like being herded to the slaughter house except they don't hit you over the head, they just take your money. It's presented as being more fun -- hey, guys, you can dance! and jump up and down! -- but in reality, after an hour your feet start to hurt.
There is usually a long, boring opening act by a band you have no interest in hearing.
They are TOO LOUD!!!

My husband noticed that the rock great Ray Davies, of Kinks fame, was going to be doing a show in our neighborhood, at the brand-new venue The Fillmore. He excitedly bought tickets. Davies is now in his late 60s, still with a great, strong voice. I really enjoyed the album he did a year or so ago with a choir:

The Kinks Choral Collection

So I was somewhat looking forward to it, with my usual trepidation (see list above). As we were leaving the house last night to go to the show, I grabbed a pair of earplugs --*just in case*.

The drill when we got there: We waited in line outside for about a half hour. They came along and checked IDs and gave us plastic wristbands color-coded to drinking age (from the looks of it, the vast majority had not been seriously carded in about 30 years -- IOW, we were among our age cohort). Then they let us in in batches. People at the door checked our bags (for weapons? I dunno) and scanned our tickets, after which we were admitted to the actual concert space and found out yep, no chairs. We decided to stand on the main floor rather than in the balcony. Then we waited some more. Then Davies's backup band came out and played for about 45 minutes. They were both boring and LOUD. I put in my earplugs. Somewhere around 9:00, Davies finally showed up. He sounded just as good as he did on his recordings, and he had a fabulous guitarist with him; when it was just the two of them on stage, the music was enjoyable. However, when the backup band came back out and they started rockin' out, it was TOO LOUD. The balance was awful.

For most of the people there, this was a trip down memory lane, and they were ready to sing along and were probably already deaf anyway (if they go to a lot of these things), so what it sounded like didn't matter. I was basically worrying about my ears the whole time. After my hearing loss episode two years ago, even though it didn't have anything to do with being exposed to loud noises, I've been sensitive to how fragile and valuable one's hearing really is.

So, for me, never again (if I can avoid it). Back to Nerd-dom.

*From "This Is Spinal Tap" (in case you have been living in a cave all your life). We happen to have seen this last week, in a special showing in honor of 11/11/11. I have to say, it was much more enjoyable overall than this concert.

Time, time, time

2011-11-08T13:26:00.000-05:00

In planning what I want to do versus, or in conjunction with, what I need to do, I dream of finding a perfect balance.

I have a job in an office where I work all day, every day, Monday through Friday, except for holidays, snow days, and the occasional odd situation (earthquake, electrical outage, World Bank protest, etc.). My free time is my own. I never have to work overtime or bring work home. When I leave the office, I'm done until I return. I've had stretches when I dreamed about work -- dreary dreams involving typing on a computer -- but I think that happens to everyone. (Doesn't it??)

There have been periods since I started working full time when my glorious free hours yawned before me, but the deeper I have gotten into the piano, the more spoken-for my time has seemed. At first, merely playing the piano was exciting to me because I had spent so many years thinking I was too over the hill to even try. As practicing has become more a part of my routine, playing time has changed from "play time" to work. It's tiring. I wonder often if it's worth it.

But as necessary and even inherently gratifying as my office job is, it is not the core of my life. If I didn't have this job, little would be missing from my intellectual and emotional sense of well-being, but if I couldn't play music, life would seem empty indeed. On the other hand, if I don't work really hard at the piano, my ability to pay the bills isn't affected.

I don't know what the answer is. All I know is it's a challenge. The challenge is not so much making time for the things I want to do but arranging the best frame of mind for doing them. One simply can't learn or be deeply creative when feeling rushed, with niggling thoughts about other priorities. The mind must be clear, calm, alert, and fully focused on the task at hand.

I do know one thing, though: I don't want to wake up one day 20 years from now and realize that I didn't even try to do what I wanted to do.

Speaking of Carnegie Hall . . .

2011-11-02T14:11:00.003-04:00

Though they weren't terribly interested in music per se, my parents tried to instill interest in and respect for the world of classical music in me and my sisters. It's actually a rather interesting case study of nature versus nurture: Out of five girls raised in the same family and environment, only one (me) developed an interest in it. None of the others even listens to the stuff, let alone plays an instrument. One of my sisters went a bit farther with the piano than the others, and even bought a spinet and gave a few lessons to some neighbors' children when she was a newlywed, but that was many years ago, with the piano long gone. I don't believe she listens to much in the way of music, though she does attend some of my concerts in a show of family solidarity. (She doesn't read this blog, though!)

So when I was growing up, we had a small and tattered collection of records in the house, including some albums of Broadway show tunes, a few random classical recordings, and a set of Great Classics purchased one per month at the A&P. We also had some aimed at children, including a set of Singing Science records and one that had a James Thurber story on one side and this on the other:

I do remember that this was the flip side of the other recording, and I do not remember this album cover. In fact, I don't remember that this was the name of the story, so perhaps what we had some sort of reissue of the original 1948 version you see here. In any case, it was played to death in our house and was finally discarded at some point.

This story has it all: unctious, cheerful male narrator; slightly wry and ironic tone; culture and humor; pathos and a happy ending; and piano music! It's a life in music told from the piano's point of view.

For years, I have been wondering if I could find a copy of it, and now I have, thanks to the folks who set up this site:

Kiddie Records Weekly began in 2005 as a one year project dedicated to celebrating the golden age of children's records. This period roughly spanned from the mid forties through the early fifties and produced a wealth of all-time classics. Many of these recordings were extravagant Hollywood productions and featured big time celebrities and composers. Over time these forgotten treasures slipped off the radar and it has become our mission to give them a new lease on life by sharing them with today's generation of online listeners.

And here it is, in all its crackly glory (but without the big scratch that made it skip near the end on our family's copy):

The Eager Piano

If you click on the link, you can listen to the mp3 and/or download the file and images. The pianist on the record, Frank Glazer, is still alive, btw, now 96 years old, still playing and teaching.

Fiasco (lite)

2011-11-01T13:35:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, my husband and I went to New York. We love going there, doing the cultural stuff, eating good meals, and just walking around watching people and enjoying the city. One reason we went at this time was because there was a Golandsky Institute workshop that I decided would be interesting to attend.

So on Friday, everything went smoothly -- we got there, had lunch, checked into our hotel, and walked down to the Cornelia Street Cafe in the Village to listen to a short concert by a young pianist named Lara Downes who has just released a CD called "13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg." It's a collection of 13 one-movement pieces by contemporary composers based on the Aria movement (i.e., the theme) of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The performance space there is a dimly lit, long, narrow room in the basement with the stage at one end, bar at the other; they've decorated it by hanging mirrors along each long wall, providing interesting exercises in perspective:


Photo credit: Mr. Harriet

The audience was small, a big proportion friends of the performer, including a couple of the composers (one of them William Bolcom!). As for the piece, it has a lot of depth to it but the piano there was kind of lacking so it was hard to get the full effect. We bought the CD and I'm looking forward to listening to it at leisure. One interesting tidbit: The pianist was using her iPad with a foot pedal instead of sheet music. This worked reasonably well, but she did run into technical difficulties when she tried to play things out of order and couldn't find the correct pages.

After the show, we walked over to Little Italy and had a huge dinner at a vegan restaurant and then a brisk walk back to the hotel.

The next day: A different story altogether! It was raining in the morning, a bit soggy but not too bad. I made it up to the workshop location near Piano Row/Carnegie Hall a little damp around the edges but intact. First problem: I pulled out my checkbook, and it turned out my husband had used the last check without telling me, so I had no blank checks. They said I could get some money from an ATM and pay them later.

So I settled down for the presentations. My teacher had said this would be a good event for me to attend, but (you knew there would be a "but," right?) it turned out to be aimed solely at Taubman teachers or potential Taubman teachers and assumed a great deal of advance knowledge, which I obviously don't have. I won't go into a blow by blow, but the gist was that there seems to be a certain amount of disdain for students who won't go for the full remodel (the "retraining"). So I felt uncomfortable both because of my sort of outside status and because I guess I fall into this latter category.

The ideas are pretty interesting, but so abstract. I would like to hear how this all translates into actual playing; it sounds good in theory, but how is the music when all is said and done?

Noon came, and there was an hour break for lunch. This is where things got extremely soggy. I ventured out into the street and into a blinding wet blizzard, with big globs of slushy snow coming from all angles. My umbrella was no match for this stuff, and my thin shoes and jacket got soaked in short order, not to mention my jeans. I wandered around looking for an ATM without success. I finally ducked into a cafe and had some soup, and had a mental reconnoiter, resulting in the decision that I did not want to go back and sit for three hours with wet clothes unless it was to hear Glenn Gould arisen from the dead. (He'd make a good zombie, wouldn't he?)

So I gave up and went to the hotel and spent the afternoon trying to get dry. My shoes were such a lost cause that I stopped on the way and bought a pair of boots.

The snow and rain continued well into the night, but we forged on and went out to dinner (pretty good Greek food) and then to hear Steve Kuhn's trio at the Jazz Standard. What a great pianist! From where we were sitting, we could see his hands on the keys AND reflected in the fallboard of the piano, and I noticed he did all the things that are the aim of Taubman technique (at least as I understand it): He keeps his hand and arm aligned behind his fingers, he does not stretch or lift his fingers, and he does not twist his body around; he just sits there and plays with great tone.

By the following morning, the storm was over, the sky was clear, the sun was out. We had a glitch-free trip home.

So to sum up: Am I justified in calling this a fiasco, or was it actually valuable in some way? I suppose any information is useful. I can't help feeling that there are many valid paths to achieving beautiful playing, and something in me rebels at orthodoxy. I have been the victim of so many other people's misguided notions of how things "should" be when they have tried to impose them on me, or judged me lacking because of them, that I am skeptical.

Still here

2011-10-17T22:43:00.000-04:00

I'm still here, still practicing the piano; I just don't have much to say.

I had a pretty good lesson this weekend. We worked on the First Arabesque and touched on both musical and technical points. We also looked at the dreaded Beethoven Op. 2 No. 3. Conclusion: it's hard.

I'm hoping to be able to record both Arabesques at some point, but I'm certainly not satisfied with them yet.

I've been toying with the idea of getting a video recorder. On the one hand, I kind of like being in blissful ignorance about how dorky I possibly look when I play, but on the other hand, isn't it better to know the truth? Also, I've heard it is very helpful to see what you're doing physically from an objective point of view. The camera doesn't lie, so they say.

On the cello, I've been browsing through my rather large collection of music and pulling out pieces at random and playing through them, to see if anything piques my interest. There's stuff there that I didn't know I had and don't know why I have it. Did I actually buy all of it, or what? In addition to the standards (all the usual suspects -- Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Haydn, Elgar, etc.) are pieces by Klengel and Romberg, Boellman and Reger, Dohnanyi and PDQ Bach. It makes me appreciate the piano repertoire.

I had a conversation with someone a couple of weeks ago about why I was playing the piano so much rather than the cello, and I said one reason is the solo music for cello is limited; for most you need supporting players, who are not so easy to find. He said, "But there's Beethoven, Brahms . . . "

I: "But that's not solo."

He: "Oh. Right."

Impossible dream?

2011-10-04T00:34:00.000-04:00

I'm starting to wonder if what I want in a piano teacher is just not possible.

I want someone who can provide both specific technical instruction as well as overall guidance (i.e., what should I work on? what pieces would be good? what sorts of goals are realistic?). And then I want someone who will take me seriously -- and by that I mean disregard any negative preconceptions they might have about a student who is 53 years old.

The first thing on my list is the easiest to find, it seems -- probably because it's the easiest to do. I know from my teaching days that you can get through a lot of lesson time focusing on minutiae.The student comes in, plays (or attempts to play) their piece du jour, and you proceed to pick it apart (why are you using that fingering? this would be better . . . there's a piano there, not a mezzo-forte . . . did you know you're playing the rhythm wrong there? . . . etc.). When I taught, I would then assign some specific things for the student to do in terms of practicing over the coming week; students who followed my advice would always come back playing the piece much better the next time (pats self on head here . . . ). Any teacher who can't do this just shouldn't be teaching.

The overall guidance thing requires the teacher to actually think about the student's individual situation and goals -- IOW, think outside the basic teaching box, at least a little bit. This seems harder to come by. Although sometimes you get this without the previous type of help, which is definitely worse than the other way around. However, I believe a big part of a teacher's job is helping the student choose appropriate repertoire and having a sort of big-picture plan.

And then, finding a lack of prejudice -- talk about impossible dreams. Maybe it really is asking too much. But somehow I feel that I can do so much more than they think I can.

So you may be thinking that I am disappointed with my new teacher, after the second lesson. I will say that he seems to be good at the first job. On the second, he has not shown much interest. He's very much into the benefits of Taubman retraining, which involves dropping all music for an indeterminate time and working only on relearning one's physical approach to the piano. I do find the Taubman principles interesting, though at the moment I guess am not up for the radical approach. He has said that's fine, that he is willing to do only a little of it while working on music (and he offered this during our initial phone conversation), but he obviously thinks that is not the best way to go about it.

My feeling, though I may be wrong about this, is that I am not doing everything wrong; I am not hurting or tied up in knots when I play. So wouldn't it be more organic to build on what is natural and instinctive, gradually changing the things that need changing?

Addressing the third point, the fact that he suggested the retraining may mean that he does take me seriously. Or is it just a one-size-fits-all prescription?

In any case, I'll just keep practicing. What else can I do?

New Bach recording

2011-09-30T18:02:00.000-04:00

In honor of our orchestra dress rehearsal tonight, I took the day off of work today, which gave me time to record this:

WTC I No. 18 in G sharp minor

Perhaps it is premature because I may go to my lesson this weekend and find that there are all kinds of things I can work on -- which I am sure is true -- but on the other hand, this meets my current standards (it's memorized, I can play it fluently, I was able to get a clean recording).

So here it is -- enjoy! Any comments are welcome.

Progress (what I'm working on, current edition)

2011-09-26T13:55:00.000-04:00

I am almost ready to record WTC I/18. The seemingly magical switch from halting, tedious effort to making music has happened once again, and I can play through both prelude and fugue from memory with at least a modicum of interpretive finesse.

I am also making progress on the Debussy First and Second Arabesques. The second is nearly memorized -- I'm just working on getting all the sections to flow together without stumbles. The first started at a more advanced place because I was so familiar with it, but any mysteries are being resolved. It has taken me about a month to get to this stage, compared with four months for the most recent Bach set. It seems most music that is not Bach is so much simpler and easier to grasp.

The impossible Scarlatti Toccata is feeling better.

When my right hand starts feeling overworked, but before anything hurts, I've been stopping and practicing some Berens exercises for the left hand. I really like these; they simple and definitely pedagogical (various scale and arpeggio patterns in various keys), but they are musical as well.

My second piano lesson is scheduled for this coming weekend. I'm looking forward to it and hope that it will provide further enlightenment.

We also have an orchestra concert on Sunday, so I've been getting reacquainted with my cello over the past couple of weeks. We've been getting along pretty well, so far.

Taubman tidbit

2011-09-19T22:14:00.000-04:00

At my recent piano lesson (described in my previous post), while we were talking about my interest in learning Bach, my teacher mentioned a pianist who teaches at the Golandsky Institute seminar every summer in Princeton: Father Sean Duggan. He is a Benedictine priest who teaches at SUNY Fredonia and who won the International Bach Competition twice, in 1983 and 1991.

I came across an interview with him in which he said this:

"The Golandsky/Taubman approach is useful for Bach,” Duggan says. “It’s useful for any piano playing. Ease at the keyboard, facility, and tone production come into play with Bach. Even pedaling. I believe that when you’re playing Bach on the piano, you should use the resources of the piano to make the music come alive. If you try to make the piano sound like a harpsichord, the pieces sound dry and lifeless. You have to be true to Bach and, also, true to the piano.

“Edna had a big impact on my performing and my teaching,” Duggan says. “My performing keeps improving, and my teaching has grown a lot. Edna is a remarkable teacher. She has incredible insight. She knows the right words to use to get you to do the right thing. She has razor-sharp eyes and ears. A lot of teachers have that, but she has it to an extent that I have never before experienced in anybody else.”

I would love to hear him play.

New teacher, first lesson

2011-09-13T10:53:00.000-04:00

I had my first lesson with the new teacher over the weekend. He is a Taubman technique devotee/trainee. I did not seek him out strictly because of that but because I feel having this focus on the physical -- how you are using your muscles in dealing with the piano -- offers some promise of staying away from mysticism. What I mean by "mysticism" in relation to piano lessons: attempts to define, explain, and categorize the various phenomena involved in playing with things that have no basis in physical fact. For example, I once had a teacher tell me that my approach to learning music was "masculine." Excuse me? And that means what? And of course is what every young woman wants to hear. Or my recent teacher's constant marveling at how I was able to play anything at all, given that I work all day -- aside from making me feel like a freak of nature, how does that help me figure out how to improve? I want someone who can look at what I'm doing at the moment and tell me what is preventing me from playing better.

And of course, there is an appeal in working with someone who at least has learned some relatively proven methods of avoiding pain and stress and gaining fluidity. Naturally, you never know how well someone can teach something that he knows, but at least you are starting with a basis that means something.

Don't know if any of that makes sense, but, FWIW ...

Anyway, I felt we communicated well and on the same wavelength (oops! a little mysticism there, I guess!), and I found this initial lesson helpful. I have not decided if I want to plunge into what in Taubman they call "retraining," which tends to commit one to some months of no music, just exercises. For now, I'm just going to keep plugging away at my chosen pieces. The first thing I played yesterday was my current Bach prelude and fugue. They are at the stage where they are almost memorized but not quite, so I used music and played them all the way through, which in itself was extremely helpful to me. Yes, I could play them for my husband or my friends, but as I may have mentioned in the past, playing for the relatively uneducated listener (i.e., musically speaking) stresses me out more than playing for other musicians. The former tend to be very ho-hum -- if something does not sound bad, they think it must be easy -- and easily bored, and then they say things like, "Well, as long as you're enjoying yourself!"

After I played, we talked about what I thought could be better followed by what he thought could be better. I mentioned my perennial problem with rushing, and he pointed out things I could do with phrasing and figuring out where to breathe and where to shape lines that could help. From there, we got into a little Taubman work -- he noted that my weaker fingers (3 and 4) are pretty tense, and that in general I am curving way too much.

We kind of left it that I would just keep these observations in mind but continue to work on my pieces -- the Bach, Debussy, Beethoven, Scarlatti, or whatever else I want to learn. It's a little amorphous -- I mean, don't we all at least secretly want some genius taskmaster to say, "I want to you do this, this, and this," which then will magically solve all our problems? -- but on the other hand, I really am a big girl now and can think for myself, at least on a good day. So I will have another lesson in a few weeks. At the very least, this gives me a goal that is not as stressful as a performance as well as the opportunity for some educated feedback.

This and that

2011-09-05T21:48:00.000-04:00

I see it's been a month since my last blog post. Here is a rambling post reflecting my rambling frame of mind.

I've been practicing the piano -- mostly my current Bach prelude and fugue (WTC I/18 in G sharp minor), and almost have it memorized.

I've also been learning Debussy First and Second Arabesques. The First Arabesque, in E major (more or less -- though there is some whole-tone tonality thrown in) is popular with intermediate students, and I'm very familiar with it, but I've never heard anyone play the Second Arabesque (G major). I thought it would be a good exercise to learn them both. Debussy wrote both pieces in 1888, and they were his first works for piano, I believe.

I have dabbled a bit in two Scarlatti sonatas (the Toccata I have mentioned in earlier posts and the beautiful slow sonata in F minor that is played a lot). Schumann has gone by the wayside mainly from lack of time and energy -- my job has been demanding this summer, and I've been coming home drained and tired, and there are some technical things in Papillons that I'm afraid I could hurt myself with if I proceed without due consideration. I figure it's better to play whatever I play with deep concentration and as well as I can rather than forcing myself to do everything I had hoped but at a lesser level.

I've been experimenting with different fingerings for my old nemesis passages in the first movement of Beethoven Op. 2 No. 3. At the Taubman workshop I attended this past spring, in my 15 minutes with Edna Golandsky, she suggested playing the double thirds as well as the broken arpeggios beginning of the development with two hands. With the former, a little extra muddiness is introduced because you have to hold down the pedal to keep the left-hand notes sounding, but it's extremely freeing -- the beginning of the piece goes from potential disaster to "Hey, this is fun!" With the latter, it's slightly trickier because you have to jump around the keyboard, but most of the tendonitis-causing tension from trying to play the arpeggios with the right hand alone disappears.

It really bugged me that when I brought this piece to my teacher this past spring, after working a bit on those first measures, she kind of threw up her hands and said, "Some pieces just aren't meant to be played!" I knew, of course, that what that really meant was that she didn't know how to teach it, having never played it, but this pronouncement zapped my confidence. I mean, here I'd worked on this on and off for almost a year, feeling like it just needed some tweaking to be pretty good, and this is what I got instead.

This, among a multitude of other reasons, is why after mulling it over during the summer I decided that even though I did learn some things from this teacher, I didn't want to continue with her in the fall. I have made contact with another teacher who was recommended to me by several people, and I will have my first lesson next weekend, so we'll see.

Cello playing has been limited. For one thing, I hurt my shoulder while we were on our vacation (I think it happened when I slipped coming down the steps of a double-decker tourist bus and kept myself from falling by grabbing the handrail -- which wrenched my shoulder). It wasn't so severe that I noticed it much until we were at home -- and it was exacerbated especially by the motion required to move the bow across the cello strings. I decided to rest it as much as I could, like in the old joke:

Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
Doctor: "Then don't do that."

(Okay, it's not funny. But you get my point.)

This plan appears to have been working because most of the pain is gone, and I can play the cello with only a touch of soreness now. I got together with our neighborhood band and played for a couple of hours, and my shoulder feels pretty good. This is good, because we start rehearsals for the first orchestra concert of the season in a couple of weeks.

Aspirational

2011-08-03T08:33:00.000-04:00

This appears to be a favorite encore piece for Marta Argerich. Could I ever possibly play this that fast? I guess a girl can dream:

Still practicing

2011-08-02T11:22:00.000-04:00

Even though my run of piano lessons had a somewhat discouraging effect on me, I have continued plugging away. My return to practicing after our vacation was not as difficult as I thought it would be. So here's what I've been doing:

Bach, WTC I/18 in G sharp minor: I chose this partly because I wanted more work on something with lots of black keys. I know "they" say that C major is the most difficult key, but come on -- reading all those accidentals in a key with lots of sharps or flats is not easy, nor is learning what to do so that your fingers don't slip off the narrower black keys. I started this in the middle of May, and only now is the prelude memorized. The fugue is not, but it's at least starting to feel like music instead of a finger tangle. The prelude is a gentle, melancholy one, in 6/8, really more like a fugue than a prelude. The fugue is somewhat marchlike, in 4/4, but odd in that the subject starts on the second beat of the measure, and it is hard to find the downbeat anywhere in the piece.

Chopin B major Nocturne and C sharp minor waltz: These are the pieces I worked on a bit in my lessons, after my teacher chose them for me. These pieces are full of what should be singing melodic lines. I had the nagging feeling the entire time I was working with this teacher that she looked at me as your average uptight, perfectionist adult student who needed lots of help with freeing myself up to be expressive. Now granted, there's some of that in me, but you'd only have to ask any of my former teachers if I were a perfectionist to get a big laugh. I'm almost convinced that the most freeing thing for me would be improving my technique so I could come closer to what I imagine without having to struggle so much with everything. Whenever I mentioned this, though, my teacher would say I had plenty of technique -- as if "technique" were only the ability to play lots of notes! I think of technique as anything one does physically, and there are lots of things I am only managing to do by instinct, without really understanding them, and many others I am not able to do at all. Anyway, I never felt like the things we worked on in these pieces helped me play them more expressively. I just felt tension and awkwardness. I want to record them so I can really hear what I'm doing, but I haven't had the time or energy. Maybe this coming week.

Schumann, Papillons: I had started this before our vacation, but I haven't looked at it since we got back last week. There's some technical stuff here I'm really not sure about, like all the octaves, and the pedaling, but it's fun to practice.

Over the weekend, I worked a bit on some new pieces:

Debussy, First Arabesque. Okay, the reason for this, aside from its being pretty: It's relatively easy, and easy to memorize; very familiar; good vehicle for practicing tone and voicing; and a nice piece to have at the ready. I have never learned any Debussy, so this seemed like a good place to start. (Though, full disclosure, of course I used to sight-read through this years ago, so it's far from being new to me.)

Scarlatti, Toccata in D minor: When we were in Barcelona, we went to hear a guitar duo concert (it was aimed at all the tourists who throng Las Ramblas and the Old City at the center of town, but it was actually charming and tasteful, and the duo was very good), and this is one of the pieces they played. They also played a slow Scarlatti sonata that is also a favorite with a lot of pianists, which I would also like to learn, but I need to look it up and dig out the music. I had printed the Toccata out a while ago out of curiosity so I had it at hand. This may be a total wild goose chase in that the repeated notes may be beyond me, but I thought it would be fun to give it a try.

As for the cello: It looks like there will be no big concerto in my future, at least not in the coming year. The conductor said that another amateur orchestra has programmed the Dvorak so he doesn't want to play it as well (though frankly, I doubt if our audiences overlap). He suggested the Faure Elegy instead. Okay, I know it can be beautiful, in the right hands, but it simply doesn't interest me. I suppose I can pretend I'm 15 years old again, but I'm afraid no one will be fooled. In the meantime, this has given me a further excuse to avoid the cello. It's odd, because I do have a hankering to play, but there's something keeping me from diving back in.

The vacationing musician

2011-07-27T18:10:00.000-04:00

I'm not accustomed to taking time off from everything and going somewhere for no other reason than to go there, but that is what I have been doing for the past 10 days. My husband had to drag me kicking and screaming from all my Stuff -- piano, cello, kitties, garden, sewing (though note that I did not include "work" in that list) -- for a trip to Barcelona. It took me at least four days after we arrived to unwind enough to start enjoying not having to do anything more than figure out where to eat next.

I had thought that maybe I could find a piano or two along the way, but it wasn't meant to be. Our hotel happened to be a few blocks from a music school (Esmuc), so I went over there the first morning and (figuratively speaking) pressed my nose against the window, but the young woman at the front desk said no, I couldn't rent, borrow, or otherwise use one of their practice rooms unless I was enrolled at the school. Perhaps if I'd had a name to drop it would have gotten me in there, but I just gave up. However, I did take a trip through a nice museum in the same building featuring an exhibit about the history of western music, with instruments of all kinds beautifully displayed (read more about it here: Museu de la Musica).

They also had an exhibit that was a sort of petting zoo for a handful of instruments, one of which was a cello, but when I tried to play it found that no one had rosined the bow recently so it was impossible to get a sound out of it. Maybe someone on the staff had sneaked in there and greased the thing after hearing one too many children sawing away.

Note: This is not a picture of me. I nicked the link from the museum's website.

As our time there progressed, I felt my identity as a musician seeping away a bit, not altogether a bad thing. But I dreaded that feeling you get when you eventually try to play again, when the first touch of the instrument is bizarre because you know what you are supposed to do, but it feels like a distant memory at best. We returned yesterday evening, and with trepidation I sat down at the piano -- but it wasn't so bad. I played the C major Bach prelude from WTC I and then Chopin's B major nocturne, and then I decided to quit while I was ahead (i.e., before I fell over from jet lag).

Thought from the interwebs

2011-07-06T11:26:00.000-04:00

On one of the message boards I read, someone started a discussion about "life lessons" -- particularly things people wish they had learned earlier in life. One woman commented (and I hope she doesn't mind my quoting her):

For some reason we get it stuck in our heads that all the people we've ever answered to are still watching us and waiting in the wings to correct us -- to tell us our priorities are wrong or to critique the way we do something. Last summer I was sitting there wondering why I wasn't drawing anymore, and I realized I was waiting for "permission" from all my critics. Why they would have opinions on this, I don't know (none of them are even artists). But like many people, for most of my life I've carried around an audience of critics in my head, assuming they would correct me and disapprove of things I did or didn't do... even if they wouldn't really. Anyway, I did start drawing again, and the critics in my head didn't say a word. I may have prejudged them. Critics typically don't even notice what we do right, anyway, when it comes right down to it. So don't wait for their approval.

Slow blog

2011-06-27T21:43:00.000-04:00

I've been silent for a few weeks because I haven't been able to clarify my thoughts enough to write anything coherent. That really hasn't changed, but I thought I'd give it a shot anyway.

The net effect of my four months of piano lessons seems to have been somewhat negative. I feel discouraged. There is so much I need to learn if I ever want to play the piano anywhere near the way I imagine I could, and I don't know how I'm going to learn it. This teacher gave me little splatters of things, but not in a very usable form. I felt very talked-down-to, as if it was an accepted fact that it is too late for someone my age to do what I want to do. Now that my appetite for being taught has been whetted, I am beginning to doubt that I will ever find the right teacher.

I have continued to practice every day, but some days it's hard to make myself do it. I've been plugging away at another Bach prelude and fugue (WTC I/18 in G sharp minor) but without much enthusiasm. I started working on Schumann's "Papillons," which is fun. We had the sheet music kicking around since I was a child, so my sister who took lessons must have worked on it, though I can't imagine how -- another stellar choice by my first piano teacher. I may have mentioned that she would pick these outrageously difficult pieces for me -- and apparently for my sister as well -- that we could in no way play, but worked on for years on end without any understanding or mastery. Anyway, I remember trying to sightread through "Papillons" many a time, but it was as clear as mud. Now I feel I understand what to do and how to do it. We'll see.

Still thinking (and what I'm working on)

2011-06-09T08:47:00.000-04:00

So, one decision made: no lessons this summer. I haven't come up with a plan yet for the fall and beyond. I briefly considered attending the Golandsky Institute summer program (it's a week long, in July), but it interfered with some vacation plans, and for the money, I think I would get more out of another semester of lessons. I'm still not sure if I will continue with this teacher. Some good things, some bad things, so not clear to me the best course of action.

For now, I am working on a new Bach prelude and fugue set. I'm not sure why I chose this one (WTC I/18 in g sharp minor), actually, except that it's short, and the key is challenging. I've been trying to alternate between major and minor and to vary the technical challenges.

I also want to try to record the Chopin nocturne and waltz I learned at the behest of my teacher. I believe she chose these so she could work with me on tone, producing a singing line, and voicing, and we did spend some time on them, but I'm not feeling like they are sounding all that great. I find myself thinking, "Just add some vibrato!" Um, no, not on this instrument!

Speaking of the cello, our orchestra played its last concert of the season on Sunday. It was kind of a meh program, but, oh well. However, I was talking with the conductor afterward, and he said next season I can play another concerto if I want, and I can choose whatever I would like. Such an opportunity! Dare I program the Dvorak? It is actually not so technically difficult as some others; there's a lot more room for error than in Haydn or Boccherini, for example. But it's long. Also, even though it is undoubtedly a wonderful piece, it is so, so, so overplayed that I can hardly stand to listen to it, let along practice it for a year. Whichever piece I choose (if I decide to do this), I will have to spend a lot of practice time on it for many months which is daunting. OTOH, I do think I'd like to take advantage of this and play something.

So next stop is the music store to order some cello concertos to peruse.

What next?

2011-05-29T15:53:00.000-04:00

My semester of piano lessons is almost at an end. What do I do now? Sort of thinking in pixels, here . . .

I know I'm going to keep practicing whether I continue to take lessons or not. What I'm not sure about is whether the lessons are worthwhile enough with this teacher, or even with any teacher. I'd say 90% of what we have worked on has been tone production and voicing, and the other 10% phrasing. This is fine as far as it goes, but I believe there's more to playing the piano than these things. Also, there's been little advice on how to practice beyond, "Just play around with this!"

This teacher has said from time to time, "You have an amazing memory!" Um, I don't think so! I've developed a basic ability to memorize and work something up to an approximate performing level, but mostly I feel like I'm muddling my way through, and it would be nice to get some actual instruction on this stuff.

The other issue is that I'm serious about learning the entire Well-Tempered Clavier. It's my main piano love. But this teacher seems to have no interest in this. I suspect she thinks it's one of those crazy "adult student" ideas that is completely unachievable. And okay, I am never going to be able to play the entire two volumes in one concert from memory, like Angela Hewitt, but I can at least continue to learn them one at a time. I brought in WTC II/15 back when I started working on it in February and we worked on it for a few minutes, and I mentioned it from time to time as the months went on, but she never asked me to play it for her again. Everything we have worked on has been music that she has chosen, and that's fine -- I have learned a great deal from working on it -- but OTOH, none of it has deeply spoken to me in the sense that I felt impelled to learn it.

I like the fact that she brings up things I wouldn't have thought about. I mean, anyone can tell you to play the right notes. You don't even need a teacher for that (after all, the notes are right there on the page). Once you're beyond the basics, a teacher is helpful for things that are not so obvious, or perhaps for things that are obvious to an experienced listener but not to you.

This has certainly been better than having the kind of teacher who churns you through a vast number of etudes and pieces but doesn't actually teach you how to play them. When I was in graduate school, there was another cello student who had a teacher like this; she finally switched teachers after much travail and insistence with the administration of the school (which is another story in itself). She would work on a pile of things for a week or so, and then the teacher would give her new ones, even though she couldn't really play the first pile. It was a total waste of time, not to mention money (seeing as the school was not cheap). If I had to choose between a teacher like my current one and a teacher like that, obviously I would choose the former.

So I suppose the question is whether I could do better.

In the interests of science

2011-05-25T09:02:00.001-04:00

I finally listened to the recording from Sunday, and whoo boy -- why did I rush so much? Adrenaline, can't live with it, can't live without it. I guess I'm not ready for Carnegie Hall yet.

But there are a few nice moments here and there, and at least I kept going when stuff happened.

Beethoven, Sonata Op. 31 No. 2, first movement, rushin' version

Recital accomplished

2011-05-23T00:06:00.000-04:00

This afternoon, I played on the adult student recital at the music school where I'm taking lessons. This was my second shot at the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 31 No. 2 (okay, "The Tempest," to make it easier for everyone).

I felt very well prepared, but even so, sitting down at that big piano in front of an audience without any music in front of me was like standing on the high dive over the deep end. I really had to assert mind control to shut up that voice in my head telling me I couldn't possibly do this.

I was scheduled first (again) -- this time because I had told my teacher I had to leave after the first half hour of the recital because I had an orchestra rehearsal -- so I didn't have much time to get nervous. But I was still nervous. So the exposition the first time through was rushed, and I missed a couple of things. In general, though, I had it under control, and starting with the repeat things felt better.

I got a good response from the audience, my teacher was happy, and the director of the school complimented me as I trundled out the door with my cello. My husband recorded it for me, but I haven't gotten the nerve up to listen to it yet. Maybe tomorrow. For now, I just want to bask in the fact that I actually played the piano in public and that it wasn't a total disaster.

Thought for the day: As we were eating lunch at home before heading out for this thing, I said to my husband, "What's the point of doing this, really?" And he said, "It's important. It's art, and culture, and music, the things that are part of civilization and make life worth living."

New Bach

2011-05-14T18:53:00.000-04:00

After dithering over how much of a perfectionist I wanted to be, I decided this version is not bad. This was recorded all in one take, with no editing other than removing some silence at the beginning and end and normalizing the audio.

WTC II No. 15 in G major

This Prelude and Fugue set is one of the easier ones, though as usual I found it challenging enough! It's taken me about 4 months to get to this point with it. There is a version of the fugue in this set that Bach called a "fughetta" that is even easier than the one here.

When I first looked at this music a few years ago, I thought it was a bit boring, but as usual with Bach, it has grown on me, and I like it very much now.

Angela Hewitt, in her liner notes for this piece, says that it "has lots of gaiety and charm," and that "not for the first time, Bach has a twinkle in his eye at the close."*

*From Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Angela Hewitt, piano, Hyperion Records.

This made me feel a little silly, but . . .

2011-05-05T13:28:00.000-04:00

I am scheduled to play my Beethoven movement on a student recital at the music school in a couple of weeks. At my lesson last night, my teacher had me practice walking to the piano and bowing, and then sitting down on the bench, waiting an appropriate amount of time, and raising my hands into position. Then I practiced standing up after playing and bowing again and walking away. She critiqued each of these actions and had me repeat them several times.

Now, as I told her, I've been performing for about 40 years, and I've done a lot of walking on and off stages in lots of places and bowing for lots of audiences. OTOH, I haven't done much of this as a pianist. I can't remember getting much instruction on stage deportment with any instrument, though I suppose I learned something by watching other people. In any case, at age 53 I have now had a lesson on it.

Even though I went home and described this to my husband, and he said, "Are you s****ing me?" and we laughed about it, it actually is useful to do something like this. In this case, because my lessons are in the same space where the recital will take place, it served as a mini dress rehearsal. Aside from understanding what you need to do (which, actually, I DO know after all these years), it gives your nerves a chance to experience by anticipation what they will be subjected to at the performance.

I do draw the line at wearing patent-leather mary janes and tying my hair back with a ribbon, however.

Shame, or why I seem to have so little of it

2011-05-02T08:52:00.000-04:00

There was a lively discussion on Piano World recently about a poster's participation in an amateur competition. The competition people sent him recordings of all his performances, and so he posted them. He was unhappy with some things, particularly a slightly insecure Appassionata performance, but IMO, they were great! Very impressive in many ways. Most reactions were positive, though there was some criticism (and one person even said the second movement of the Beethoven was "pretty bad"; the original poster luckily seems to have a thick skin).

Sometimes when I think about what I have posted here (and who knows who is listening), I feel pretty embarrassed, but I do it anyway. I know that my posted recordings are lacking in many (possibly most) respects. But I post them because I think they may be of interest to other amateur musicians who are struggling with the same issues. If I have no other goals available, I know I can always use this forum to give myself one.

So thanks for listening!

And speaking of listening, I am almost ready to record my current Bach WTC attempt. Coming soon . . .

Done!

2011-04-24T15:47:00.002-04:00

I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have successfully performed anything on the piano from memory in front of other people. My nervousness about the AMSF recital lay in the fact that I didn't know how I would react to the situation. I knew that the stakes were very low, that it would not matter in any material fashion if I messed up. My fear was of having a bad experience, of finding out that the hours I had spent in preparation had been insufficient, or even wasted, and that I really don't know what I'm doing.

As I was fretting over this on Friday -- panicking over not being "ready" and so on -- I decided that I was going to use this as a learning experience. The worst that could happen would be a total neurological flatus episode, where I would break down, stop, and have to attempt to read the music while someone sat and turned pages for me, or else crumble to the floor in tears and have to be carried out. Such scenarios were not likely. More likely would be a few little memory slips, a few missed notes, a few poorly executed pedal maneuvers, or maybe just a boringly paced 10 minutes of music.

As it turned out, the latter was more or less what took place yesterday afternoon (although I don't believe my 10 minutes of music was particularly boring). The recital was held at one of the member's homes (a beautiful town house from the turn of the 20th century in a quiet corner of DC). The piano was a very resonant rebuilt Steinway from the same era as the house. Six of us played, and a few friends came to listen, so that made an audience of 10 or so, plus the other occupants of the house (one human and two dogs), who listened from upstairs.

The atmosphere was informal, more like a piano party than a recital, and they put me first on the program, so I didn't have the opportunity to sit there worrying about it while listening to everyone else. My husband said I looked calm and relaxed. I didn't feel completely at ease -- at a few points, I could feel my pulse pounding -- but my extremities did not shake, my hands did not turn cold, I didn't rush (I don't think). I kept breathing and pressed on. In a short time, it was over! Success!

My husband's comment: my playing was good, and it was musical, though you could tell I was an amateur. (Sigh. When I asked him what he meant by that, he said, "I didn't mean it in a bad way!") Anyway, I'm happy about how it all went. Maybe next time, I won't feel quite as insecure beforehand.

Here's what my husband describes as a "bush recording," made with his iPhone. He missed the beginning, but you get the idea:

Edgy live recording of Beethoven Sonata in D minor, Op. 31 No. 2, first movement

Jitters

2011-04-20T09:33:00.000-04:00

One of the great difficulties of performing is putting things into proper perspective.

Last fall, when I was looking for ways to motivate myself to perform on the piano, I decided to sign up to play on an AMSF "Sonata" recital. This is a recital category devoted to longer works -- sonata movements, or even full sonatas. At the time, I was working on the Beethoven Op. 2 No. 3, which I thought I could get together by the time of the recital in November. However, by the time I contacted the coordinator of the event, the recital was full. The next one was scheduled for April, so I signed up for that instead.

Fast-forward to February, when I started lessons with a teacher who told me to stop working on that Beethoven sonata and choose something else. I knew I had the April deadline coming up (and had mentioned it to her at my first lesson), and I was dubious about learning (even relearning) another piece in a month and a half, but I pulled out the first movement of Op. 31 No.2, which I had worked on on my own a few years ago, thinking that, okay, I already knew it, and it's not so technically difficult, and I would be having lessons on it, so why not give it a go?

My lessons on this piece have been focused largely on tone, touch, and voicing. The big picture (memorizing, overall interpretation, preparing to perform) has been left up to me. Basically, I've only gotten as far with this piece as I have because of what I already knew. There are some passages that are simply physically awkward, and I still don't know how to un-awkward them.

The other night, I sat my husband down and made him listen to me play the piece and was dismayed at several train wrecks that occurred. I realized that I didn't know for sure what fingering I was using in all of those places, that I hadn't practiced hands separately nearly enough, that I was rushing. So since then, I've been trying all the tricks I can think of (playing with the metronome very slowly; writing down each finger on each note; playing hands separately from memory; practicing in different rhythms). This helps, of course, though I think it's too little too late.

I thought briefly of canceling on this event, and if it were something of great importance to my career that would cause woe unto me if I messed it up, I would. But the reality involves playing in front of a forgiving audience of maybe a dozen people at someone's house, for no stakes, so though I am certainly taking it seriously, it's not do or die.

I don't know why, but the closing sentence from The Great Gatsby keeps floating through my mind:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Is your bias showing?

2011-04-15T09:01:00.000-04:00

I noticed this review in the Washington Post of Simone Dinnerstein's concert last weekend:

Review

I wonder how many reviews of men would contain lines like these:

. . . she saunters onstage in a sensible black pantsuit . . .

Dinnerstein’s Cinderella story — a virtual washout at age 30 who set the world on fire with her self-financed CD of the “Goldberg Variations” — is well-known by now.

In Goethe’s final line from “Faust,” “The eternal feminine draws us upward.” Dinnerstein seems to commune equally with higher spiritual realms and deep maternal instincts.

I also disagreed with the following statement:

In Schumann’s “Traumes Wirren,” the fingers certainly had fleetness but lacked the last ounce of power and clarity.

I've heard a good cross-section of pianists on the performing circuit in the past few years (including some of the biggest names in the business), and I can't recall any who had more power -- and fire -- than Dinnerstein displayed at the concert I heard last week (though many had less).

I suppose you could argue that, well, she is a woman, and men and women are different. But somehow this hit me the wrong way. This particular reviewer probably didn't think there was anything objectionable in taking this slant -- and he did say,

She is unquestionably an artist of true expressive force, striking a near-ideal balance of objectivity (accurately rendering what is on the page, even when technically awkward) and fantasy (searching for what lies behind the notes). This was one of the best recitals I’ve heard this season.

And then, it's his right to say whatever he wants to convey his reaction to the concert. If everyone were all namby-pamby PC about everything, what a boring world it would be. But on the other hand, when someone is at that high a level of achievement, summing up their artistic vision as " 'The eternal feminine' "being connected with "higher maternal instincts" seems, I don't know, condescending? What say you?

Further instructions for the cello section

2011-04-12T20:57:00.001-04:00

Another installment of Tom Zebovitz's messages for his cello section:

Dear Fellow Cello Anything But Mellow Players,
First of all, I want to point out that the term "sectionals" does NOT mean: "Don't bother showing up." This is an opportunity to play your instrument the entire rehearsal, something unheard of, unless you play violin, in which case you generally find yourself fervently wishing the break would arrive sooner. I assume all of you are like me, wanting to get as much quality time with your instrument as possible whenever it is in contact with your body.
So, dudes: Play On!
All others need not read beyond this point, unless you wish to be enlightened about the Cellists' Philosophy to Living Life in the Bass Clef with the Occasional Trip to Trouble in Treble Hell.
OK, Kids, I promise we will have a great time in the cello sandbox Wednesday night. The first item on the docket is about self-discovery and Zen. Really, it is! We will do some rhythm investigations that will give you insight into why and how we play the way we do. Come with an open mind and we will expand your horizons.
Please reread the first sentence of the first paragraph of this communique. This will work if all of us are present. So, shampoo your hair, do your nails, finish that report on Tuesday so you can be present, physically and cosmically, on Wednesday. I know I will.
It's important to note that the reason we will be taking a walk on the wild side of rhythms is because of the Serenade. I do sense some resistance to the piece, but, hey! That's human nature; it's modern. Having said that, I view it as a learning experience. We will all be better and more versatile musicians when we not only understand the unusual patterns in the Serenade, but when we also cut loose our dependence on beats 1 and 3. Realizing that any beat, or off beat, can be The One is liberating.
And, once we can let go of conventional beat thinking, the Beethoven, which has its own rhythmical challenges will line up like a bunch of baby ducklets going for their first dip. Beethoven will be about technique, such as playing softly and beautifully. The focus is on movements 2 and 3. We will also come to understand that it isn't a polycello concerto for 12 different cellists. Rather is the heartbeat of the orchestra pulsing as one powerfully understated instrument. Our section is a community, the friendly neighborhood in Orchestraville.
Don't you just want to vomit???
See you Wednesday, all of you. If you die, you still have to bring a note from your mortician.
Tom

“ Fine art doesn’t just happen. It requires an act of inspired, participatory creation.”

—Maybe Ansel Adams, maybe not!

Simone Dinnerstein

2011-04-10T15:41:00.001-04:00

I was seeing a therapist a few years back, and it so happened that this particular woman was a music lover, so she was very interested in all my travails in that area; we spent a lot of time talking about them. Sometime around 2007-2008, she mentioned Simone Dinnerstein. Dinnerstein is a pianist who went to Juilliard and studied with some good people (including Peter Serkin and Maria Curcio), and then, as I have heard her tell it, she had a baby and was casting about for what to do next. She was in her 30s at the time. She decided to learn Bach's Goldberg Variations, reasoning that even if nothing came of it careerwise it was at least great music (I think this last point was what interested my therapist vis-à-vis my situation). Dinnerstein ended up self-financing a recording of the Goldbergs, and it became a huge hit, launching what appears to be a major career as a performer.

This weekend, Dinnerstein was in Washington for a recital on Saturday night, and the evening before, she gave a master class that was open to the public, so I went to check it out. (We already had tickets for the recital, part of a subscription series.) Some of the piano-related things she talked about:

Gauge tempo and pedaling on the performance space. In a really resonant space, you need to play slower than in a dry space and use less pedal.
Use fingers to produce color, a singing tone, more contact with the keys, and to play to the key bed. She quoted Rachmaninoff's dictum to "feel the wetness in the key."
Think about voicing and producing a variety of colors.
Shape each line (this particularly in the context of Bach).
Be planful but not completely predictable.

Possibly the best thing she said (IMO, anyway) was that in a performance, if you make a mistake or if something goes wrong don't stop and don't show it in your face or body language -- just press on. Everyone -- everyone! -- has bloopers, but most of the time, the audience will not even notice. And anyway, nobody died.

Another interesting comment was that in her opinion, jazz musicians are the most intellectual musicians of all because they have intimate knowledge of every chord progression they play, but at the same time, they play so freely. She said they generally are much more knowledgeable about harmony than any classical musician. She added that classical pianists should listen to music played by other instruments and preferably in other genres than classical (i.e., if you are familiar with the sounds produced by other instruments, you will have a better idea of different tone colors you can try to produce on the piano).

She came across as very down to earth, though serious and dedicated to her art. This was also in evidence at the recital the following evening, where she played Schumann's Op. 12 Fantasy Pieces, Bach's English Suite in G minor, three Bach chorale prelude arrangements by three different composers, and Beethoven's Op. 27 No. 1. Encores were a Schubert impromptu (really dazzling!) and Schumann's "Of Strange Lands and People" from "Scenes From Childhood." (She preceded the Beethoven by informing the audience that if they came to the reception and shook her hand, they would be only seven handshakes from Beethoven -- her teacher studied with so-and-so, who studied with an earlier so-and-so, and so on back to Czerny, who studied with Beethoven.)

There was something about her playing that was so much more interesting than some of the other pianists I've heard in the past few years. I think it's because she took chances and did some unusual things, and her voicing was in general extremely clear, with the important lines emerging ringingly from the composers' tangles of notes. Her performance was both polished and exploratory.

I often wonder if I'm doing the right thing by spending so much time playing the piano, but then I hear something like this, and it feels like it is the right thing. I feel connected to something larger. In any case, I doubt if I could stop! It's turned into a compulsion -- but one I think my former therapist would approve.

Thanks for the memos

2011-04-06T00:27:00.000-04:00

I am on an e-mail list for a local amateur orchestra. It's one of those groups that's not a good fit for me -- alas, it's just a little too basic. The people involved do seem to have fun playing, however. They rehearse once a week and do a few concerts every year.

One of the cellists, Tom Zebovitz, has been sending some messages to the cello section that reveal a certain gift for language as well as an understanding of some cello essentials, and with his permission, I will be sharing a few of them.

Here's a recent note about an upcoming cello sectional:

Hello Intrepid Cellists!!! And, Maybe Bassist(s)!!!

For those of you not fortunate enough to have chosen the cello as your life's inspiration, please disregard this e-mail. It is for the enlightened eyes of our cello (and bass) section alone. Any confidential information revealed in this e-mail must be held closely to the vest and not divulged under any circumstances unless you are asked in desperately phrased, assertively asked, pointed questions. Civilians may now return to practicing.

I see we are doing sectionals tonight. I'm bringing a metronome, take out your notes about counting, if memory serves, we may have to count as high as six.....

As much as I would like to focus on the Beethoven, I think the Serenade requires our attention. I plan to devote two-thirds of the time to the Serenade. The challenges in the Serenade are rhythmic, so we will be working on the rhythmically challenging sections. There is no point in going over some of the ridiculously high sections of the piece. If you want to work on discovering where the G, two octaves above middle C, is in the nosebleed section of your fingerboard: May the Force Be with You! But, that's between you and your A-string.

In the Beethoven, we will be working on high-profile solo sections, such as the 2nd movement. I also want to work on the third movement, the home of the "stealth rocket theme" that quietly shoots up our four strings. It needs to be quiet, smooth, tense, and together. The rest of the symphony, which is a cornucopia of great cello themes and solos is pretty bombastic and more forgiving of the occasional clinker.

If anybody has thoughts about sections deserving of our attention in either of the pieces, please let me know. We can cover them tonight as well.

If you are still reading this and haven't fallen into a catatonic coma requiring large volumes of Mountain Dew to help you snap out of it, I'd like to share with you my philosophy about making music.

With the exception of some of the more modern music and the occasional instruction from a dead decomposer, I feel cellists strive for purity of sound. Everybody is different, everybody's instrument is different also, however, I believe there is a way of playing that will produce a minimum of scratching, creaking, croaking, frictiony, squeaking, scraping noises that many of us have learned to live with and even filter out so we don't hear them anymore.

Producing that purity of sound begins with the placement of the bow before you even make the first scrape. Getting your string to vibrate resonantly from the start is a technique about which, I'm sure, somebody has written a long book. There are little tricks to getting your strings to vibrate beautifully. The most effective is to gently pluck the string with an available left-hand finger just as you begin to move the bow with the right hand. I also understand that open strings, especially the A-string, sound pretty darn pure, but, need to be avoided in favor of a fingered note, simply because those notes are so darned pure and twangy. Finding the optimum bow-contact position on the string, the angle the hair contacts the string, the pressure on the bow, the speed of the bow, the pressure used in the fingers of the left hand are all critical in producing pure sounds. When you practice, I suggest experimenting with these variables.

OK, I'm done, see you tonight. Come with bells on your toes....

Tom

Another Sunday, another concert

2011-04-03T21:09:00.000-04:00

We had our third orchestra concert of the season today. I had to get the cello out of mothballs for this. I spent some time over the past month playing scales and simple etudes just to get my fingers working again. However, it seems that as long as I am practicing some instrument at a fairly intense level -- these days, obviously the piano -- it's not so hard to get my cello playing back up to a decent (if not super high) level within a day or two. The same synapses in the brain must be firing no matter what instrument one plays.

The main piece on the program was a world premiere of Joseph Santo's "Vísperas de la Santa Cruz," which he describes as a "concert Vespers." That is, it's meant to evoke the feeling of a service but not actually to be used for one. I know little to nothing about Catholic liturgical music, but simply as music I found the piece interesting. Though probably not groundbreaking, it has some nice effects, and the writing is graceful. My husband says he enjoyed listening to it.

There was some griping among the orchestra members about having to play this, not because of this piece, especially, but because there's a tendency for amateur musicians to grumble about playing anything they have never heard before that is in an nonclassical idiom. And then, they don't want to spend a lot of time practicing something they will never play again. (I should add that this does not apply only to amateurs!) However, this particular piece seemed to have been written with the amateur playing level in mind; though it has a few tricky places for some of the instruments (not the cellos, though), overall it is not technically difficult. All the difficulties are in getting the ensemble to play together. I think we did okay, though it would have helped if more first violins had been at every rehearsal.

Anyway, I found it refreshing to play something different. Believe me, I've played lots worse . . .

The concert opened with Verdi's overture to I Vespri Siciliani, an opera that actually has little to do with Vespers, but it was a nice contrast to the somber Santo piece. The cellos have a pretty section solo, too.

The continuing struggle

2011-03-25T12:12:00.001-04:00

With lessons, that is. Eight down, nine to go. It feels like a trial. I'm taking these with such a huge grain of salt that they are becoming hypertension hazards. Why am I such a skeptic?

In some ways they are good. For one thing, having to play something for someone every week is exactly what I need. And then, the teacher is saying the right things, I think. She is talking a great deal, every lesson, about touch, and tone, and using the wrist and arm. At the end of each lesson, she sort of waves it all off, saying, "Just have fun with all this!" which I suppose is also a good attitude to have (rather than taking it too, too seriously).

Most of my doubts lie in the direction of execution. It's one thing to say "Bring out the melody," but another to explain how to do this consistently. This teacher does try, but the mechanism is not really clear to me, and unfortunately, she is not able to fully demonstrate what she is saying. By that I mean that she can show me individual motions but cannot show me how they work in context -- that is, when you are performing the whole piece. No, it's not good to be too obsessed with details, but on the other hand, the details are what form the whole. Too many sloppy mistakes, missed notes, rough transitions, anachronistic interpretations, and so on, and the listener loses heart. One of my teachers used to say that an audience will accept only a limited number of oopsies before they turn against you.

Should a teacher be able to play what she assigns to a student? I know there are plenty of teachers who cannot, but it has always seemed like a major obstacle to me. I have often wondered how Dorothy Delay (the famous violin teacher who was at Julliard for many years and who taught just about everyone you have ever heard of, but who was not known for her own playing) was able to teach so many virtuosos so effectively. Perhaps they were at such a high level of playing when they got to her, she didn't have to teach them any technique -- it was all refinement. (Any Delay aficionados out there, please feel free to comment. I never met her or watched her teach myself.)

I also wonder about whether it's better to simply play rather than getting bogged down in trying to achieve some ideal sound that I may never be able to produce. Isn't it possible to be musical without so much attention to this? I mean, who the hell is going to listen to me, anyway? And then, once you have sufficient technical ability to play without strain and self-injury, isn't "good tone" one of those subjective things? Or is mine so bad that I have no business playing the piano in the first place?

I should add that I do feel this is helping my piano playing, overall. It's making me listen to myself more carefully, and I think I sound better. However, I have the instinctive notion that I should continue to forge ahead and do what gives me the most pleasure, taking from this teacher and others what is useful and meaningful to me and setting aside the rest -- along with the salt. I know that with the cello, it took many years of letting everything I heard and experienced sort of simmer together on a back burner before the jumble of ingredients melded into a palatable dish (most of the time, anyway).

Another person's WTC project

2011-03-24T17:33:00.000-04:00

The music critic of The Oregonian, David Stabler, decided a year or so ago to spend a year practicing the Bach preludes and fugues. The plan was to practice one set per week for 30 minutes a day -- not for performance or recording or from memory, but to get acquainted with all of them.

Here's his first post about it (October 2008):

Goats in the shed

And here's the last (February 2010):

A year of playing Bach

When I heard about this, I was looking forward to reading some details, though few were forthcoming (either he didn't post much about it or there was a website shakeup and posts got lost, but I could find only one other than these). He writes very well. It would be nice to read more.

Happy Bach's birthday!

2011-03-21T11:12:00.000-04:00

Born March 21, 1685

My older sisters all took piano lessons, the first two only briefly, the third for some years. This third sister (who is 7 years older than I) stuck with it long enough to learn a little Bach. My first memory of this music is a Schirmer edition of something -- the inventions, perhaps? -- with the old buff-colored cover and the mysterious (to me, as a child) appellation, "Bach," front and center. Despite my sister's halting attempts at it, the music struck me as comfortingly organized, cheerful, substantive. Even my untutored ear responded to its many levels, from finger exercise to harmonious, architectural whole.

When I started lessons myself, I spent a few years on utter dreck (cheesy arrangements of pop tunes, etc.), but at some point my teacher decided I was ready for the good stuff, so she told me to get the book "Eighteen Little Preludes and Fugues" put together by Busoni. I wish I could say that I instinctively knew what to do with this and developed incredible skill and sensitivity in my playing, but alas, I did not. I knew there was something important there, but I did not know how to get at it.

Early in my cello-playing career, I discovered that Bach had written six solo suites for cello, and of course I wanted to play them. I began my explorations into them at age 14; one could not really "finish" such a thing, though I delved into it fairly thoroughly. I suppose the official culmination was my doctoral thesis on the fifth and sixth suites and the lecture recital I gave on the same topic.

Though they comprise great music in their own right, the solo cello suites are not at the same level as the keyboard works or even Bach's solo violin music. They could even be described as primitive -- just six preludes exploring various techniques and six simple sets of dances. This was probably intentional on Bach's part because the cello was relatively unexplored territory at the time, and it was not his instrument. The cello suites progress in difficulty, so I believe they were meant as pedagogy. There is implied counterpoint and some multivoice writing, but basically they are fiddle tunes. Even so, any other solo cello music pales in comparison, and time spent on playing them is rewarding in many ways.

But the keyboard music is infinitely more so. There is so much to play there, and again, on so many levels, that they can be enjoyed anywhere on the spectrum from occasional hobby playing to full-time, lifetime endeavor. I am somewhere in between. When I'm being realistic, I know that I will never play as many of them as I would like. On the other hand, the music exists and will be there for me whenever and however I choose to take it up. As it is for anyone.

A decent lesson

2011-03-17T00:54:00.000-04:00

Today's piano lesson was not too bad. At least I played more than I have at the others.

Now that I've been working on the first movement of the Beethoven Op. 31 No. 2 for a few weeks, it's getting back into my fingers. We started with my playing through it from the development to the end. It actually felt pretty solid, albeit with a few glitchy things. My teacher expressed great enthusiasm, and even said I sounded like a different person. Interesting to get that reaction; at least it shows I'm not consistently bad! (Playing on a good 9-foot piano in a big space helped. Last week's lesson was moved to a different room, so we were on a real PSO.*)

We then went back and went over sections in detail. We talked mainly about touch, and about shaping phrases, and about voicing. These were all helpful, I think. We'll see if any of it sticks.

One thing that helped me this week was thinking more about my ideal interpretation. To start with, I've been trying to get the whole "Tempest" idea out of my head. This fanciful title was not Beethoven's. According to Wikipedia:

The Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, was composed in 1801/02 by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is usually referred to as "The Tempest" (or Der Sturm in his native German), but this title was not given by him, or indeed referred to as such during his lifetime; instead, it comes from a claim by his associate Anton Schindler that the sonata was inspired by the Shakespeare play. However, much of Schindler's information is distrusted by classical music scholars. Renowned British music scholar, Donald Francis Tovey, in his authoritative book A Companion to Beethoven's Pianoforte Sonatas, states that "With all the tragic power of its first movement the D minor Sonata is, like Prospero, almost as far beyond tragedy as it is beyond mere foul weather. It will do you no harm to think of Miranda at bars 31-38 of the slow movement... but people who want to identify Ariel and Caliban and the castaways, good and villainous, may as well confine their attention to the exploits of Scarlet Pimpernel when the Eroica or the C minor Symphony is being played" (pg. 121).

What keeps coming to mind (though in a half-baked, fleeting fashion) when I play this piece is something more Gothic, like Washington Irving's Headless Horseman:

The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance.... the body of the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.

—Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Anyway, I think it almost does not matter what one imagines in relation to a piece of music; music like this is only "about" itself. But attaching it to something verbal makes it easier to hang onto under the stress of performance, I've found. So I'll keep thinking about this.

*PSO = piano-shaped object.

Taubman workshop

2011-03-09T08:54:00.000-05:00

Last month, when I started thinking more about tone production on the piano and how to go about improving it, I posted to Piano World with my questions and received some mixed responses. Several people recommended that I look into Taubman technique. I even got a private message from a very enthusiastic Taubman student ("It's truly absolutely amazing," this person said).

In a nutshell, this is an approach developed by Dorothy Taubman (who is now in her 90s) that is based on observed natural movements that best serve the techniques involved in playing the piano. It eschews a lot of the old standbys like very curved fingers, lifting fingers independently, sitting rigidly at the piano, and so on (all of which were part of how I was trained, btw).

So I did a web search, found the site for the Golandsky Institute, and noticed they were having a workshop on March 5 in Philadelphia at University of the Arts.

I quickly calculated: Philadelphia, only a few hours away; event on a Saturday when I had nothing else scheduled; cost, minimal. So I signed up.

When I was filling out the form online, there was a part asking if I'd be willing to play in a master class, so impulsively I checked "yes" and put down the Beethoven Op. 2 No. 3 as my piece. I received a quick reply noting that I had been scheduled to play on the afternoon master class. This was before my teacher gave up on teaching me this piece. After that lesson, I had a panic attack over it, so I e-mailed Robert Durso, the faculty member in charge of the workshop, and explained my situation (i.e., level of playing, experience, etc.), suggesting that if it didn't sound like it was going to be useful (for the listeners!) for me to play I would be happy just to observe. A few days later, he responded and said he had consulted with Edna Golandsky (the master teacher of this technique, who worked closely with Taubman and founded the current institute), and they had decided to move me to the morning session. He asked for some specific spots in the piece I would like help with, which I duly sent, and I was on.

The first session at 10:00 a.m. was a lecture by Durso ostensibly on octaves and chords, but it really was an outline of the entire history and philosophy behind Taubman technique and an explanation of how it is applied, so it was a great way to learn about it. Right after this was the seminar led by Golandsky. Five of us were scheduled in 15-minute blocks; I hesitate to say we "played," because the longest anyone actually played anything was maybe eight measures. Each person had chosen a small point that he or she was having difficulty with, and Golandsky demonstrated how one would go about solving the problem. So there was a snippet of a Schubert impromptu, a bit of a Chopin mazurka, and so on.

I of course started with those first four awful measures in the Beethoven. I think I was the only person playing who had no experience with Taubman, so she gave me some general pointers. She said many people play those double thirds with two hands, but if one did play them with one hand, she recommended another fingering in addition to using a combination of motions: hard to describe in words, but basically a sideways rotation of the wrist combined with a sort of in-and-out movement of the hand. We also covered a couple of other passages: the really difficult beginning of the development (which she recommended breaking between the hands -- and yes, I can see it will be much better doing it that way); the unison trills (which would be approached in the same way as the double thirds); and the broken octaves at the end of the development and the coda.

I had lunch with four other people from the workshop. Two were in their 20s, both studying with Durso in Philadelphia, and the other two were more in my age group and were piano teachers (and students! as one woman pointed out to me when I asked). One of the younger people was a jazz pianist. In the course of the conversation, I asked how long it takes for this technical approach to become ingrained. They all agreed that it starts very slowly, and there's a lot of playing one note at a time, with you thinking this can't possibly be working, but that one day it starts to click. It was actually very enlightening to hear this from this small sample of people, showing once again that there's more to learning something than sitting at the feet of a master.

The afternoon featured a master class by Danilo Perez, a jazz pianist. There seems to be a real effort to incorporate jazz into this approach -- or vice versa, perhaps. The University of the Arts has made jazz a big part of the music curriculum, which I think is great. The music schools I attended had a sharp divide between classical and jazz, with the latter being at best a poor stepchild, so it was nice to see the genres mixed up a bit. As for the last class with Golandsky, I am SO glad I followed up and did not play on it because it would have been awful. The two young women who performed were very good -- one played Chopin's Scherzo No. 1, and the other played a Ballade, and both were almost flawless. So me and my messed-up little bit of Beethoven would have been quite out of place.

So what was my take-away from all this?

There is a certain almost cultlike belief in this system among some, similar to what I have seen among Suzuki teachers and students. Like what is called "the Suzuki method," what is called "Taubman technique" is at heart simply a collection of useful ideas and approaches to learning music that good teachers and players have always used -- the one an overall method for learning, the other an approach to technique. (I noticed there was a session for string players at this workshop, which would have been interesting, but it was scheduled at the same time as our morning session so I couldn't check it out.)

What I liked about Suzuki, when I was involved with that, is that it provides a systematic way to break learning down into small, achievable bites. Students master one small part of technique or note reading or musicality at a time, but it's not boring because (1) they are playing real music; (2) there is always a goal (e.g., recital); and (3) there is the social element of playing with other students and, for children, of the parents being closely involved with lessons and practicing.

This brief exposure to Taubman technique gives me the impression that in the same way, there are points of piano technique that can be broken down into small elements. It is interesting that what my teacher has been saying is generally along the same lines as Taubman (particularly with respect to tone being related to the speed with which the key is depressed), which is why I had decided to continue with her despite the problems with her teaching method being so unsystematic. It's not that I am longing for some kind of militaristic regimen but rather for something in between that and randomness.

Anyway, at the least it was fun going back to school for a day.

How to get to Carnegie Hall

2011-03-07T00:49:00.000-05:00

My husband has been saying for a long time that he would like to hear a really good orchestra (as opposed to the ones I generally play with!). We were in New York last week for a business meeting late on Tuesday afternoon, and the meeting was only a couple of blocks from Carnegie Hall, so we decided to go to the Philadelphia Orchestra concert that happened to be scheduled for that evening.

Now, I have been to Carnegie Hall and poked my head in the door but never heard a concert in the main venue there -- just in the recital hall upstairs. (Actually, I've even performed in the recital hall, with a chamber ensemble.) We got seats in the balcony, which is up many flights of stairs and much less expensive than seats lower down, but it was great up there. We had a panoramic view of the stage, and the sound was wonderful -- clear and warm.

The program was Berlioz, Beatrice and Benedict overture; a world premiere violin concerto by James MacMillan, with Vadim Repin; and Tchaikovsky, Fifth Symphony. After the overture, my husband whispered to me, "I can't believe how good they are." And of course it was all perfect -- perfectly together, perfectly in tune, perfect solos. An orchestra like this is like a jewel in a velvet box, like a priceless painting in a museum. All of its members -- cream of the crop, best of the best; talent plus years of lessons plus winning out in fierce competition to get there. And the hall a legend itself, a cozy, creamy, gilded, and red velvet nest in the middle of Manhattan, kept alive through corporate philanthropy. And yes, I enjoyed hearing this concert, but it also seemed like something unconnected with the real world. And I had no burning desire to play in a group like that. (A good thing, too, or I'd be living an extremely unhappy life.)

Lessons, continued

2011-03-03T22:06:00.000-05:00

I had my first lesson on the school's 9-foot grand yesterday -- MUCH better. (I wonder how they got hold of such a thing? Donated, perhaps?) Though the ideal is to be able to make any piano sound good, it's hard to learn how to do it when the instrument is fighting you, and particularly when it's out of tune.

As for continuing the lessons, even though this teacher isn't exactly the right one for me (or doesn't feel that way, anyway), I decided that the best course of action given the circumstances is simply to go and get what I can out of them. Really, the most important aspect of playing is how, what, and how much one practices.

The real problem I'm having is my atavistic tendency to let things slide. I am wasting practice time flailing about, playing too fast, and so on, so when I get to the lessons, it seems I can hardly play a thing. It's something along the lines of my sleepwalking brain going, "Okay, what do I need to get done? Oh, right, we talked about that one section of the Beethoven, so that's all I need to practice." What I need to do instead, both to gain the most benefit from going to all this trouble to take lessons and to continue to progress in my playing, is to practice at least as well as I have been practicing all along while keeping in mind the ideas presented at the lessons. This may not be the most efficient way to go about it, but maybe there is no efficient way.

Not that my prelesson practice was exactly efficient in the sense of producing quick results. I have been learning in slow increments, hearing improvement only over many months of nibbling away at a piece. I don't know if learning quickly is a proper goal anyway. It's like losing weight: Anyone can crash-diet a lot of pounds off, but because this way of eating is unnatural and unsustainable, they generally come right back on when one starts eating normally again. Another analogy: cramming for a test. We've all brute-force memorized key facts or formulae at the last minute and regurgitated them well enough to pass, but a week or a month later, all is forgotten. In the same way, it's possible to woodshed one's way through a piece of music enough to be able to play it at a lesson or a concert, but my experience has always been that it's gone from my fingers in the same amount of time I spent learning it. On the other hand, slow, steady, careful, relaxed practice sticks a lot longer.

To her credit, this teacher is not saying I need to master everything in an instant. To the contrary, I feel I'm in the adult student ghetto, where much latitude is given and few results are expected. We're all supposed to be doing it "for fun." In a way, of course, that's right. But in another way, if we wanted pure fun we'd spend our free time riding roller coasters (I personally hate roller coasters, but you know what I mean). Or playing EZ arrangements that take 5 minutes to learn.

What bothers me most of all is that playing the piano is starting to seem overwhelmingly impossible. Yes, I would like to have a better touch and tone, but I'd like more to keep playing and not get bogged down in perfectionism. Is it an either/or proposition? Or is there such a thing as just a little perfectionism, now and then, when it adds value? Okay, that's a rhetorical question, because as I'm thinking about it now, that's EXACTLY how it should work. No one can be perfect; instead, one aims for the illusion of perfection, or what makes the art seem to be perfect, and gradually, over time, these areas of high achievement spread and overlap.

Quick note

2011-02-25T09:02:00.000-05:00

I am feeling a little better about the whole lesson thing. I have to say, I am noticing that I'm really paying a lot more attention to sound quality and what my hands are doing, and the teacher's words are sticking with me. So perhaps there is more method to the madness than I was perceiving.

The question, though, is whether noticing these things actually improves my playing. I think improvement must come from a combination of noticing, knowing what to change and how, and then doing it.

Fourth lesson: Uh oh

2011-02-23T00:23:00.000-05:00

The school where I'm taking these piano lessons has a policy that if, after three lessons, you feel it's not working out, you can cancel or ask for another teacher, but after the third lesson, you're stuck. I spent much of the past week wondering if I should cancel. But, I wondered, was I considering it because I was afraid of the challenge or because I had misgivings about the teacher? As usual, with difficult decisions, I went around and around about it. Should I face my fears? Would there be consequences (e.g., hurting people's feelings, getting a bad reputation as one of those "difficult" students)? Was I letting my cynical side take over? I squared my shoulders and went back in today.

I'm now feeling like this was a big mistake.

My issues:

I want to PLAY. I don't want to have too many discussions about things like what to do with my hands without actually doing them myself. It just feels like there is too much talking going on in these lessons. Also, everything is awfully free wheeling. It's not that I want my first teacher again, who wrote in my book every week exactly how many times I should play each thing, and at what metronome marking. But at least a little more organization might be good. Also some direction on technique -- scales and all that. But, sadly, I think this person is not that type of teacher.

Because I'm a grown-up now, I just stop and ask questions and try to get answers: How do you do this? How do you practice it? So far, I have not gotten very useful responses. But am I expecting too much? I just don't know! I only feel that I'm not very sure what I'm supposed to do between lessons that's going to improve my playing.

It's also bothering me that this teacher can't seem to keep straight simple facts about me, or even what we agreed to work on last week (most of which she chose). Perhaps there is some problem with her that is beyond her control, in which case I'm sympathetic. But it's weirding me out.

And then, not her fault, there's the piano. It is just horrendous. It was supposed to have been tuned since last week, but honestly, I heard no difference. It was possibly even worse. It's just a twangy, awful-sounding thing, impossible to control. Okay, when she demonstrates stuff, she does make it sound a little better than I do, but only a little.

One positive development amongst all the excessive chit-chat today was that she offered to let me change my lesson time to an evening on a different day, when she teaches on the "good" piano that they use for concerts. I'm sure it's much better than the Yamaha from hell. However, my husband and I went to hear a concert in there last month, just before I signed up, with a very good concert pianist playing on that very same piano, and it also was pretty out of tune and not that great sounding, IMO. Maybe they just have a lousy piano tech. But I accepted the change. It certainly can't be worse. The other good thing about the switch is that it will interfere much less with my work hours.

So, I guess I made my wimp's bed and now must lie in it. Perhaps things will improve. Perhaps this will simply be another trial I have to get through in my musical education.

If all else fails, I can just quit, I suppose, and chalk it up to sunk cost + experience. But it's sad.

Third lesson: Discouragin'

2011-02-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

I dropped the last "g" to show that I'm not quite 100% serious. But I did feel discouraged.

I spent the week hacking away at the Beethoven, trying to hack more gracefully, but still hacking. Got to the lesson, played a little bit of it, and then the teacher, trying very hard not to be negative, suggested that we put it aside and work on something easier.

Now, the main reasons I believe she did this are as follows:

1. I have a couple of performances planned in the near future. One is an AMSF recital and the other is a master class (more about that as the time approaches). Not that these are set in stone, by any means, but I did express the desire to perform. The music school also has some recitals that would be possible. She said she was worried that I would get out there and pound out a couple of clams on those first four awful measures and it would -- well, discourage me. (I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea.)
2. I also explained to her that I did NOT want to get stuck in a rut of trying to play something too hard that would take too long to learn, or that I couldn't learn at all. This has been the story of my life as a pianist -- particularly when I've had teachers in the past. I've already spent a good 6 months on this sonata, and the rut potential is all too strong.
3. She has never played this piece or taught it. Not that she couldn't give me advice on it, but it wouldn't be from personal experience.

So although I've definitely learned a lot from working on this sonata, I'm not opposed to learning some more manageable pieces. The teacher had some specific recommendations ready: She thinks it would be good to work on something more soulful, and pulled out two Chopin pieces: the B major Nocturne (Op. 32 No. 1) and the C sharp minor waltz (the one in Les Sylphides, Op. 64 No. 2). Since we had talked about doing some shorter pieces at the last lesson, I had brought along my James Friskin book of Scarlatti sonatas, and she pounced gratefully on the first sonata in the book. We also talked about perhaps another bigger sonata, and I mentioned that I had worked on the "Tempest" for a while. She liked that one, too! It's nowhere as technically difficult as the Op. 2 No. 3. And I do think it will probably come back fairly quickly, at least as far as I took it when I worked on it a couple of years ago. (I had memorized the first movement and some of the third.) All must be very familiar territory for her as a teacher of kids and adult amateurs.

I'm trying to look at this positively. I know there are lots of gaps in my piano education and that it's far better to fill them using material that is graciously written for the piano rather than stuff that fights it. It's worth spending these few months at least giving this approach a try. And anyway, I never intended to saddle myself with difficult pieces that I could never even begin to master -- I want to be able to PLAY. My weaknesses were on full display for the rest of the lesson, when, Op. 2 No. 3 banished, we worked on my current Bach prelude and fugue (WTC II/15 in G major). Now, talk about discouraging! For something I feel is coming along well when I practice it at home, it sure was a mess. I felt like what I am: a middle-aged amateur who only practices an hour a day. Quite a reality check.

So this definitely reinforced taking things in another direction.

Second lesson

2011-02-09T22:40:00.000-05:00

When I have taken lessons in the past, I would go in every week feeling defeated: I hadn't practiced enough (however much it was, it was never enough). Every day in between lessons, I would wait to be inspired, and then I'd start missing days, and then a whole week would go by when I'd practiced for an hour or two over the whole week.

I have resisted starting lessons because I did not want to pay all that money and spend all that time and find myself in the same spot. One reason I felt okay about it this round is because I have built up the habit of practicing every day, without fail, unless I'm really sick or traveling and away from any piano. As Shinichi Suzuki used to say, "Only practice on the days you eat."

This habit has become so ingrained that this week after my first lesson went by without my feeling a need to make any big changes in my routine. I just kept on with my usual, and I got to the end of the week feeling like I had actually done something.

My first lesson ended with an agreement that I would concentrate on the Beethoven sonata but without a specific assignment. Being as self-directed as I am now, I took what we did talk about (the approach to the keys, filling out each note) and ran with it -- or at least walked briskly.
I thought a lot about the problem. I posted a question about it at Piano World (with mixed results). I pulled out this book, which I bought some years back:

I read it then, but this week was really the first time that I sat with it at the piano and tried some of the things Lhevinne suggested. He was apparently a wonderful pianist, and he taught at Juilliard for many years. He certainly expressed himself clearly and simply in this book (which appeared originally as a series of articles in Etude magazine in the 1920s). Much of the book is devoted to the issue of tone and how to use the fingers, wrists, arms, and body to influence tone. Everything in this book makes a lot of sense to me.

In addition to reading and thinking, I practiced -- the Beethoven as well as my current Bach prelude and fugue (WTC II/15 in G major) and the Brahms Op. 118 No. 3 -- and attempted to apply all of these new ideas. At my second lesson yesterday, then, we began with my playing through the entire first movement of the Beethoven. The teacher said she could hear the difference (I hope she was telling the truth!). Then we started at the beginning and went through slowly, phrase by phrase, discussing lots of details: phrasing, pedaling, voicing, dynamics, articulation. We made it through about two pages (which actually covers a lot -- both the first and second themes).

I will continue to work on incorporating more of this thoughtfulness into my playing and will see what comes of it. I mentioned to my teacher that I have a spot reserved on an Adult Music Student Forum recital in April that is what they are calling a "Sonata" recital -- for longer works -- so that would be a good place for the Beethoven. She thought I would certainly be able to have it ready by then.

The teacher also suggested learning some shorter, easier pieces, which I think is a very good idea. I'll need to give it some thought. I'd like to explore some composers other than Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Brahms -- which I've been sort of stuck on for the past couple of years.

Anyway, time to go practice!

First lesson

2011-02-02T08:40:00.000-05:00

Oh, it's so weird to be back in the student's seat. But going into this with scaled-back expectations and the willingness to be self-directive, I think it will help. Just for posterity, and in case it helps someone else, here's how the first lesson went:

1. Introductions, discussion about my background (always kind of complicated). I had gotten the idea of bringing in a copy of my cello resume and the list of pieces I've learned on the piano in the past six years, so that broke the ice a little bit. (The teacher and I discovered that we had played in the same chamber group, though not at the same time, and knew some of the same musicians.)

2. I started by playing the Bach D minor prelude I was working on recently -- and of course, rushed, crashed, and burned. The teacher, experienced with nervy adult students, took it in stride and began working with me on tone production -- pointing out that my wrist should be more flexible and that the left hand in this piece could be more expressive. I also played the fugue, and we briefly discussed what could improve it, though no revelations there.

3. We moved on to Beethoven -- my presentation here again marked by rushing, crashing, burning. Then I played some of Brahms Op. 118 No. 3, just to demonstrate my problems with it.

4. She seemed a bit overwhelmed by the amount of music I am working on, so we discussed what to focus on to start with. We decided on Beethoven for now. We spent the last 20 minutes or so of the lesson on issues around how I'm using my hands and wrists. I think this was REALLY good. It has sparked my awareness of what's involved in producing expressive tone on the piano -- something I have had little instruction on. I would liken it to being aware of intonation + use of the bow on the cello. That is, anyone can (a) plunk a finger down on a string and (b) drag a bow across the strings and get a sound, but there's a complex of muscles and bones that must arrange themselves in certain positions for the optimum and/or desired sound to come out. In the same way, anyone can push down a piano key and get a sound, but getting that sound at the exact time, length, and volume that is desired, while allowing the hammer to strike the strings and make them ring without deadening the sound, is any number of levels beyond that.

5. I left without really a specific "assignment," but what we talked about will probably give me a lot to work on as I continue with my self-imposed program. I spent an hour or so last night playing, trying to be aware of having a springy hand and wrist, listening to the tone.

The only really bad thing about this lesson was the piano. I don't mind that it was a Yamaha baby grand, but I do mind that it was horribly out of tune. Egads.

Teachers

2011-01-31T23:55:00.001-05:00

People study with teachers to learn things they don't already know: to obtain guidance on how to proceed, to find out how to do something, to understand things in a way they haven't been able to accomplish on their own. If I were to go through the history of all the music teachers I've had, it would take a long time and end up as a book, but the bottom line is that most of them did not tell me what I needed to know, or did not tell me in a way that I could understand.

Even in the years when what I desperately wanted was simply to play the cello as well as I possibly could, with the practical object of getting a job doing it, the teachers I had didn't help much. They spent a lot of time on airy-fairy discussions about emotion, or they told me to practice but didn't help me learn to listen to myself. They assumed understanding that I didn't have.

Every once in a while, I would have a great lesson or series of lessons when the teacher would get down to business. My best lessons from one teacher took place when I was learning the Beethoven A major cello and piano sonata. There is simply no way that piece is going to sound good unless the cello is exactly, precisely, in tune, and so this teacher finally showed me how to pinpoint intonation by checking each and every note in multiple ways. After that experience, I was able to focus much more on this aspect of cello playing in every other piece I learned. It's not that I didn't know you needed to check intonation; I really didn't know how, other than the occasional check against an open string.

At one point, I had the opportunity to take some lessons with David Soyer (the cellist in the Guarneri Quartet, who passed away about a year ago). The one really nitty-gritty lesson I had with him was when he showed me some exercises to develop tone. There were two parts to this. For one, he liked to use the Popper etude No. 6 (all running 16th notes in various simple patterns, all over the cello), and the drill was to practice a small segment first at the lowest part of the bow, next in the middle, and finally near the tip, using full force and almost, but not quite, scratching, but keeping the hand and arm relaxed. One was to do this first as written, then in different rhythms. The other exercise involved playing a fully covered scale (he liked D flat major), slurring across the string crossings, playing very slowly with the fullest, widest vibrato; then, he suggested doing the same thing with "The Swan" (that chestnut from "Carnival of the Animals"), putting slurs in the most difficult shifts and string crossings. The object was to keep the vibrato constant and minimize the sound of any breaks across notes.

Well! This just about revolutionized my playing, believe it or not. Ever since I spent some time doing these exercises (and I did them every day for some years), my tone grew richer and surer.

Perhaps these pivotal lessons struck a chord (so to speak) because I was at the right stage to learn what they taught me. I do know that what works for one student does not work for another. Maybe I had heard similar things at other times but they went in one ear and out the other. But my point here is that out of the hundreds of cello lessons I had over the years, I can pinpoint only these few as being truly useful as lessons (vs. as performances, or as scold-fests, or as hours of fluff).

As for the piano: I just counted them up, and I have had five different teachers. None taught me as much as I've learned on my own, with the help of some technological tools, in the past 6 years since I began playing the piano again. As much of a cliché as it's become, the Internet has made a tremendous difference. The community at Piano World, for one, offers a resource that simply wasn't available in the past -- I mean, you can go over there at three o'clock in the morning and pose a question ("What's a good fingering for the first four measures of Beethoven Op. 2 No. 3?") and within a few hours get at least one response. The availability of inexpensive digital recording options means you can record something and post it and get feedback from pianists all over the world – not to mention being able to hear yourself with pretty good fidelity. The online "recitals" have provided realistic, achievable goals.

So this has been great, up to a point, but I still have a lot of trouble sitting down and playing the piano in front of a live human being. Not that this isn't always difficult under any circumstances, but it is especially difficult when one does it as rarely as I do. For me in particular, the expectations of what could be my captive audience, friends and family, are unreasonably high. I am the most educated musician most of them know, so they seem to think it just comes out of me with no effort, and they are not all that impressed unless something is polished to perfection (which of course it rarely is, given my lack of practice performing on the piano, yadda yadda yadda, endless loop).

And then, the more time I have spent, the more I have wondered if I have been handicapping myself too much by not getting some direct, specific help from a live human being in the same room. I'm well into the second half of my life at this point; how many more years do I have to spin my wheels on this? It’s not like there is a deficit of piano teachers around here. It’s starting to seem silly not to at least try it. My fear in the past was that I would go to the lessons but would not practice enough in between to take advantage of them. Now, though, that I have developed a solid daily practice habit, I don’t think this is going to be as much of a problem as it has been in the past.

Another thing about that live human being: as helpful as the virtual world can be, it does not provide the full social and emotional experience of face-to-face contact with other people. I would like to somehow integrate my piano life into my interactions with the outside world. I have a sense that my playing is not entirely real -- that it will be validated and recognized only if I can play for other people without the filtering medium, and anonymity, of posting recordings on the Internet.

Thus it has come about that I finally contacted a private music school and signed up for a semester's worth of lessons, which are to start tomorrow. The people at the school are aware of my background, so they have set me up with someone experienced who teaches other adults. I hardly know what to expect, but I am hoping I will be able to try my best to get something positive out of it.

Powerless

2011-01-29T12:50:00.002-05:00

We had a little snow storm this week, just a few inches at most, but it was somehow heavy and wet enough to cause power outages all over the place. We had both left work early on Wednesday afternoon (thank you, OPM!), so hadn't gotten stuck in the legendary traffic jams around the area, like our neighbor, who spent 5 hours in her car driving less than 10 miles, and were eating dinner around 7:00 when the power went out. We have a gas hot water heater and a gas stove, so we were able to clean up and make some tea, and we are well supplied with candles and flashlights.

I was even able to practice the piano by candlelight, and my husband caught up on some reading. Sleeping wasn't bad, with a down quilt and two cats on the bed.

But then by Thursday morning, power was still out. And again yesterday morning. PEPCO had promised to have us back on by 11:00 last night, but 11:00 came and went, and no power. It was pretty darn cold in here. I was reduced to huddling on the couch with a hat on my head and a cat on my lap. When I got in bed, one of the cats crawled under the covers with m e and stayed there most of the night. Finally, this morning a little before 7:00, we were back on.

So this has put a bite into my practicing, and I also feel like I'm on the edge of having a cold. But I'll get back on it today.

Because . . .

I finally will be taking some piano lessons! They start on Tuesday (unless the weather intervenes again).

Housekeeping and "new" recordings

2011-01-20T09:15:00.000-05:00

When I first started recording myself on the piano, I wasn't thinking about organization. I wasn't even thinking I'd want to listen to the recordings again, or share them with anyone -- they were just a learning tool for me. I am now paying the price for that in many gigabytes of poorly labeled audio files scattered about the hard drive. A few years into it, I did start saving them in one folder, with subfolders labeled with the date, but unless I felt a recording was a wrap, I didn't give it a name. Some of the recordings are just mistake-filled blunders -- valuable from the educational perspective, but not so much from the artistic one. But others are actually pretty good. I am now faced with the task of wading through everything and deciding what I can delete and what I should archive on a storage disk, which needs to be done before this poor computer cries uncle. Given that I have a full-time job plus I'm trying to actually practice the piano (and the cello) plus I have a life = Agghhh!!!

Anyway, I was looking at my list of Bach preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier that I placed on the blog and thinking that surely I learned, and recorded, more.

And sure enough, I came up with a few.

When one of my sisters got married in 1971, when I was 13, she asked me to play piano at the wedding. It was a sort of hip wedding at the Ethical Culture Society, with self-written vows and so on, so the music was simply to add a little atmosphere. My sister had been taking piano lessons at college as an elective, so she asked her teacher for some suggestions for music, and they came up with two of the easier Bach preludes. Prelude No. 23 was one of them. Of course I did not memorize it at the time, but over the years since then, I looked at it and wondered how it might be done, and especially how one might learn the fugue.

In 2008, I decided to wonder no more, and learned the set. This recording is the result.

WTC I, No. 23 in B Major

The next one is from November 2006. No story attached, I just love it. I learned all of it, but I can find a recording only of the prelude:

WTC II, No. 12, Prelude, in F minor

Who knows what else I'll find in my rambles through the hard drive?

And if anyone out there has a suggestion for a good way to organize this stuff, please chime in!

"The perfect is the enemy of the good"

2011-01-18T10:32:00.000-05:00

I've heard this repeated many times and finally looked it up: Voltaire said it. In its spirit, I am posting a recording of the Bach prelude and fugue that I've been working on.

As usual, I wished for so much more for this piece: I wanted the prelude to be sparkling and clean yet melancholy at the same time; I wanted the fugue to be beautiful and brooding, with perfect trills. Not quite there! But at the same time, I did learn and memorize this in the shortest time I've spent on a WTC pair: 3 months. This is one of the easier ones; for one thing, in the prelude, the left hand is much easier than the right, and the fugue is meant to be fairly slow. Listening to it, what bothers me most about my performance is the predictable "marchiness" of the thing. Ah well.

I recorded this in one take. There was some problem with how my recorder was set; I hear some clipping and a little distortion. I may work on this some more and perhaps try recording it again, but for now, here it is:

Bach Prelude and Fugue, Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, No. 6 in D minor

I really have been playing the piano . . .

2011-01-11T21:43:00.000-05:00

. . . honest! I do my hour or so every day without fail.

I just haven't had much to write, or not anything coherent.

I made a recording of the Bach prelude and fugue in D minor last night, but I'm having technical difficulties with the digital recorder -- my recordings are clipping and sound horrible. So I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong. I will post a recording as soon as I can get something acceptable.

I'm also forging ahead on the Beethoven; the second and third movements are mostly memorized, though still rough, and I'm trying to divide and conquer the fourth movement. There is one passage that has been giving me a lot of trouble. If I can find the time, I will scan it in and explain, but not tonight . . .

There is no required cello playing on the near horizon, so the cello is getting another rest for now.

Year winding down: Reflections

2010-12-29T11:36:00.000-05:00

There are only about 60 hours left until the calendar turns to another year. In nature, this means nothing. For example, our cats give no thought to anything so artificial as the division of time into measurable units. They only know that we humans do roughly the same sorts of things on a regular basis (i.e., wake up, feed them, leave the house, come home, feed them, take showers, turn off all the lights and go to bed), and because they are genetically programmed to adapt their needs to those of the creatures they're mooching off of, they pay attention to that and come to expect it.

We humans, on the other hand, practically let the clock and calendar rule our lives. It's a constant struggle to balance the natural with the artificial. We can plug in and apply imaginary divisions all we want, but in the end we are physical, aging, changing bodies.

So on the one hand, I mark "the end of the year" like everyone else does, but on the other hand, it doesn't really mean anything beyond remembering to write "2011" on checks and letters and looking at a new Cat Lovers Against the Bomb calendar every day.

This same dichotomy between what actually is, physically, and how the actual is labeled, described, and divided threads its way through everything people do. I'm constantly aware of it in my musical endeavors. I think it's hard for a lot of people to on the one hand be in the moment with the music -- hear what you hear and feel what you feel -- and on the other keep enough distance to know that one day's practice, or even one year's performance, is only a small step. There is not one big goal, really, but rather many small ones that build up over time until the music is a part of how you think and who you are. I would equate it with learning a new language: each word, phrase, speech, book read or written, and so on, is a small goal on the way to becoming fluent, and becoming fluent is a means to being able to communicate in a new way, with people who would not have been able to understand you before (and vice versa).

Even something like learning to communicate in a new way is not necessarily the real goal, though; it is more that human beings seem to have a need to channel their energies into more than mere survival. To me, going through life without striving for something greater than the bare necessities seems like a waste.

I close my probably trite musings with someone else's similar thoughts:

Through the corridors of sleep
Past the shadows dark and deep
My mind dances and leaps in confusion.
I don't know what is real,
I can't touch what I feel
And I hide behind the shield of my illusion.

So I'll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end,
And flowers never bend
With the rainfall.

The mirror on my wall
Casts an image dark and small
But I'm not sure at all it's my reflection.
I am blinded by the light
Of God and truth and right
And I wander in the night without direction.

So I'll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end,
And flowers never bend
With the rainfall.

It's no matter if you're born
To play the King or pawn
For the line is thinly drawn 'tween joy and sorrow,
So my fantasy
Becomes reality,
And I must be what I must be and face tomorrow.

So I'll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end,
And flowers never bend
With the rainfall.

--Simon & Garfunkle, "Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall"

Happy Beethoven's birthday!

2010-12-16T22:44:00.000-05:00

The e-cital is up:

Ludwig van Beethoven: Celebrating 240 Years

My contribution here:

Sonata Op. 2 No. 3, First Movement

One thing's for sure: you can tell I didn't pirate this from a professional recording. But when I listen to this and remember how I was struggling with most of it a few months ago, I'm amazed. That's the magic of practicing.

If I had only done more slogging away a year ago, I might have been able to play all four movements by now. But as I said to my husband, "It's a start."

Slogging away at Beethoven

2010-12-11T12:04:00.000-05:00

A year ago, someone at Piano World decided to set up an online recital in honor of Beethoven's 240th birthday on December 16. I blithely signed up to play all of Op. 2 No. 3.

Months came, months went, and I still hadn't started working on it. I finally began focusing on it sometime in the summer. This is not an easy piece! I mentioned some of the difficulties with it here. The first movement alone has a whole bag of tricks you have to learn, with a first theme composed of a fidgety, nearly impossible motif involving double thirds, and a recurring bridge of trills in octaves, capped off with a closing figure of double broken octaves. Just that opening alone makes this one of the most impossible sonatas to manage reliably. And that's just the first movement.

By October I shelved the idea of learning and recording all four movements for this occasion and have been concentrating on the first. With only a few days left to get something in digits, I am resigned to merely scratching the surface (if "scratching" is the right word here -- maybe if this were on the cello?).

The main thing I logged on here to say, though, is that even though my efforts fall far short of the ideal, just having the goal (date set to record and post) and some points of comparison (e.g., the Perahia recording I've been listening to) have pushed them way farther than what they could have been. Knowing I would have to sit down and play through the whole movement, with the repeat, without stopping, at somewhere near the preferred tempo, and have a permanent recorded record of it, is quite the motivator.

(And knowing that the professional recordings probably involve at least some amount of splicing and doctoring eases some of the frustration.)

From the archives: Bach on the cello

2010-11-27T22:00:00.001-05:00

I was browsing through our iTunes files this evening and came across a recording of me playing Bach on the cello in 1985. That was the year I gave a recital for what was a soon to be aborted attempt to earn a doctorate from a well-known conservatory. I won't go into the gory details here; suffice it to say that a number of unpleasant things happened that year, and the upshot was that I left and did some other things for a year or two before trying school again. The second time was the charm -- or at least, I got through the graduate program at another school without embarrassing myself too much.

The original recording is on a cassette tape. My husband and I were experimenting once with transferring tape to digital format, and this is the result. It has a kind of fuzzy, distant sound quality.

Bach, Prelude, Suite No. 5 in C minor for solo cello (beginning cut off)

I remember those little slips feeling like the most godawful messes at the time, but they are not so bad. Listening to this now, I wish it had been more graceful and a bit less on the scratchy side, though there's a lot of strength to it.

(For visuals, just imagine me with a perm. It was the '80s, after all.)

Happy Thanksgiving, a day late . . .

2010-11-26T11:47:00.002-05:00

. . . and a dollar short . . . like Virgil Starkwell . . .

(Speaking of dollars, I wish I had one for every time someone has mentioned this movie to me when they found out I play the cello.)

Cello section!

2010-11-14T23:48:00.001-05:00

The chamber orchestra I'm in played its second concert of the season this afternoon. The program was a bit more substantial than some we've done. It opened with "Tales From the Vienna Woods" (with two violins substituting for the zither part Strauss scored originally); next was Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol, which never fails to remind me of youth orchestra concerts, though I think our version was a little more mature; then after intermission, we played Vaughan Williams's "Fantasia on Greensleeves"; and we closed with Borodin's Symphony No. 2.

There was the usual quota of missed notes and missed connections and the familiar frustrations of playing in the poor acoustics of the church. But it felt good to play a concert nonetheless.

One of the other cellists just sent me a picture of the section, taken by my husband at intermission, with a request to post it on my blog, so here it is:

Tom, Liz, Karen, Liana, Frank, and Harriet

One little side note: for this concert, the orchestra hired a harp player (such are the ways of community orchestras that one reason for the choice of repertoire was to make sure each piece had a harp part). I was surprised to find that the harpist was someone I played with maybe 15 years ago with a chamber group. At the time, she was a star high school student, heading off to Curtis (which, in case you didn't know, is a crème-de-la-crème music school in Philadelphia that is full scholarship for all students, all four years). One would think that such a student would graduate and have offers pouring in for orchestra jobs (unless one knew that offers never pour in for orchestra jobs). But this harpist now plays with a local regional orchestra, does weddings and other gigs, and gives lessons. I suppose if she's happy that's fine, but it seems a little sad, somehow. She's still a very good player.*

*Someone pointed out to me that this could be interpreted as harsh. By "sad," I'm not talking about this person's life, which of course is not sad, but about the state of music education -- that even someone with the most stellar credentials has no particularly stellar place to go careerwise when they get out of school but must make his or her way just like the rest of us not so stellar ones. Biographies of famous musicians rarely describe providing background music for weddings but instead make artistic success sound inevitable. Maybe things are different now than when I was in school, but I never had a teacher who mentioned the cold realities one would face once one graduated.

Review of Emanuel Ax recital (Washington Post)

2010-11-13T15:51:00.000-05:00

FWIW, here is reviewer Anne Midgette's reaction to the recital I mentioned in my last post:

Music review: Emanuel Ax at Strathmore

"Though Emanuel Ax captured a singing artlessness in the Schubert selections, the Chopin pieces were at times muddy."

Small rant about recital programs these days

2010-11-11T21:08:00.000-05:00

When I was in school, I enjoyed choosing recital programs. It was like coming up with good double features. I would think about key connections (pairing a major key with its parallel or relative minor), forms (e.g., playing two pieces with fugues), and contrasting styles (something detailed and classical paired with something lush and romantic; something lush and romantic paired with something angular and modern). The trend these days, though, seems tending toward programming entire recitals of one or two composers, with no composers who lived after 1900, and nothing too challenging or "out there."

Over the past year or so, my husband and I have been treating ourselves to piano recitals by some big names in the piano world. We've heard, among others, András Schiff, Mitsuko Uchida, Angela Hewitt, Alfred Brendel (his last concert in the United States), and last night, Emanuel Ax. These are people with the stature to play anything they want, yet many of them are presenting the same thing over and over again. This year, we've been treated to multiple concerts featuring the same pieces by Schumann and Chopin (in honor of their 250th birthdays). In a previous season, no less than three pianists played the same Beethoven sonata.

Some of this probably is because the presenters don't want to take chances with programming. I believe (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) that the performers offer lists of works that they are playing in a particular season, and the presenters choose one from column A, one from column B, and so on. They end up choosing what they think are the safe crowd pleasers. I do understand that they need to think about ticket sales, and let's face it, most of the people who shell out money to go to concerts are not edgy hipsters and musicologists but older people with disposable income and conservative tastes. At every one of the concerts we've attended in these piano series, most of the audience looked to be retirement age and up. But here's something to think about about: maybe they would get BIGGER audiences with more interesting programs. They sure weren't sold out last night. A sure sign of a small audience: they didn't open the coffee bar in the Grand Tier at intermission.

It's not that there's anything wrong with any of the music we've heard; it's just that I have always felt a recital should be more than the sum of its parts. Pieces played in proximity to each other can highlight qualities that are not apparent when they are played in isolation. Where is the creativity when a program is simply a selection of works from one composer? You might as well go out and buy a CD by that performer of the complete works (which in fact is usually for sale at intermission). And when a number of concerts are presented as a series, that is another opportunity for imagination in programming, with each concert being part of a whole.

As for last night's concert, my impression was that it was professional and workmanlike but rote and somewhat boring, and the programming was a big part of the problem. The first half was Schubert: the four impromptus from Op. 142 and the sonata in A major, Op. 120. The second half was Chopin: the Barcarolle, the four Op. 59 mazurkas, the two nocturnes from Op. 27, and the B flat scherzo.

The Schubert especially didn't work well in that big hall; the sonata is a simple one and seemed more suited to a student recital than to a concert like this one, and the impromptus, though certainly not easy, are for the most part also simple in form and content. All that simplicity and repetitiveness in one 40-minute-or-so block of time, however cleanly performed, was too much. The Chopin pieces worked much better as a group; Chopin was a more inventive composer altogether, in my opinion (particularly in terms of pianism), and his music is just easier to bring off in a performance. However, by the time the second half rolled around, the performer seemed fatigued and the audience restless.

For encores, Ax played Schumann (I think it was a movement from Waldszenen, not sure -- I know Schiff played it last month) and Chopin (the "grand waltz" No. 1, I believe). Overall, it was interesting to finally see and hear him in a live performance, but it wasn't enlightening in any other respects.

There really is a benefit to hearing live music, but I wish the people who design these concert series would be more imaginative. Creative programming doesn't have to be ugly.

Addition to the practice routine

2010-11-08T11:34:00.000-05:00

If what I do can even be described as a "routine"!

I am right-handed. I work on a computer all day, and to try to balance out overuse, I keep the mouse on the left side of the keyboard and in general try to do things ambidextrously as much as I can. But my right hand still bears an extra burden in terms of fine motor tasks. Then I go home and practice the piano, and it's a fact that most piano music exercises the right hand far more than the left.

So I've been noticing over the past few months that my left hand feels slighted in terms of how much exercise it's been getting. I've noticed it especially since I started working on the Bach D minor prelude from WTC I, in which the right hand gets a significant workout while the left hand just plays a walking bass in eighth notes. After an hour of practicing this piece, my right hand and arm feel pretty buffed, whereas my left hand feels like it's been taking a nap. So I decided to add some left-hand-alone work to make up for this deficiency.

My first piano teacher did this. Part of her standard assignment would be an exercise out of Hermann Berens's "Training of the Left Hand: Forty-Six Exercises and Twenty-Five Studies for the Left Hand Alone."

Here's a sample page (courtesy of SheetMusicPlus):

Naturally, with the callowness of youth, I didn't appreciate this much at the time, though I did like some of the studies -- they are musical. I may even get old Berens out of the music stockpile. But last night, I turned to Brahms's arrangement for left hand alone of the Bach Chaconne in D minor. I read through the entire piece (the first time I've ever been able to do that!), and sorry, Herr Berens, but this piece is in a different universe.

Brahms said of it (in a letter to Clara Schumann),

The Chaconne is in my opinion one of the most wonderful and incomprehensible pieces of music. Using the technique adapted to a small instrument the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I could picture myself writing, or even conceiving, such a piece, I am certain that the extreme excitement and emotional tension would have driven me mad. If one has no supremely great violinist at hand, the most exquisite of joys is probably simply to let the Chaconne ring in one's mind. But the piece certainly inspires one to occupy oneself with it somehow . . . There is only one way in which I can secure undiluted joy from the piece, though on a small and only approximate scale, and that is when I play it with the left hand alone . . . The same difficulty, the nature of the technique, the rendering of the arpeggios, everything conspires to make me-feel like a violinist!*

I'm not sure I want to feel like a violinist, but I think that tackling the technical challenges involved in bringing this very familiar piece (I've not only heard it performed but have lived through various friends learning it, on both violin and guitar) to life will be very helpful, beyond simply exercising my left hand.

So I will add this into my mix and will see how it develops.

*From La Jolla Music Society, Copyright 2010

What I'm playing this week

2010-10-26T00:03:00.000-04:00

I haven't done one of these in quite a while, mostly because it was getting monotonous. But because I have a few new things, I thought it might be at least a little bit interesting to mention them.

On the piano:

I'm starting a new Bach prelude and fugue, WTC I/6 in D minor. I chose this to work on because it's simpler than the A major set, and I thought it would be good to learn something that I would not have such trouble memorizing so I could focus more on being musical. The prelude and fugue are also both appealing: the prelude has that fun forward-propelling texture with rhythmic bass in the left hand and fast triplets in the right hand; the fugue has some beautiful moments, and there are also some technical challenges with regard to playing the trills in the subject just right.

Beethoven, Op. 2 No. 3. I am continuing to make progress on this. Listening to Murray Perahia's recording has given me a lot more ideas on what to work on. I know I will not be able to play all the little technical flourishes as quickly and cleanly as he does, but it still helps to hear it done. I have a goal for this, which is to record as much of it as I can for a Piano World recital on Beethoven's birthday this December. I think I can do at least the first movement.

Brahms Op. 118 Nos. 3, 4, and 5. I finally came to the conclusion that No. 3 is just damned hard. What does it is all the jumping around, especially in the left hand, and having to land on thick chords at the ends of the jumps. It's almost impossible for me to play it up to tempo without looking at my hands. No. 4 is interesting because it's the only one of the set that is not in A-B-A form, but sort of A-B-C instead. The A material does show up in the C section, but greatly altered. The B section is tricky because it requires precise pedaling. No. 5, the Romanze, has a pretty difficult B section, embellished with runs and trills, so I'm focusing on learning that first.

I have really missed playing Chopin, but I can't quite settle on a piece to learn. Another prelude? (I have really fallen down on the job of working my way through them.) Another Nocturne? Something else entirely?

And then there's so much more that's tempting . . . but I know my limitations.

On the cello:

Rehearsls for the second orchestra concert of the season start next weekend, so I pulled out the music and started looking at it. The program is Johann Strauss, Tales From the Vienna Woods; Rimsky-Korsakov, Capriccio Espagnol; Vaughan Williams, Fantasia on Greensleeves; and Borodin, Symphony No. 2. To be honest, none of it is that interesting to me. But I will do the best I can with it.

Bach recording (sigh)

2010-10-17T21:50:00.000-04:00

I've been working on the Bach prelude and fugue in A major from Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, for six months now. For some reason this piece has been especially difficult for me. Sometimes I have thought that it doesn't engage me much emotionally, so my mind wanders while I'm playing it. (I find myself thinking all kinds of things -- some very far afield!) I have a vague mental picture of the prelude being something pastoral and the fugue being something along the lines of a hunting song, or a jig (or should I say "gigue"?), but I couldn't seem to get deeply into it.

Anyway, I told myself I'd work on it until I could produce a reasonably okay recording and then move on. About a month ago, I made a recording that sort of met that criterion. In fact, the fugue came out especially well. I wasn't satisfied with the prelude, though, so I figured I'd work on it a little more and maybe rerecord the prelude.

Time went by without my getting around to it, and in the interim, I had the piano tuned, so the possibility of joining the older recording of the fugue with a new recording of the prelude was less likely to be convincing (i.e., the latter was going to be significantly sharper than the former). I spent some frustrating hours trying to get a decent recording of both prelude and fugue, but nothing came up to the level of the version I recorded a month ago, so I decided in the interest of my sanity (or facsimile thereof) to throw this up here and call it a half year and move on:

Bach WTC I/19 in A major

I apologize in advance for a couple of oopsies in the prelude. This does have the virtue of having been recorded in one take, though!

Music in Maine

2010-10-07T15:03:00.000-04:00

This past weekend we finally made it to Maine. The original plan, two years ago, was for three of us (the three women who are in our neighborhood folk-ish band) to travel there to play with an accordion player the recorder player has known for 30+ years. He used to live in this area and retired about five years ago to Maine. But then the violinist had a family emergency and couldn't go, and we canceled it.

In the middle of last week, the violinist came down with something, and she still didn't feel good by Friday, so she again ended up not going. But because our spouses were coming along and we were all looking at it as more of a general vacation than an all-music kind of thing, we forged ahead this time.

Part of the deal was that I had to pick up a rental cello on the way from the airport, so each couple rented a car and drove separately. One of my imaginary friends from the Internet lives sort of on the way, so we decided to stop in and see her and her husband. I was totally zonked from getting up at 5:00 that morning, but we had a nice visit, and I played a little on her Seiler grand.

(That's my husband sitting on the couch in the background.)

She also has a fractional-sized cello (maybe a three-quarter-sized one?) that she wanted me to check out -- her husband picked it up for her on a whim from a pawn shop years ago. It is not bad sounding but needs new strings and some tweaking. (It was tuned a half step flat, and I was afraid to tune it up because the strings looked like they were about to pop.)

Back on the road, we headed for Glen Cove and Woodsound Studio, a nice little shop that services and sells mostly stringed instruments, with a few folk-oriented ones as well. They gave me a very good-sounding Romanian-made student cello, and judging from the way the cello was set up, they know what they're doing.

We then continued on to Southwest Harbor. Our B&B faced a picturesque tree-lined street, and from the back of the house, you can see the water. After a quick dinner at one of the restaurants up the street, we went down to the basement of the B&B for the first of what turned out to be only two sessions with the accordion player. He was really busy and couldn't give us much time. We played through some of our repertoire for about an hour, and then he had to leave. So that was Saturday.

We met again on Sunday morning for about two hours. We decided to liberate ourselves from the dark basement room and started out playing outside on one of the porches:

However, it was really too cold to play outside, so we moved indoors and played while the cleaning person and other guests picked their way around us.

It was bothering me that I'd rented this cello to play it for only three hours, so on Monday evening, I suggested to the recorder player that we play as a duo. She asked our hosts at the B&B if it would be okay, and they got excited and asked if we'd like to entertain the other guests at an impromptu cocktail party. So while they shook up some Cosmopolitans and set out dishes of tapenade, we set up in the dining room and played for a while -- quite a bit different without a rhythm instrument, but it wasn't too bad. We wound up our session and then drove down the road to visit the accordionist's wife (he had had to go out of town that morning, but she invited us over for a short visit). It turns out that she was a music major at Wellesley back in the day, though she doesn't play much now. She has a baby grand piano -- a Hardman -- and she asked me to play a bit. So I played my Bach prelude and Brahms Op. 118 No. 2 (the latter with a big brainfart hole at the end, unfortunately; I wonder why that happens?).

The rest of the time, we did vacationer-type things like going on hikes and eating seafood. The weather was beautiful, aside from a little rain on Monday morning.

It was a pleasant trip, and I liked getting in some playing (I always feel better when I can play music), though renting the cello was a bit of a pain. I suppose I could have bought a seat for my own cello on the plane, but that is always an iffy proposition (sometimes the airport people won't let you bring it on board if the flight is crowded), and then I'd have had to worry about it the entire time. I've done my share of traveling with a cello, and it's a hassle however you arrange it.

If money were no object, I'd get one of these: That Carbon Fiber Cello

But with my traveling-with-cello career as limited as it is at the moment, I can't justify it.

Slow progress, or the magical powers of lack of speed

2010-09-28T00:16:00.001-04:00

Over the summer, I spent several months flailing at Beethoven Op. 2 No. 3, his grand C major sonata, learning the notes but not playing them very well. When I finally buckled down and started practicing the Beethoven at a relaxed slow tempo (not painfully slow, but slow enough to attend to every note), it got better miraculously, in just a session or two. This sonata, for those not familiar with it, is written in a virtuosic style, almost like a concerto. It's Beethoven at his most cheerful, as well as Beethoven showing off his chops. There are both pianistic and compositional flourishes throughout. The main theme is particularly devilish because it features four 16th notes played in thirds in the right hand on the third beat of the first and third measures. It doesn't look like anything much, but it's quite difficult because it forces you to play these rapid notes in thirds with emphasis on the fourth and fifth fingers -- the weakest ones -- right at the beginning of the piece. Also, the Allegro con brio temp compounds the difficulty.

I may have mentioned that I worked on this piece a little when I was 17 with a teacher I had for only a short time. He assigned it because I had worked on Op. 2 No. 2 for years on end with my previous teacher, so with his logical Germanic mind, of course I needed to continue with No. 3. I struggled with those first measures. When I asked him how one could possibly play them, he said, basically, "Practice." I finally gave up on the piece because I could not play those measures. Well, I didn't know how to practice then -- but I do now.

My fancy-pants ABRSM edition by Barry Cooper helps. Back when I didn't know any better, I was using Schirmer, which is chock full of horrible overedited anachronistic markings. I'm pretty sure they had those first measures slurred. Cooper points out that the 16th notes are actually NOT slurred into the two eighths at the end of the first measure, nor are the eighth notes slurred into the second measure. So if you play this figure fairly crisply and separated, it not only sounds better but is easier.

My slow practicing is also soothing all the muscles and tendons in my overstrained right wrist. Shortly after I began working on this sonata, I started feeling a lot of pain there -- not carpal tunnel type pain, but a definite and severe pain on the outside of that wrist. In the week or so that I stopped trying to force it in a fast tempo I can't play yet, the pain has eased.

So -- here's to slow progress, though I continue to wonder why it's so hard to make myself do it.

Blogaversary and goals

2010-09-20T14:00:00.006-04:00

It has been a year since I published my first post here.

I tend to take stock and compare with the year gone by more at this time of year than when the calendar turns in January; maybe it's my Jewish heritage coming out, or maybe it's just that I spent so many years in school. In any case, I've been thinking about what I've learned this past year and my musical goals for the near future.

Aside from a lot of pondering on philosophical questions, what I've actually done amounts to this:

September 2009: I played the cello at one of the English country dances at Glen Echo. I like doing these because the other musicians are usually very good, and it's a chance to practice improvising skills.

October 2009: I recorded Chopin Op. 27 No. 1, playing from memory. I felt that this was a good start on this piece. I think if I ever relearn it, it will be much better. I also played a concert with my chamber orchestra.

November 2009: I recorded the Bach Prelude and Fugue in C sharp major, Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, No. 3. I felt pretty good about this one. This is one of those pieces that I couldn't even imagine being able to play, let alone memorize, back in the day.

December 2009: I played the cello at two holiday folk events: an English country dance and a Scandinavian dance. These were with the large and loosely (very loosely) organized group that's been around for about 30 years, and they were what they were.

January 2010: I performed Dvorak's "Silent Woods" with an orchestra, playing from memory. This was one of the more satisfying cello performances I've done. The sound was close to what I imagined it should be, I felt comfortable in front of the audience, and I felt well prepared. This is also the first solo piece that I prepared for an important concert completely on my own from the beginning. It made me feel like a pro. On this same concert, we also played Brahms's Symphony No. 2, for which I coached the cello section, and I think we acquitted ourselves very respectably.

February 2010: I relearned and rerecorded Chopin Op. 55 No. 1. I felt good about how quickly I was able to redo this piece; however, I was not very happy with my performance. Though clean, it was just too, too fast. I should have recorded it a few more times, at least, to try to create a better interpretation. I think I was just feeling burned out about it and like no one really cared.

March 2010: I played the cello at an English country dance ball with two excellent folk musicians. I did a decent job, but nothing amazing. Not a high point of the year, though I'm glad I had the chance to do it.

April 2010: I recorded both the Bach Prelude and Fugue from WTC Book II, No. 2, in C minor, and Brahms Op. 118 No. 2. The Bach left a lot to be desired -- I think I just did not work on it correctly. I did too much fast playing and not enough slow playing. The Brahms, on the other hand, was gratifying because I finally memorized it and played it as well as your average anyone else. I continue to have the sneaking suspicion that I'm getting away with something by not having a teacher and not doing things the "traditional" way -- though of course, there are as many traditions as there are people, which is to say, a lot. I also played the third concert of the year with my chamber orchestra.

May 2010: I performed the Brahms on a recital. I didn't post the recording here at the time, but actually, I like it better than the one I did post here in April. It was more musical, even with the oopsies. I also played a long gig on the cello with our neighborhood group, where I felt I honed my improvisation skills a bit.

June, July, and August: In June, I played the final concert of the year with my chamber orchestra. In July, I played the Brahms in a master class for my old friend Brian Ganz, which was an interesting experience, and in August, I played the cello in a very large DC Youth Orchestra reunion concert at the Kennedy Center.

September 2010: Our neighborhood group played a gig that was relatively polished (if one can describe folk music as being "polished").

What I am happy about, looking at the list above, is that I continued to apply myself, both to continuing activities and to learning new things, throughout the year. Every month I did at least one musically engaging activity.

So what do I hope to accomplish in the coming year?

1. I'll continue to practice the piano every day. This seems to be a good thing to do. Though I heard this for years (i.e., "practice every day!"), what got me to actually do it was the MOYD challenge started by a Piano World member a few years back.

Click here for the link to the PW thread.

So there is some worthwhile stuff on the Internet.

2. I would really, really like to get better at performing on the piano. To that end, I will schedule at least a few performances on AMSF recitals. I can never decide whether it's better to do as many as possible, even if I don't feel prepared, or to play only when I feel as ready as possible. There are pros and cons to both approaches. One pro to doing lots of these is that you get a lot of experience at dealing with nerves and learning what to do to combat them. OTOH, bad performing experiences can have a detrimental effect on one's psyche; if you continue to have them, that's what you're practicing rather than playing music for people. So it's tricky.

3. I'm still going back and forth about taking lessons. What I'm contemplating now is going to someone to get help with specific pieces -- for example, the first movement of the Beethoven sonata I'm working on, which I would like to play on a recital in about two months, has multiple technical issues that I could use help with. And I'd like to see if there's a better way to learn Bach than what I've been doing. My experience with lessons throughout my life has not been so great overall; for one useful comment, I've had to put up with months, or even years, of not-so-helpfulness (or worse).

4. Other than that, I plan to just carry on carrying on.

If anyone is still out there reading (I know a few of you do check in from time to time), I hope you find at least some of my musings interesting, entertaining, or useful. Let me know! Comments are always fun to read.

So here's to another year.

Musical Saturday - update (recording added)

2010-09-11T22:59:00.005-04:00

This morning was the first rehearsal of the season for the chamber orchestra I'm in. I have to admit that I'm disappointed with the choice of rep for this concert. The "big" piece is an arrangement of Debussy's "Children's Corner," which though charming for solo piano is more than a bit weird for orchestra. Then there is Beethoven's overture for "The Ruins of Athens," a double flute concerto by Cimarosa, and Haydn's symphony that is nicknamed "The Bear." Oh, well; at least I don't need to practice much for this concert.

Then this evening, our little neighborhood band had a gig. Our recorder player is friends with someone who works for Hostelling International, and we've played a couple of times at the hostel in Baltimore that he's involved with, which is a 19-century mansion downtown. We've enjoyed playing there because the main room has really great acoustics. Here's a picture of us playing there last year (love those big windows!):

The event tonight was a social part of a meeting of the organization, and they hired us to provide background music during a (nonalcoholic) cocktail hour, with a break in the middle while they made a presentation.

It was generally a good gig, but the room got so noisy we could hardly hear ourselves. However, several people told us afterward that they enjoyed hearing us. One guy staked out a spot next to us and asked us if we had a CD. Well, I did say it was noisy in there. I think it was good for us as a group because it prodded us to put together a nice playlist that seemed to work well -- a combination of slow and fast, folk and jazz-lite -- and we managed to hang together pretty well.

But I am so tired now . . .

Here's a recording (first number, before the noise level went up); there's some room noise at the end that I didn't have a chance to edit out. Also, you may notice that the guitar is loud and the cello is soft (for a change); that's because we put the recording thingy next to the guitarist so it would be out of the way. I was on the other side of the group.

Carolan's Welcome

International cellist of mystery

2010-09-08T22:11:00.000-04:00

We watched the movie "Billion Dollar Brain" (a piece of Cold War over-the-top silliness from 1967 with Michael Caine as Harry Palmer; the "billion dollar brain" is a giant mainframe computer with probably less memory than your iPod -- my husband was laughing at the punch cards) over the weekend, and of course I was most struck by this:

Why the cello?

Director Ken Russell is full of flourishes and Francoise Dorleac's cello playing is sub-par . . .

I've been searching around all day, and cannot find out what was behind this. If anyone out there knows, please do tell.

I'm dancing as fast as I can

2010-09-03T13:40:00.000-04:00

It is so easy to succumb to the temptation to practice fast. You sit down to practice the piano, and you only have an hour, and there's all this stuff you want to get through -- so if you play it fast, you will get more done, right?

Wrong!

I do think there's a place for playing things fast. You need to do it to make sure fingerings work, to figure out what tempo you are aiming for, to get the flow and mood of the piece. But wow, one hour of slow practice is worth three of fast, at least. In fact, three hours of fast practice might even have a negative effect because you are simply playing from muscle memory without much intellectual involvement. Plus, you are often practicing mistakes, or glossing over any potential intepretive niceties that you might otherwise be able to add.

I can't even begin to recount all the times this has hit home. Most recently, my husband made the mistake of wandering into my practice room the other night, so I told him to sit down and listen to me play Bach. Talk about a shaky, messy, uneven train wreck. The prelude wasn't bad, actually, but the fugue fell apart completely. I did a lot of stopping and restarting and had to take a lot of running leaps to get over all the humps and make it to the end. And the thing is, I've been playing this through reasonably well for the past month, but having any audience brought my performance down to its true level.

I have been planning to schedule this piece for an AMSF recital soon, so this was a wake-up call to go back to the basics: small sections, fix stumbles by isolating them, hands separate, voices separate -- and all of this slow, slower, slowest. The metronome is my friend here. I've heard some people say they never practice with the metronome, but I think there's no better way to internalize a steady pulse. One's biological pulse is erratic and tends to speed up under stress, so it's not a reliable guide.

Further, I realized I've been pushing all of the pieces I'm working on, trying to play them up to tempo without preparing. What happens is my muscles can sort of do it, but there's not enough input from consciousness, so when something goes awry (a finger slips, I play a wrong note, etc.) I don't really know what I'm doing enough to stay with it. There's no real control.

This is of course a common problem. The difference in my case from the average amateur is that I do know how to avoid it; I've just been lazy while at the same time desperately wanting to just be able to play this stuff already, dammit. But there really are no shortcuts.

Summer

2010-08-30T22:08:00.000-04:00

Even though technically speaking there are three more weeks of summer, now that school is starting and it's getting dark at 8 p.m., it feels like it's over. I've been thinking lately of how different summer was when I was in my seemingly endless years of school. I remember this feeling that finally, I could spend all my time practicing so I could really dig in and learn something. There were summers when all I did was practice and do wedding gigs (back when my rent was only $120 a month!).

And then there were summer music festivals. I attended a few of those, though not the really prestigious ones. My one summer at Aspen was the closest I got to the big time, though I was but a tiny cog in the huge wheel of musicians. That was pretty much a waste, musically speaking (I was in the most boring orchestra -- it was a chamber orchestra for the people who weren't big enough star students to get into the top chamber orchestra but who were better than the people in the so-called "Festival Orchestra" -- wow, haven't thought about all this ranking stuff in years), though it's a nice place for a vacation. And that was also when I decided not to go back to North Dakota, where I had been playing in a regional orchestra and teaching the previous season, but to go to graduate school in Cincinnati instead. It seemed the entire string faculty from CCM was spending the summer at Aspen during those years -- they jokingly called it CCM West -- and they had scheduled a block of time for official auditions, so it was easy for me. The teacher I was studying with taught there, and it was just a charmed moment for me to get in with a full scholarship, even though a few years later it became much more competitive.

Before that, I spent several summers at the Waterloo Festival in New Jersey, which, looking back on it, was a great deal: It was all-scholarship, including room and board, for two months. There was an orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz (a well-known conductor, formerly a successful trumpet virtuoso), with weekly concerts, plus chamber music and master classes (I even got to attend a master class given by Josef Gingold!). Because it was so close to New York -- at the time I went, it was housed at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison -- most of the teachers and guest artists were big-name musicians in groups like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. I'm not really sure how I managed to get into this place. I guess it was just a fluke that the recital tape I sent them in 1979 was so good; once you were in one time, you were in any other time you wanted to go, so I was able to go back a few more summers. I did like the experience, but I didn't entirely appreciate it at the time, nor did I take advantage of everything it had to offer, particularly in the area of networking. Ah, well. I believe the festival is long gone, no longer being held.

In addition to the long festivals, I've been to a number of shorter festivals and workshops, including some Suzuki teacher training courses, a couple of chamber music festivals, and even (much more recently) the New Directions Cello Festival for nonclassical cello playing.

For all of these, the hallmarks are sweat, way too much proximity to other musicians, and (for some) way too much partying. The big festivals were fun for me when I was younger, as someone who had never lived in a college dorm before. (I remember, with some shame now, participating in the vandalism of a dorm room: the guys who lived in it invited everyone in to draw and paint grafitti onto every wall in the place. They did paint over it all before they left, but it was a big mess. Yikes. Kids.)

Now that I'm working full time like a normal adult, that summer magic is gone -- it's just like the rest of the year, only hotter. Still, every June, I have the fleeting sensation that I've just been let out of school and am on my own.

Reunion

2010-08-24T00:18:00.000-04:00

This past weekend I participated in a musical event that raised a lot of wistful, nostalgic feelings.

I came home one day earlier this summer to find a message on our answering machine about a concert that would take place on August 21 at the Kennedy Center in the Concert Hall to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the DC Youth Orchestra Program, and they wanted to know if I could play. I am an alum -- enrolled in 1970 and emerged in 1974. Before then, I hadn't been connected with sports or clubs or summer camps (I don't really count a forgettable couple of years in Girl Scouts, where we met in a church basement and did craft projects and brought snacks from home), and our family didn't belong to any organized religious group, so this was my first involvement with a group activity that was both voluntary and demanding, and one that involved music. My piano lessons, as I've mentioned, were unconnected with the larger musical world, so DCYO was the place I learned some of the elements of performing.

The program was free to anyone, with no restriction on the basis of residence; you could sign up no matter where you lived or what school you attended. If kids needed instruments, they were provided at no charge. (In later years, the program started charging a modest tuition fee, but that was after my time there.) I started in prep classes, then quickly moved through Elementary and Junior orchestras, and a year or so after I started, I was promoted to the DC Youth Orchestra itself. I traveled across town to Coolidge High School, in northwest DC, on Saturday mornings and one evening a week during the school year (various parents arranged a carpool with kids from our neighborhood, and later on I felt very grownup about taking the bus), and daily during some hot, sweaty summers, for four years. The orchestra has also traveled overseas many times, and I went with it to the Von Karajan Festival in Berlin in 1972 and to Scotland and London in 1974.

I was NOT a star. I was a reliably okay, middle-of-the-section player and was not one of the notables for my personality, either. But I must have made a decent impression, because in the early 1980s, I returned to the program as a teacher and worked there for several years, until I decided that I needed my Saturday mornings back. And then in 1989, they asked me to go on a trip to Spain with a chamber orchestra, which of course I did. (Lest you think this involved a lot of glamor, however, you have to know that our accommodations were in a dorm with no air conditioning, sleeping on little cots, with a shared bathroom and continental breakfasts, and then long rides on a bus, also not air conditioned. But it was still fun. The kids were all really bright, great travelers and performers.)

Last year, NPR did a story on the orchestra. This definitely jibes with my memories:

Success on a Shoestring

The real kicker about this program is how, deceptively blandly, it disregarded the social canards of this town. Back in 1960 when the program was founded, DC was a city segregated by race and class, and the idea of offering classical music training to the have-nots, and bringing together children from all groups to learn music to the same standards as the privileged, was a radical one. Rich white kids from Bethesda sat next to poor black kids from Southeast, and no one made a big deal over it except for the press, when a reporter would poke his or her head in to observe.

Over the years the program was attacked from all sides. I remember in the 1970s a loony DC Public Schools superintendent who railed against providing funding for a program that taught black kids "white" music. But somehow, the program managed to limp along on the financial equivalent of band-aids, duct tape, and chewing gum. The physical plant was decrepit even back then, and I'm surprised Coolidge High School hasn't collapsed on its own already. (A few weeks ago, they finally moved to new digs at the renovated Eastern High School on the other side of town. Though they desperately need a better building, there are a lot of happy memories in the old place, and I hope the new neighborhood is as hospitable as the old one was -- it's a bit sketchier over there.)

Preparation for the concert on the 21st was three three-hour rehearsals at the Kennedy Center -- and a memory lane trip, seeing people I hadn't seen in many years (including one guy I went to junior high with!). For some strange reason, everyone looked 40 years older than I remembered them looking.

There was a one-hour time restriction on the concert, so they programmed only a few short works: after "The Star-Spangled Banner" (which opened with a group of young violin students playing the tune without accompaniment) came Wagner's overture to Die Meistersinger, an arrangement of Gershwin's "Summertime," a new piece by a former orchestra member (John Christopher Wineglass's "Portrait in Themes"), the Andante from Hansen's Symphony No. 2, and "Nimrod" from Elgar's Enigma Variations.

Somehow the organizers wrangled the services of Marvin Hamlisch as MC and to conduct the Gershwin. The founder and longtime conductor and music director of the program, Lyn McLain, who retired in 2006 (and who is now 82 years old -- unbelievable), conducted the Hansen. Even though I was not in the inner circle back in the day and so never was chummy with him, Lyn was as familiar to me as a relative, a feeling I'm sure was shared by many of those who participated in this event. He has grown rather frail and is having trouble with his eyesight these days, but he rehearsed his piece meticulously and with his familiar down-to-earth demeanor of a jazz band leader (with wry whispers around the orchestra of, "He's still the same!").

The orchestra was excellent. There were so many great players there, and together we produced a magnificent sound. There's a video of the whole thing here (though unfortunately, the sound quality is terrible):

DC Youth Orchestra reunion concert (video)

Although I enjoyed playing in a large, very good orchestra for the first time in a long time, I was reminded of why it's not my favorite thing, either. Lost in the middle of a cello section, you can't hear yourself, and you have no say in how things are done or what musical decisions are made. Because this was an extremely short-term situation, these conditions didn't bother me, but I knew that for the long term, they would be onerous. However, this was altogether a stimulating experience, both from the musical standpoint and because it reconnected me with parts of my past.

Decision

2010-08-18T13:01:00.000-04:00

I have decided not to go to school.

I gave it very serious consideration, but it came down to the fact that this particular program is not going to offer me enough to make up for its inconvenience. Travel time alone from where I live to the school would be a minimum of 40 minutes each way, more if I took public transportation, so one and a half to two hours, two or three times a week, which adds up -- and it's time I could put to better use. Plus the three hours a week of orchestra rehearsal, which was not something I had envisioned originally.

And then the other thing I realized is that I don't want to be that regimented. I've been there, done that, got the degrees. What I want to do is play the piano, and that's something I don't need a school to do. I still think a teacher is a good idea, but even without a teacher I believe I've done pretty well.

I also have other interests and want to feel free to follow and enjoy them.

I started investigating this thinking that I needed to challenge myself, but I'm actually pretty challenged now (!), and there are many other ways and paths I could use for this that won't lock me into something that's not exactly what I want.

So, fresher ideas to come . . . stay tuned.

What I'm playing this week

2010-08-17T08:56:00.000-04:00

On the piano: I am making good progress on all my pieces.

Bach WTC I/19: This is now memorized. I'm still feeling like I am not doing this methodically enough. With this piece in particular, I just kind of bludgeoned my way through it until it started sticking, which did not seem like a good way to go about it, but I had a hard time intellectualizing. Anyway, I'm hoping to try to record it in the next week or so.

Brahms Op. 118: I've mostly been working on No. 3, and this, too, is memorized. It's also getting easier each time I practice it, though it's still pretty clunky. So I now have learned half of the set in this opus number group. Of course, Nos. 4 and 6 are the hardest ones . . .

Beethoven Op. 2 No. 3: First movement is also mostly memorized. This means I can play through most of it with only a few peeks at the music now and then.

Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but memorization always means major progress to me. Even if I can play something musically and technically well, if it's not memorized I don't feel I have plumbed the depths. And conversely, if I at least have a piece memorized, I know I have more than superficial acquaintance with it. Perhaps this is not true for people who memorize music more easily than I do. When I started practicing the piano again (about six years ago), I had to make a conscious effort to memorize. I still do, though it has become a slightly more natural process. I'm sure if I practiced more it would go faster.

On the cello: Um, not doing much. Slap me with a wet bow hair.

Just wanted to share this

2010-08-17T08:39:00.000-04:00

Electric Land

2010-08-08T15:57:00.000-04:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that one of the problems with playing the cello is that it's not the most portable instrument. Though you can pick it up with one hand and carry it from place to place without too much difficulty, it's bulky and awkward, and it's really very fragile -- one wrong turn, and you can knock a hole through it, slam it in a door, tip it over and watch it go crashing to the ground. Traveling on public transportation can be something of a nightmare, or at least expensive (when you have to buy a seat for it).

About 30 years ago, I was in an airport somewhere with my cello, and a man came up to me and asked if I'd be interested in a cello you could fold up. As a matter of fact, I told him, I'd played on one once and hadn't liked it. Well, it turned out that that man was Ernest Nussbaum, the inventor of the one I'd tried, something called the Travielo. It was basically a fingerboard, strings, and bridge mounted onto a wooden frame, fitted with a pickup and primitive amplifier. The whole thing could be dismantled and put into a small wooden box within five minutes.

About a month ago, NPR did a story about Nussbaum and the current incarnation of this instrument, the Prakticello. It's similar to the one I played on all those years ago, but minus the electronics.

You can read about it/listen here:

Cello in a Box

Shortly after this story was broadcast, we decided to go on the trip to Maine that I mentioned last week, and that started me thinking about the possibility of acquiring a cello for travel. Although I am kind of a Luddite, I'm not a purist. I'm not against something that serves a useful purpose. My main interest is in portability, but in addition, if I ever get into playing more nonclassical music, the possibility for amplification would be nice.

Any cello can be electrified with a pickup and amplifier, but those designed to be electric have certain features that are appealing from a portability standpoint. Electric cellos are much smaller than traditional acoustic cellos because they don't have the large resonating body; they are generally just simple sticks, with a fingerboard and bridge on the front and electronics in the back. They incorporate various design elements that are either practical (to provide the traditional contact points -- chest, left hand, and knees) or aesthetic (cool-o rock band shapes and colors).

I've spent some time searching the Internet for information and opinions, but nothing beats actually holding the instrument in your hands, so I searched out some local options. First, I emailed the creator of the Prakticello, Ernest Nussbaum, and asked if I could arrange to try one out. He said he would have one available soon and promised to call me when it was ready.

Yesterday I made a trip to Chuck Levin's. They carry two brands: one made by NS Design and one made by Yamaha. Each has several variations to choose from. NS Design cellos are available in four-, five-, and six-string versions but with the same body design; Yamaha offers different body designs, all with four strings.

The salesman showed me a five-string NS Design cello and the most basic Yamaha model, SVC-50. I went in with high hopes for the NS Design cello: it's very attractive, made out of a solid piece of maple with a sort of folky look to it. Here's the five-string model:

It's designed so you can play it standing up, either on a heavy metal stand (which is included) or on a strap around your shoulders like a guitar, or sitting down. The stand can be adjusted for the seated position. There is also an optional endpin, but they didn't seem to have one in the store. My assessment, albeit based only on noodling on it for 10 minutes: nice sound, weird and uncomfortable playing position. The fingerboard feels very short, and the only stand-in for the shoulder on the left side of the cello that provides a reference point for shifting out of first position is a small metal nub on the back of the neck. I think it would be hard to go back and forth between this and my acoustic cello. There wasn't a four-string model for me to try, either, so I don't know if that might feel a little more natural. It's also heavy, especially with the stand.

The Yamaha model I tried is very plain. It looks kind of like a giant praying mantis.

But as you can see, the playing position is natural and the proportions of the instrument are the same as an acoustic cello. I liked this instrument a lot -- its simplicity, its design, and its clean sound. It's also very lightweight, at about seven pounds. The knee contact piece just screws on, and it's easy to install and remove. Yamaha calls it a "silent" cello, but it actually has a pleasant, though soft, acoustic sound when not plugged in.

Ernest Nussbaum had called me Friday evening to tell me the cello was ready, so my husband and I went to his house this morning. He had the cello waiting for me in his study. I was able to pick it up and start playing it, with virtually no adjustment other than the one you normally would have for a different cello. It has a similar acoustic sound to the Yamaha, though perhaps more resonant.

Here's Nussbaum with his invention (photo from the NPR story):

Here's moi, from this morning:

This cello has the best portability of all of them. It doesn't have any built-in electrical components -- Nussbaum said he gave up on that when it became apparent that the main utility for this instrument was as a practice cello when traveling or when living in close quarters with other people whom you do not want to disturb. However, one could easily use a pickup and plug that into an amp, just like one of the electric designs.

And the amp is the rub: if you want to use one of these cellos for performing or rehearsing, you need an amplifier, and they are complicated and expensive. The cello may only weigh 7 pounds, but add a 22-pound amp and you're getting back up to the weight of an acoustic cello (though at least it's not all in one awkward, fragile package). I looked at some at the store yesterday, but they are in a different department than the band and orchestra instruments, and they didn't offer to let me play the cello with one. So although there was a big heavy amp in the room with the cellos, I wasn't able to find out how it would actually sound with something more like what I would want to buy. I did play the Yamaha for a minute with headphones, but I can't see myself using headphones much.

While we were at his house this morning, Nussbaum showed us an old Travielo he has, and he explained that he made the amplifier himself -- just a little thing, with no container -- because he couldn't find anything else that would work at the time. I didn't get a really close look at it, but I believe it was something along these lines:

Image from this site: http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/computers/solderless/amplifier.html

He claimed that one would need only 1 watt for most purposes for this instrument (something like what's in the picture here), but I wonder about that. I'm not planning on playing Flight of the Bumblebee with a heavy metal band any time soon, but I'm thinking at least a little more power than that might be necessary.

In any case, I've got a few things to think about here.

What I'm playing this week

2010-08-05T13:30:00.000-04:00

On the piano:

Bach, WTC I/19 in A major: Still struggling along with this one, especially the fugue. I know I'm practicing it too fast and in chunks that are too long. I'm also straining something in my hands, which is really not good. The solution is obviously to SLOW DOWN, pay attention to what my hands are doing (am I using good fingering so that I'm not stretching unnecessarily? is everything relaxed?), break down into smaller sections, and SLOW DOWN.

Brahms Op. 118:
No. 3, Ballade: I'm making good progress on this. I have all of it memorized and am working on getting it faster and cleaner.
Nos. 4-6: I'm dipping a bit into each of these. They seem so much less difficult than they did even six months ago (though of course not easy).

Beethoven, Op. 2 No. 3: This is another piece for which it would behoove me to SLOW DOWN and practice in smaller sections. But it is not nearly as difficult as the Bach or the Brahms pieces I'm working on.

The past couple of weeks I've been making a conscious effort to simply increase my practice time whenever possible, and it definitely helps. I'm still considering pursuing the school thing, but before I do, I want to see if I can actually practice at least three hours a day more than every once in a while. So far, I have not been able to do so, which makes me wonder if I'm really up to this.

Yes, quality time is important in practicing, but amount of time is also important, especially if you are learning new skills. Experienced musicians who are just maintaining do not need to practice that much, but even they, faced with learning new music, need to increase the hours they spend.

On the cello:

The cello has been getting an extended rest this summer. I finally dusted it off this week and creakily played through a few things. It wasn't too terrible, and it actually felt good physically: playing the cello seemed to smooth out some of the strain I was feeling in my hands from the three Bs I've been struggling with on the piano.

A few things on the horizon for the cello:

A reunion concert with the DC Youth Orchestra. This year is the 50th anniversary of the program, and they contacted a lot of the former members about playing in this. It will be at the Kennedy Center in the Concert Hall on August 21. I agreed to do it, and the concert itself is fine with me (in fact, I'm looking forward to playing -- there are many excellent musicians who will be participating), but getting to and from the Kennedy Center with my cello is going to be a pain.

The first TCO concert is in September this year! It seems so early. They decided to redo the schedule to avoid having a concert in January when the weather is usually the worst we have here. So concerts will be in September, November, April, and June. I have no solos this year, though, so not much pressure.

A jaunt to Maine this fall with the ladies from my neighborhood band, to visit a friend who used to play accordion in the big folk group that we have all played in. He took early retirement and moved up there about ten years ago, and one of our group who has known him for a long time has been wanting to go up and visit him and play music with him. This is all fine, though again, there is the problem of what to do about a cello. I'm not buying a seat for mine on the plane for such a short trip; there's always a question of whether they will even let it on board (which, no matter the formal policy, is left to the discretion of the person guarding the boarding gate, who has the authority to summarily banish a cello to the baggage compartment). Driving up there is not an option. So I'm looking into others(portable electric cello? rent a cello there? find one to borrow?).

Anyway, that's what's been happening. Somehow the summer is flying by. But I am making some music every day.

Master class, finally

2010-07-28T15:02:00.000-04:00

When the AMSF master class with Brian Ganz was first scheduled in February, it was snowmageddoned out; then when it was rescheduled in the spring Brian had a death in the family, and it had to be canceled again. It finally took place this past Sunday. It was bracketed by one of the hottest July 25ths on record and a short but incredibly destructive storm, which hit right in the middle of the class, causing the power to go out -- but our hosts cranked up a generator and lit some candles, and we kept going.

In any case, Brian was exactly as I remembered him from almost 30 years ago when he accompanied some of my student recitals: warm, enthusiastic, full of fanciful but helpful imagery, and extremely knowledgeable about music and the piano.

They put me first -- perhaps because I was playing the easiest piece, the Brahms Op. 118 No. 2. I played from memory, and it went well except for the pianissimo hymnlike section in the middle, during which I realized I had hit the sostenuto pedal instead of the una corde pedal, and it threw me off and I messed up the second phrase of it.

The things Brian talked about were understanding how Brahms developed the music, asking questions like, "What makes this version of this theme different here?" He talked about "juxtaposition," by which he meant playing related sections of music side by side to make these kinds of comparisons. He also talked about voicing, and suggested practicing something he called "ghost playing": sounding only one voice while lightly pressing the keys of the other notes without having them sound. He mentioned something suggested by his teacher Leon Fleischer when he was studying the opening of Beethoven's fourth piano concerto: imagine you have two cherubim, one tucked under each arm, and they are blowing on the keys.

The musical analysis he suggested is actually something I tend to do automatically, but it was nice having it reinforced. Any advice on varying touch, though, is really valuable; the piano's weakness as an expressive instrument is its percussiveness and the tendency for playing to be plunky. The ghost-playing technique is very difficult, requiring a lot of control, and it's something I'm definitely going to start practicing -- just a bit at a time, though.

In the interests of confidentiality (because I don't know how they would feel about having their performances analyzed on the Internet), I won't go into detail about the other five people who participated. Let's just say that they played interesting pieces and were well prepared. I also applaud the intrepid audience (including my husband), who sat through 3 1/2 hours of master class and were still awake at the end.

The buffet afterward was excellent, conversation was lively. So all in all, a good experience.

What I've been working on

2010-07-17T13:53:00.000-04:00

I haven't been describing my practicing for a while because there hasn't been all that much to worth reading about, although I HAVE been practicing. I make it a point to play the piano at least a little bit every day unless I'm sick or traveling and not near a piano.

So my lineup on the piano has been stuck on the 3 Bs:

Bach, WTC I/19 (A major)
Brahms, Op. 118 Nos. 1, 2, and 3
Beethoven, Sonata Op. 2 No. 3 in C major
Scales and arpeggios

I've been working on the Bach for more than three months. The fugue in this WTC set is particularly difficult. As I've mentioned, the theme is always introduced in stretto with another voice (i.e., they overlap). It is also a jumpy theme, built on a broken arpeggio, so it's almost like two voices in itself. It starts with a single eighth note followed by three eighth-note rests, which I'm finding hard to bring out. I've resorted to punching at it in an attempt at staccato, which then leads to rushing, which then leads to a tangled train wreck.

Here's Rosalyn Tureck, playing it very slowly (I think too slowly, though of course it's beautifully clean):

And here's Kenneth Gilbert on the harpsichord (I like the tempo of the fugue much better in this version):

In the past week or so, I have finally been able to play bits of it from memory. I have memorized the prelude. I'm certainly not giving up on it. My experience with learning these fugues is that there is a certain amount of time (maybe a few months, at my practice rate) in which it seems I will never be able to play whichever one I'm working on, but then there is a breakthrough and it's suddenly in my hands.

The Brahms is developing. I am going to play 118/2 at the long-postponed masterclass with Brian Ganz next week. I had thought about maybe substituting another piece, but decided to go ahead with this one because it's the most polished piece I have at the moment. I have been working on 118/1 on and off for more than two years, and it still seems so hard to me, though I'm not sure why. It's short (only two pages), and not complicated. Maybe it's all the arpeggios. I recorded myself once a while back, and noticed that the left hand and right hand were not in sync -- the left was always a little bit behind. Frustrating!

Here's someone named Peter Rösel playing it very nicely (don't know what's up with the Classical Greek pose later in the video):

The Ballade, Op. 118/3, is awkward all over the place, but I think I'm finally getting it. I have it almost memorized, and I'm working on building up speed while playing it cleanly. It's difficulties involve mainly the thick chords, with harmony changing almost every beat in a fast tempo. As I mentioned some months back, when I was in college I used to sit on the steps in front of the music building waiting for orchestra rehearsal to start, and someone would be practicing this piece in the classroom directly above the entrance. I admired it then but never imagined I would learn it myself.

The Beethoven sonata, by contrast, is much simpler than any of the above, so it's been fun. There are a few tricky technical bits, one being the first theme, with the little double-thirds trill. When I worked on this piece briefly when I was 17 years old, I asked my teacher how in the world you could learn to play that, and he basically said, "Practice." So, I've been practicing. It's still not 100%, but it's somewhat better.

Here's a performance by Daniel Barenboim that is very much how I hear it (but wow, vertigo-inducing camera work here . . .). The first movement hangs over into a second video because it's longer than 10 minutes:

Those are a lot of videos for one post! One of these days, I'll record myself some more so I'm not depending so much on YouTube for entertainment around here.

Practical creativity (a tribute)

2010-07-13T12:55:00.000-04:00

I first was introduced to the work of Harvey Pekar in 2003, when the movie "American Splendor" came out. For those who might not know, he was a writer who had the brilliant idea of using the comic book form as serious essay and autobiography, with a little humor thrown in, too. Even though he had no drawing ability, he developed a way to work with artists who did to create his stories, beginning in the 1970s with R. Crumb. This evolved into a series of comic books titled American Splendor -- an appellation both ironic and heartfelt.

After I saw the movie, I read a couple of the book-length collections of American Splendor and developed an appreciation for Pekar and his achievements. On the one hand, he depicted the little everyday happenings of his life -- going to a boring job day after day, buying groceries, finding an apartment, fixing a car -- but at the same time, he was celebrating their beauty, and their sheer American-ness. Many have described him as a depressed crank, but I think he was just telling it like it was. He styled himself as full of problems, but really, he was a remarkably intelligent person living the life of an ordinary human being.

Although he kvetched about his job as a file clerk at the Cleveland, Ohio, VA hospital, he also appreciated it and stayed there until retiring at the age of 62. The job grounded him, provided a living wage and sense of security that enabled him to indulge in his creative pursuits on his own time. His third marriage, to a fan, endured and ultimately settled into what seems like a happy home life. A native of Cleveland, he lived there all his life and expressed a real love for the place. In addition to writing American Splendor, he was a respected jazz and book critic and continued to keep irons in the fire (an ambitious blog project, an opera).

Call me crazy, but I find him an inspiration: This is someone who was able to survive and not only keep plugging away at his creative work on his own terms but send that work out into the world and turn it into something concrete and real that communicated with many other people.

Harvey Pekar died yesterday at age 70. From one of the commentors on the article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Unlike some basketball player that just left, the loss of Mr. Pekar is a major loss for the city and literature. RIP Harvey

A very good obit here, from the Guardian.

Drop the needle quizzes

2010-07-11T15:47:00.000-04:00

For the generationally challenged, the "needle" here refers to a phonograph needle. A "phonograph" is kind of like those things DJs use to make scratchy noises at dance clubs (do they still do that?), except we used to use them to actually listen to music.

In the olden days in music school, teachers would turn on the phonograph and drop the needle on the "record" (you know, those round things made of vinyl) at random, and students were expected to listen to a snippet of something and either identify it or describe what they thought it was. In my later years in school, the technology moved on to cassette tapes (um, plastic tape coated with magnetic material containing the recordings wound on tiny spools in little plastic cases). I spent the entire 15 or so years I was in music school learning how to do this. It was part of the doctoral exams I took. I don't remember what pieces they used, but I did pass the test.

I mostly use this skill now to impress my husband when we're riding in the car with the radio on. "Tchaikovsky, 'Swan Lake,'" I'll say, or "Howard Hansen," or "Mahler symphony -- not sure which one," and almost every time, I will be correct. Some of it is just recognizing the actual piece, but part is also being able to place a style chronologically by noticing the instrumentation, texture (chordal, contrapuntal, etc.), and style. Most composers also have a signature riff that they always use -- a melodic turn, a chord progression, a rhythmic pattern.

Beyond its utility as a parlor (or car!) trick, I know there must be something useful about this, too. Maybe it's simply being able to listen carefully enough to distinguish different types of music, which probably helps in understanding, which ultimately helps in playing. In the confusing world full of all kinds of sounds, part of being a musician is being able to listen and discern one from another.

Real live practicing!

2010-07-06T17:40:00.000-04:00

Well, actually, if you didn't catch it before midnight on July 4, you missed it.

Valentina Lisitsa is a wonderful pianist with a secure and relaxed technique. She concentrates on the solid, muscular romantics -- Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Schumann. I had a chance to hear her live and attend a master class with other amateur pianists* a few years ago, and it was fascinating to watch and listen to her demonstrate and explain how to achieve something technically, from a legato line to double trills -- and in a completely matter-of-fact way, without pretensions.

Last week, she set up a webcam and did a live stream of her practicing for a week. I'll give you the link here, though there's not much to see at this point:

Val's daily practice cam

She described it this way:

Hi everyone :-)
I thought it kinda cute to let those of you who are curious - (or upsed at me not responding to messages on Youtube , Facebook etc LOL ) inside my practice studio.I am going to run live webcam for next 7 days-'till July 4th midnight to be exact.
I will be working on my recital and cocnerto programs that I will have to perform next month. I have 55 pieces to work on!!!!!!
Seriously. Some of them I have to revive ( like Chopin Etudes or Brahms #2)more than half is absolutely brand new . I am going to practice as usual -@ 13-14 hours a day., from around 9-10AM EST to midnight. Nothing exciting otherwise:-)
Enjoy!!!

I was only able to see a little of this, though over the weekend I left it on for hours and listened to it in the background while I was doing other things. It was extremely interesting to hear how she went about drilling these pieces for many hours. She played small sections -- maybe eight to twelve measures at a time -- and cycled through them over and over with just a brief pause between reps. If something wasn't completely clear, she would do the section slowly once or twice and then back at tempo again. She always had the score up on the piano, and occasionally she stopped and wrote a fingering or note in the music. No metronome. No sitting and meditating.

Among other things, I thought about the intense boredom of this kind of practicing for the musician -- balanced, of course, by the knowledge that if she doesn't do it, the performance won't be secure and she won't be able to express what she wants to express, and won't be fulfilling her professional duties, either. As my first piano teacher always said (and wrote in my lesson notebook, in big letters), "In repetition there is security!!!"

Amateurs and nonplayers are dumbfounded by the "13 to 14 hours a day," but divide that among 55 pieces, each at least five minutes long, most more, and you end up with, what, about 15 minutes per day for each piece -- not much time at all. Perhaps enough time to make sure everything's in place in a piece already learned.

*I played in this class, an embarrassingly mediocre rendition of a Chopin Mazurka (Op. 6 No. 1). Pictorial evidence:

Instrument comparison: Piano versus cello versus . . .

2010-07-04T12:30:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking lately about the differences between playing the piano and playing the cello (as my poor cello sits in a corner while I practice the piano). I came up with a list of my pros and cons:

Piano vs. cello:

It's a complete experience -- I do not need to depend on anyone else to play something. Think about it: On an instrument like the cello, you can spend years learning a piece, but then when you are actually preparing to perform it, you get what amounts to a few hours to coordinate with an accompanist, orchestra, or ensemble, and you are pretty much dependent on their level of expertise for the final result.
Vast choice of music (Chopin!). A lot of music has been written for the cello, but the literature is miniscule compared with what is available for the piano. Hundreds of pieces by Bach alone! And a large proportion of the piano literature is iconic, containing many monuments to civilization, or at least to Western art music.
Much more intellectually challenging. Even for the simplest piece or improvisation, the pianist needs to understand harmony and voicing (emphasizing one line more than the others). When you get into a four-voice fugue, or the thick chromatic harmonies of the Romantics, there is a world of mastery to challenge you. To really play a piece well, you need to memorize it (even if you don't ultimately perform from memory), and memorizing all this complexity takes you to a seriously higher level of mental acrobatics than memorizing anything on the cello.
Don't have to carry it around. You would be surprised how limiting the cello's size is on a day-to-day basis. It's small enough to carry, but too large and heavy to just sling on your back. If you want to travel with it, you either have to drive or buy a seat for it on the public transportation of your choice. It's not so easy to just take it to work for an evening rehearsal, so I always end up taking time off to go home and pick it up, or having to come up with complicated plans so I can get from Point A to Point B with the darned thing.
Preparation for playing is easy: Just sit down! For the cello, you have to get it out of the case, tune it, find a chair, make sure your endpin doesn't slip, get your music stand situated (and if you're using one in a concert, figure out where to place it so you can see the music but it doesn't get in the way; one of my cello teachers called the music stand "the fig leaf").

Cello vs. piano:

Does not require as much practice time. This makes it an excellent instrument for an amateur musician. Now of course, you could spend endless hours on it, but for even above average competence, the minimum necessary practice time is much less than what you have to spend on the piano.
More of a social experience (because it does require collaboration). This is really good from a reality-check standpoint. I know I tend to get twisted up in knots about my playing when I don't have any interactions with the outside world. When I'm practicing the piano and don't play for anyone else or get any feedback, I can either under- or overestimate how I'm doing. When I play the cello in a chamber group, or even in an orchestra, I get an instant reality check both in terms of what I'm hearing and reactions of the other players. There is also a "greater than the sum of its parts" effect: In good circumstances, all of those human brains working toward the same thing can create a better musical experience than just your lone brain.
More directly expressive -- you actually touch the strings and feel them vibrate. You really do feel more like you are singing and like the instrument is part of you than when playing the piano, which tends toward the percussive and mechanical (though it doesn't have to, of course).
Always perform on the instrument you practiced on (as opposed to the piano, when you generally do not). This is something that gives you more control over what comes out at a concert.
You can tune it and do basic maintenance (change strings, adjust the bridge) yourself. With the piano, even when playing on your own instrument at home, you are somewhat at the mercy of piano technicians and tuners.

I think this covers the basics, at least in terms of my opinions. I'd be curious to know if any readers out there have thoughts on this.

For fellow statesiders, I hope you're enjoying the holiday today!

A concert and a film

2010-06-25T15:21:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, my husband and I went to New York for a quick vacation. On Friday night, we went to Le Poisson Rouge, which is a club in the Village that presents all kinds of music, from classical to avant garde whatever. The event was a 4+-hour tribute to the composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton for his 65th birthday.

I had never heard of Braxton until I met my husband, who loves this kind of thing (he -- my husband, that is -- is really much more appreciative of music in and of itself than I am). His music sounds a lot like other free jazz I've listened to, but I have been totally mystified by his opaque presentation of it. His compositions all have titles that are numbers, or equations, or little drawings, or diagrams that look like flow charts or math puzzlers:

His liner notes do not clear things up, either:

Pulse track horizontal structural systems have increasingly become 'a way of life' for my quartet music - and this has been a gradual attraction -- starting with composition 23G [diagram here] (which emphasized sound point attacks or quarter note based rhythmic stresses -- in the sound space of the music -- as a basis for extended solo improvisation). The concept of pulse tracks in this context refers to the use of extended structural devices (moments) that are approached as fixed metric sound events in the same sense as in vertical harmony (i.e. be-bop) -- but directed instead at the 'forward space' of the music -- that being structural events which are positions into the space of the music -- to be repeated as a continuum that supports (and defines) the nature of the unfloding invention (music). The reality of this context seeks to establish a unified open and controlled sound space (environment) that hopefully allows for fresh experiences to happen (and there's nothing complex about that intention).*

Then you put the record on and scratch your head for a while (or at least, I do).

This event we attended has served to make me appreciate Braxton a lot more. First, his devoted protegés of all ages and career stages were there. The show included I think five sets (beginning with a solo bagpiper who marched slowly around the room three times) with a variety of instruments, and they played a mixture of Braxton pieces and their own music. At least one person from each group made a statement about how he had influenced/mentored/nurtured them as musicians. It was interesting listening to all of these different groups. The grand finale was a 14-piece group that included strings, winds, brass, reeds, and percussion. A lot of the people playing were young. The music actually sort of started to make sense to me.

Before this last set, Braxton got up and made a speech, and in his own professorial style was lamenting the increasing vulgarity and commercialization of music in the world. He commended all of his students for making the sacrifices necessary to work as musicians in this world and to carry on for art. It made me feel a little guilty, somehow.

Then, this week, we are taking in some of the films at Silverdocs. This is a fantastic documentary film festival that takes place practically in our backyard (or a five-minute drive away from it, anyway). This year, the first film we saw was "Bill Cunningham New York," about the venerable 82-year-old New York Times fashion photographer. He lives the life of an ascetic. From the 1940s until this year, his home was a small studio in Carnegie Hall with a bathroom in the hall and no kitchen, crammed with file cabinets filled with his negatives.** Though his interest is fashion, he wears the simplest functional clothing and repairs his plastic rain poncho with duct tape. He travels around New York on a basic bicycle, including to fancy parties, where he refuses to eat anything to avoid being influenced.

It's not a life most people could enjoy or even tolerate, but he seems to thrive on it. And it struck a certain chord with me. I have to confess that I used to fantasize about living that kind of life -- modestly but persistently pursuing an artistic vision, eschewing any material possessions that don't relate or enhance. But alas, though I have the frugality and even the vision, I don't have the true modesty or charm to make it work -- not the way Cunningham does, anyway. And I think I'd get lonely.

*From "Anthony Braxton: Four Compositions (Quartet) 1984" (1985, Black Saint label).

**The Carnegie management finally evicted him, along with a few other elderly residents, this year, providing them with what is really much nicer housing in the neighborhood for life. He's now at Central Park South in an apartment with a view of the park (though according to the film makers, he had them remove all the appliances and cabinets from the kitchen so he could store his file cabinets in there). Here's his narrated slide show about leaving Carnegie Studios (from the New York Times website: Goodbye

Checking in

2010-06-22T00:51:00.000-04:00

I realized it's been a while since I posted here. I'm not sure what I've been up to is all that interesting, from a musical standpoint, but I'll share a few things.

I'm still pondering on whether enrolling in the music program at the community college is a good idea. It seems to be a fairly casual sort of program. I called the music office a couple of days after I went in there to find out what I needed to do next, and the person I talked to said I just had to register for my classes (which I can do online) by August 25, and they would assign me to a teacher. I got the names and phone numbers of all the piano teachers anyway, thinking it might be a good idea to contact them to see if anyone is particularly simpatico, but I haven't done it yet.

I'm torn between two desires.

One: to keep the piano a pleasant hobby that I can pursue on my own terms. To keep my life simple and not stress myself out too much. To practice for five minutes one day and three hours the next, if that's what I feel like doing.

Two: to push myself to a higher level before I get too old to do it -- really, purely to see what it will be like, and to see if I even can improve that much.

My thinking at the moment is that maybe I'll try it for a semester, and if it proves too difficult or unpleasant, I'm not committed to continue. If it turns out to be worthwhile -- if I'm learning a lot and feel engaged in the process -- then I can press on, though I know I'd need to make some major adjustments to the terms of my day job.

In the meantime, I've been struggling along slowly with my practicing. For some reason, I've been having trouble finding large blocks of time for this, which does not bode well for the school idea -- or maybe it does, in the sense that if I had something riding on it, I would make the time.

The Bach prelude and fugue I chose this time, WTC I/19 in A major, are possibly the most difficult I've tried to learn, and it's been frustrating. The fugue is loaded with stretto (when the fugue theme overlaps in subsequent voices), and the accompanying voice lines are not pointedly melodic, so it's hard to memorize them.

I'm making some progress with Brahms Op. 118 No. 3. The form is a simple ABA, and I have a good chunk of it memorized.

The Beethoven sonata (Op. 2 No. 3 in C major) is making a lot more sense and is getting more under my fingers, at least the first movement.

The cello is sitting lonely in a corner.

And that's where things are with me this week.

Food for thought

2010-06-09T21:05:00.002-04:00

I had my interview/audition yesterday at the community college. The person I met with is the head of the department and also teaches piano. His office was stuffed with two grand pianos (Kawais) and a desk, with a tiny path to get to each. I introduced myself, and then he asked me to play something. I played about two pages' worth of Brahms Op. 118 No. 2, and then he stopped me and said it was fine. I believe this was my very first piano audition! (Even though I think they do this just to see if you can play at all.)

I explained what I want to do, and he understood and expressed support for the idea. He even mentioned perhaps having the theory teachers devise some sort of exam so that I wouldn't have to take basic theory again. Without needing theory or any of the basic general classes (which I took back in 1974), all I'd have to take would be four semesters each of piano lessons, what they call "applied music lab" (basically a performance class, where you learn to play for and listen to others, three hours once a week), and large ensemble. Most pianists take chorus, which actually kind of appeals to me, but because it's held twice a week at noon, and the college is a pretty long trek from where I work, that's really not an option.

So it looks like if I want to do this, I'd have to play in the school orchestra, which meets once a week on Monday nights and gives four concerts a year (on Tuesday nights). This would work well from a scheduling standpoint, but my first thought was, gee, do I really want to pay to play in a community college orchestra? My second thought was, maybe it would be fun. Or not. But I imagine it's probably on par with the other gigs I've been playing, particularly because some of the same people are in it (this is also a community orchestra, so there are a lot of people who are not students).

Anyway, I'm accepted at the school and have now had the required advising session, so if I decide to go ahead with this, all I have to do is register. I do have to audition for the orchestra before the semester starts, but I'm guessing that won't be a problem. The only other issue is figuring out which piano teacher to choose and then coming up with a good lesson time.

My husband asked me why I can't just take private lessons instead of jumping through these hoops. I have been asking myself the same question, and if the infrastructure -- the school, the performance classes, the juries -- really is that important. Well, in my own experience, simply taking private lessons has never been enough. Maybe it is if you happen to have a great teacher, but I have never been that lucky, or maybe I never worked hard enough or was in the right mental place to get the most out of it. I was always so passive, lying on the beach of lessondom waiting have wisdom imparted to me, like a suntan; I didn't realize you need to wade out there and grab it. Really, the most important element of developing one's playing is practicing -- practicing enough, practicing the right way -- and that's something a teacher can only guide. Sometimes the environment can be a big part of the learning process.

Just being in the music building yesterday, thinking about being part of a community like that again, was invigorating, even though it was between semesters and hardly anyone was there, even though it was not some prestigious conservatory. While I was waiting for my interview, I could hear someone having a lesson on a Chopin prelude (very faintly -- the building was remodeled a few years ago, and they must have put some good soundproofing in). The last time I was part of a music school, I didn't even know what that piece was; now I do, and could learn to play it if I decided to do so. It's good to feel that I'm actually learning things instead of forgetting them.

Back to school, maybe?

2010-06-06T12:48:00.000-04:00

It has been eight years now since I took viola lessons at a local community college. I signed up for credit (because my employer had a tuition reimbursement program) but as a nonmajor. Because I wasn't a major, I wasn't required to meet any particular standards or play juries, and that was probably just as well, because my viola playing was extremely basic. My teacher was an excellent violinist who also played viola, and I did learn a lot from him, even though his method included practicing the same scale for months on end (I also worked on Bach and Telemann). I probably would have continued, but he left the area, and I didn't know who they would find to replace him, so I then enrolled in a private music school for most of the following year. Sometime in the spring of 2004, I grew discouraged with how I sounded (my vibrato was, um, less than ravishing) and quit.

I was just looking through my papers to try to find some records of all of this, and I came across my evaluation from the teacher at the private school. He noted the repertoire I had covered (Bruch Romanze, Bach Fourth Suite, Hoffmeister concerto, Sevcik scales, Bruni etudes), and he said,

It will be disappointing to not have Harriet as a student next year. She has been my most advanced player and the one with whom I can go most deeply into the techniques of music-making and the music of technique.

This made me feel so guilty. Sigh.

Anyway, when I was going to the college, I picked up a booklet prepared by the music department that outlined all the requirements, courses, and policies for the various degree programs. Even though it was published in 1997, and some specifics have probably changed, I hung onto this booklet and have studied it from time to time, comparing my level on the piano with their minimum requirements for each of the four applied classes (four because it's a two-year program). I recently came across it and looked at it again, and I noticed that the piano requirements now seem very much within my capabilities, whereas before, I didn't feel they were. For example, for the first semester, you are supposed to learn all major and minor scales and arpeggios in two octaves, one etude (at the level of Czerny, Clementi, etc.), and three pieces (Bach, WTC or other; a sonata movement; a prelude or other short work), at least one memorized. This seems completely do-able to me now.

So I've been thinking that one way to move to the next level on the piano would be to get myself into the program at this school. With short- and long-term goals in place, and weekly lessons, I would have a sort of infrastructure that would help with motivation. I would also be required to perform on student recitals and juries. It would be formal but probably not overly intimidating. A decent teacher would also help with any technical difficulties and provide direction on the best ways to improve. That would be the plus side.

In the minus column would be the possibility of turning an enjoyable hobby into a chore. There's also the fact that I don't know what the teachers are like, and what if I ended up with a martinet who had me practicing with quarters balanced on my wrists? Or worse, Hanon in every key? And then, how will I ever find the time to practice enough? The booklet mentioned above suggests three hours a day, seven days a week.

I suppose this is a minus, too, but, you know, I already have a couple of music degrees. I've taken the courses in theory, sight-singing, history, et cetera, and even passed comps in them at both master's and doctoral levels. I'm a bit overqualified -- though I certainly could benefit from studying these things again. But the people at the school might think I'm a wack job.

These are some of the things I have been weighing in my mind for the past year or so. I've also been cogitating on whether there's any possibility that I might be able to teach piano, which is something I'd like to explore. Topping it all off is the incontrovertible fact that time is passing. The longer I wait for inspiration, the less likely it is that I will be able to act on it.

Facing the prospect of another academic year slipping by, at the end of which I would be another year older and probably no wiser, this past week I finally called and set up an appointment to talk to the department head; I am also supposed to bring one piece to play. So here I go.

Pianos and piano people

2010-05-30T16:43:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, after a quick rehearsal of the Milhaud that I'm playing with the chamber orchestra I'm in, my husband and I jumped in the car and drove up to Philadelphia for an afternoon and evening of playing pianos and talking about music and many other things with a group of people I've gotten to know from several piano-related internet forums. We gathered at the Cunningham Piano Company showroom in the Germantown neighborhood, which is full of historic sites and buildings dating to the 17th century.

The first event was a lecture by Indrek Laul, the president of the current incarnation of Estonia Pianos. Unfortunately, because of the aforementioned rehearsal combined with holiday traffic, we arrived just at the tail end of his talk, which I am sorry to have missed. I have met Laul a few times but have never heard him speak at length, or play the piano. We were at least in time for a sandwich lunch buffet generously provided by Rich Galassani, proprietor of Cunningham. After lunch, we watched an energetic presentation by pianist Hugh Sung, who has a lot of irons in the fire related to using new technologies for playing and teaching the piano (which you can read about at the link I've provided).

Rich gave us a tour of Cunningham's workshop, in a separate building, where they rebuild and repair pianos of all sorts. Both of the Cunningham buildings are old and interesting, with large rooms, high ceilings, and worn wood floors. This narrated slide show created by the Philadelphia Inquirer provides an accurate portrayal of what we saw yesterday:

Cunningham Pianos slide show

The rest of the afternoon was taken up with impromptu performances by the attendees, ranging from a full-fledged reading by Joe Kubera of a piece written in the 1990s (I didn't note down the name of the composer, but we all gathered around the piano and watched the score as he played, which was interesting) to scattered attempts by the rest of us to recall once-known pieces. All were met with friendly approval. Rich had asked me to bring my cello, but I decided against it after I weighed the logistics of hauling it around against the probably short time I would be playing it, adding in the element of not really having anything ready that would fit in with the piano-centric occasion.

These piano parties (I've been to about a half dozen of them since I've been involved with the online communities) are really a good way to get a taste of performing without having too much riding on it. It's especially fun at a place like Cunningham's, when there are multiple good pianos to choose from. Because of Laul's presentation, an Estonia 190 that is identical to the one we have in our house was impeccably tuned and set up in performance position, so that was the piano everyone played on. It was somehow gratifying to hear how good it sounded and how much everyone liked it. We also spread out and tested most of the other pianos on display, including several digitals (a digital harpsichord was interesting, though the keyboard was too short for playing Bach).

Home again, I feel re-inspired about playing music. I've been feeling discouraged lately. My practice log is showing me how little time I've been spending on the piano. I think I can do better, and I feel a renewed energy to try.

Catching up + what I'm playing this week

2010-05-17T21:54:00.000-04:00

I haven't written one of these in a while, mainly because I haven't been working on anything new or interesting. It seems like I've just been treading water, doing the minimum, aside from preparing Brahms Op. 118 No. 2 for the recital last week.

But there are a few things to report:

On the cello:

The last orchestra concert of the season is coming up in a few weeks. We are playing a Johann Strauss II overture (the "Gypsy Baron"), the Mendelssohn violin concerto, one movement of a symphony by a local composer, and Darius Milhaud's "La création du monde" (Creation of the World). This last has generated some excitement in the orchestra because (1) it's a chamber piece (i.e., one on a part) and (2) it's got "jazz" in it (i.e., a saxophone instead of a viola, lots of seventh chords, a spot of ragtime). But in my opinion, it's not a particularly interesting or clever piece of music; it's more of a curiosity. Even with the chamber scoring, the texture is thick and muddy. I spent a few hours this past week practicing my part, but at the rehearsal yesterday, it was obvious that no one will be able to hear me in all the murk. Ah, well; I will do my best.

A couple of weeks ago, the group I'm in with some of my neighbors played at a cafe for three hours. It was a typical background music gig, with people eating and talking while we were playing. It certainly wasn't the best we've ever played. A couple of the others were very unhappy about how they played, but I wasn't upset about it. It was hot in there, and noisy, and were cramped into sitting in a row on a little platform where we couldn't see each other. We also played quite a lot of music. To make it anywhere near perfect, we'd have had to spent much more time on it than we did. It's not like classical music, for which some diligent practicing on one's own is more than enough prep for a gig like this. To play music like this -- our assortment of folk, jazz standards, and Beatles tunes -- well requires many hours of working things out in the group. We just don't have the hours for it, not to mention the collective skill level.

Anyway, here's a sample, warts and all:

All of Me

On the piano:

I'm continuing with practicing two scales (parallel major and minor) most days. I spend about five minutes at a time on this, and I've been enjoying it (a back-to-my-roots kind of thing, I think).

Bach, WTC I/19 (A major): This has been slow going. The fugue is especially difficult because there's a lot of stretto (voices come in before other voices finish their statement of the theme -- basically, they overlap, as shown in the link). This makes it harder to keep the voices mentally untangled.

Beethoven, Op. 2 No. 3, Sonata in C major: As I've mentioned before, this is not terribly difficult, but it is long. With my time limitations, five minutes seems about the most I can learn at one time, and each movement of this sonata is longer than that. But there are some things I love about this piece: the way it sweeps up and down the keyboard, the very Beethovenian twists and turns among key centers. It's also great as a technical study because it has a little bit of everything.

Brahms Op. 118: I'm pressing on with these, working now on Nos. 3 and 4, making slow progress. No. 4 is especially dense and odd, almost Baroque in its knotty textures.

Chopin Nocturne Op. 62 No. 2: I've been working on this a little bit. I had one or two extremely good practice sessions on the difficult middle section a few weeks ago, but I set it aside to concentrate on the Brahms.

So there you have it -- some of what I've been up to.

Piano recital -- done!

2010-05-09T22:06:00.000-04:00

Even though this isn't the first time I've played on a piano recital, it's one of very few if you consider all the years I've been playing. My nerves were mostly focused on wondering how nervous I would be. I decided to not try to play from memory, and I think that was a good decision because I was able to enjoy the experience of performing and take many more chances than if I were worrying about whether I was going to have a memory lapse.

What sealed it for me was that I wasn't able to practice much yesterday. There must have been some bad pollen blowing through town; something, in any case, was making my eyes sting and my head heavy, so I practiced just a little bit and went to bed early. I woke up this morning feeling fine.

I did some careful practicing this morning: I spent more than an hour working through the piece backward, measure by measure, while looking at the score. This helped me reconnect with playing and reading at the same time, and it also reinforced my knowledge of how the music flows from one measure to the next. Doing this made me feel much more secure about using the music after spending the past few months playing the piece from memory every day. The other seven people playing on the recital all used music, too, so I didn't feel that bad about it.

The piano was a decent 9-foot Steinway grand. It had a very light action (i.e., it was very easy to press the keys down) compared with my Estonia, so that was one reason for some of my clunkers -- where on my piano, I can brush against a key and it will not sound, on this one, everything sounded. It also seemed much louder and brighter than my piano, so I think I sounded harsh when things got loud. If I'd had 15 minutes to practice on the piano and get used to its quirks, I might have played better, but that's how it goes at these things.

Overall, I had fun playing in front of an audience, and I got a lot of compliments afterward. My husband recorded it on his cell phone, but it's not a great recording so I won't post it.

Here's a picture, though:

Memory

2010-05-07T20:43:00.000-04:00

I went out on a limb and offered to play the Brahms on an Adult Music Student Forum recital on Sunday. So I've been practicing it quite a bit this week, mostly very slowly (i.e., setting the metronome to 56 = eighth note and working up to full tempo a few notches at a time). I'd say it's still not 100% secure, so I'm thinking it would be best if I don't play from memory. This feels like a cop-out, but I want to have a pleasant experience here! (I did play it from memory on the recording I posted here, btw, but of course that wasn't in front of an audience on an unfamiliar piano.)

If I do use the music, that means I need to practice it with the music, which means I need to make a copy so I don't have to turn pages. This is why it's better to play piano music from memory -- it gets complicated.

So off to practice some more . . .

"Where do you play?"

2010-04-30T14:47:00.009-04:00

I get this question a lot. I'm never sure how to answer it.

I could say, "Mostly in my basement," which would be the truth. But I'm sure people really are asking where I perform, and I give my usual equivocating answer about freelancing, a couple of amateur groups, and so on.

However, most of what I consider my important music making is done in my basement, with my piano. "If you play the piano and no one listens to you, are you really playing?" I'd like to think I am. I've tried sending my recordings to family and friends, and I post some of them here, but I get little reaction so it's hard to tell if anyone actually listens to them. It's also a little remote, and definitely not the same as giving a live performance.

My husband keeps urging me to find a teacher and really pursue piano study. I feel like I am really pursuing it. I've made so much more progress and learned so much more in the past 5 or 6 years when I've been working on my own than I ever did when taking piano lessons. But I also feel that learning to play an instrument requires three basic things: absorption of knowledge (whether imparted by a teacher, by books, or by observation), practice of the mechanics, and performing. Though it's certainly true that a crucial part of the equation is the amount and quality of individual practice, lessons fulfill both the first and third aspect, and all are about equally important. None means much without the others.

Many adult students don't want to perform because they hate the fear and anxiety that are involved, but I believe it's crucial to do it -- because isn't that the whole point of playing? That is, music is meant to be listened to. You also discover how well you really know something when you play it front of someone else. It's also a form of communication, which I find sorely lacking in my life (even with all the blogging, tweeting, and facebooking going on everywhere).

I would like to play the piano someplace in addition to my basement, but I have not figured out how to go about it. I joined the Adult Music Student Forum a couple of years ago, fully intending to perform as much as I could, but somehow it never works out that I have time to either attend an event or to prepare for it. I've played at only two events in the entire time I've been a member. I've hesitated to arrange for lessons because I don't know how to find someone who's both simpatico (i.e., someone who is both kind and knowledgable -- IOW, a good teacher!) and who is willing to teach an adult student.

And so I continue to waffle and wait. And play the piano in the basement.

Two concerts

2010-04-22T12:20:00.000-04:00

As I've mentioned, I don't attend a lot of concerts, but this past week I went to two.

The first was last Saturday, at An Die Musik in Baltimore. This used to be a "record" store with a nice small performance space on the second floor; the emphasis now seems to be more on the performance space, though the store is still there (selling CDs), along with a reception area in front that also serves as an art gallery. The performers were 10 college students from Penn State who study with Enrico Elisi (here's a link to his student performance web page: Piano Studio Projects), and they played a selection of Chopin's Nocturnes. I found it really enjoyable. There were a few lumps and bumps as well as obvious nerves, but I like hearing performances that are musical but not entirely slick. The piano there is a gorgeous Mason & Hamlin. I generally am not a big fan of this brand, but this one sounds lovely. My favorite player was a young woman named Clare Wang. She had a nice, full sound and played with real assurance.

The second concert was last night, at Strathmore: a recital by the great pianist Mitsuko Uchida. She is a powerhouse in the music world, and deservedly so. She is a real intellect with a strong personality and huge technique. Last night's concert included Mozart K 310 (the A minor sonata) and Schumann's Davidsbundlertanze and Fantasie. The Mozart I'm extremely familiar with, both because I have listened to her recording of it many times and because I've learned it myself. The Schumann pieces are difficult and rather knotty works, full of musical allusions, autobiographical references, and in-jokes. I need to listen to these a lot, I think, to really appreciate them.

But it was a great concert. For each piece, Uchida bounded onto the stage and started playing, not giving the audience any time to rustle their programs (though they did so anyway). That hall is so big that the piano could get lost, but she projected a full sound. The last movement of the Fantasie, in particular, was stunning.

So, lots to think about. So much to learn, so little time.

Tracking practice

2010-04-20T09:31:00.000-04:00

I'm still plunking away at the piano, doing a little bit every day. A few weeks ago, I started two new things: practicing two scales every day (major and parallel minor, including arpeggios) and keeping a practice log. For the log, I jot down what time I practiced, for how long, and what I did. I think it will be interesting to see how it adds up over time. I don't want to make this too elaborate because I don't want the record keeping to affect the process.

So for example, here's my log for last week:

Sunday, 4/11: 3:30-4:00 p.m.
Brahms 118/2 - recorded
Scales - E flat major/E flat minor

Monday, 4/12: 5:15-6:00 p.m.
Scales - D major/ D minor
Bach prelude [WTC I A major] - sections back to front, slowly, faster
Bach fugue - first two sections, HS/HT [hands separate/hands together]

Tuesday, 4/13, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Brahms 118/2 - played through for tone and phrasing
Bach fugue - by section, different speeds, VS [voices separate]/HS/HT
Bach prelude - by section from end to beginning, different speeds, HS/HT
Beethoven Op. 2 No. 3 - 1st movement - spots
Scales - D flat major/C sharp minor

Wednesday, 4/14 [no time recorded]
Scales - C major/C minor
Beethoven - 1st movement, sections slowly
Brahms 118/2

Thursday, 4/15, 10:45-11:45 p.m.
Scales - B major/B minor, quarter note = 50 (16ths, triplets, 32nds)
Brahms 118/3 - slowly, sections, HS/HT
Brahms 118/2 - play through
Bach - play through

Friday, 4/16, 11:30 p.m. - 12:15 a.m.
Scales - B flat major/B flat minor
Bach fugue - last 2 pages, sections, VS/HS/HT, slowly
Brahms 118/1 - play through under tempo
Brahms 118/2 - play through for tone, etc.

Saturday, 4/17
9:30 a.m. - Brahms 118/2 - play through
1:00 p.m. - Brahms 118/1
11:00 p.m.
Scales - A major/A minor
Bits of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin 62/2

I think this will be helpful, though I don't know exactly how. Maybe it will help me see patterns. Sometimes I think not having a set practice time is a big problem, but then other times I think it's good, because I'm not programmed to play the piano only at a certain time every day, with every element in the same order.

If anyone is wondering how I can practice at midnight without disturbing anyone: I have a practice room in the basement with a door on it. Although the piano can be heard throughout the house, it's filtered and muted. My husband says it doesn't bother him. (He can listen to the stereo while I'm practicing, and though I can hear it, it doesn't bother me.)

Brahms Op. 118 No. 2

2010-04-12T13:15:00.003-04:00

I am having a great extended weekend. My workplace decided to close today and tomorrow because downtown DC is going to be a mess for commuters, with the summit on nuclear weapons being held not too far from where I work. And we're having beautiful spring weather on top of it.

So I finally was able to buckle down and record Brahms Op. 118 No. 2.

Brahms Intermezzo Op. 118 No. 2 in A major

I consider this still a work in progress. I'd like to figure out how to make the bass line less relentless without destroying the pulse. I'd like everything to be more legato. I think I'm on the right track with this, though.

I did a little YouTube research last week to hear how real pianists interpret this piece. This was the weirdest one, IMO, clocking in at almost 9 minutes (most performances are 5 to 6 minutes):

One of the commenters (though I usually don't read them -- YouTube comments generally range from worthless to offensive) described the tempo as "rubato on crack." Everything is so stretched that I think you really lose the line. It's also very percussive, oddly enough, with some notes randomly bashed out. Maybe a pianist of this stature plays this way to show that he's thinking outside the box -- way outside!

I think that whenever you learn a piece like this that is played so much, you need to ignore the fact that thousands of other people have played it before you (and will do so after you) and just listen to the piece on its own merits and, ultimately, use your own judgment about it. The end result may not be startling, but it will be true to your taste and to your feelings about what the composer intended.

Anyway, time to go out and enjoy my day of freedom.

Back in the saddle, or this and that

2010-04-10T13:37:00.000-04:00

We had our first orchestra rehearsal this morning for the next concert. I have not been practicing the cello for the past month (just playing once a week or so), but the music for this is very easy, so it wasn't a problem. I think playing the piano keeps the music-related synapses in my brain firing; being able to pick up the cello after not playing for a week and having it not sound bad is due to a combination of intellectual knowledge and muscle memory and something creative. This is not a terribly interesting concert: It includes von Suppé's "Light Cavalry Overture," the first movement of the Grieg piano concerto (with a high school age kid playing the solo), a concerto "attributed to" Haydn for two horns, and two of Grieg's Norwegian dances; a children's choir directed by the conductor's wife will also be singing a few numbers. But it's about my speed at the moment.

I don't know why I'm not feeling interest in the cello right now. Perhaps it's because I have such limited time to pursue my hobbies, and I only have so much energy to expend. Or else it's just a continuation of my love/hate relationship with the whole cello experience. If someone asks me to play something specific, I can generally muster the enthusiasm necessary to prepare and do a good job, but if I'm just floating along, self-directed, it's hard to get motivated.

The piano master class that was supposed to take place next weekend has been canceled yet again; the teacher has had a death in the family and will be out of the country. But having the deadline has been good for me in terms of providing incentive to really learn the Brahms. It's really been kind of a rush, finally memorizing this piece after all these years of stabbing at it ineffectually. I'll try to record and post it here soon.

Finally, some Bach

2010-04-01T21:49:00.003-04:00

Here is a mostly clean performance of the Prelude and Fugue in C minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II:

Bach, WTC II/2

Again, this falls far short of what I imagined -- but at least I tried. My idea originally was to record both pieces in one take, but I could not do it without having at least a minor crash somewhere or other, so I recorded them separately and then joined the two together. Other than deleting some silence before, between, and after, and normalizing, I did no editing.

I started working on these pieces in the middle of November 2009, so it has taken me four and a half months to get them to this point -- just two pages of music. Sigh. One thing I found surprisingly difficult was doing the repeats in the prelude; it was hard to concentrate equally on both iterations.

The mood, I finally came to realize, should be autumnal for the prelude and wintry for the fugue, but I don't feel I convey this very well. Let me know what you think!