5. Londonderry Air

This song was already familiar to me from a childhood spent in church. Apparently someone had taken this Irish folk tune and set Christian lyrics to it. So this prior knowledge of the melody meant I was always acutely aware of any mistake I made while tackling this piece. The cross-hand playing we did in Nobody Knows made a come back, but for me the most interesting and novel aspect of the song was that the score's given on three staves. J. T. assures us that, rather than making things more complicated, it actually simplifies things. It certainly makes things less cluttered—and since clutter is actually an aspect of notation that bugs me, I definitely find this three-stave anomaly to be helpful. 

All in all, I think this song was good for me. I'm sort of conservative when it comes to flailing my arms all over the keyboard, and this song eases me into that. Apart from repeatedly crossing hands, a couple instances exist in which its necessary to walk arpeggios some distance down the keyboard—not too extreme, but graduated in a sense that makes it the perfect stepping stone for someone of my modest (but growing!) capabilities. 

I am utterly enamoured of the particular chord pictured above—the one the diminuendo sign seems to also find necessary to point out. It's located in one of the final phrases of the song and consists (as is apparent) of two flattened C's, one flattened G, an A, and an E. It was murderous to read when I first encountered it because just about every infernal note has an accidental against it! But I was more than rewarded at the end of that effort. (Turns out to be an inverted B7 chord when all the key-signature dust clears.) And, if I recall correctly, my response to the combination was to find it at first peculiar and unexpected, then almost in the same instant it became interesting, and finally it settled on just being really satisfying. 

4. Toreador Song

Georges Bizet, what can I say? I had him in the second grade book aeons ago when we played Habanera. That was fun—I really loved that syncopated rhythm. And the learning never stops. I have not perfected this bullfighter's anthem by any stretch of the imagination. My current weak spots are a couple small jumps in the 4th and 5th bars. I kinda realise I just need to isolate and work on them though, because they haven't always been my weakest spots. What happened, I think, is that the polishing that I've done to the other areas have caused what I might have previously considered strong areas to appear weak by comparison. This is good, of course. It means progress is being made... but the song, as I currently play it, still sounds pretty horrible.

The good news is that the above double-time, backhanded-F-major-scale-that-starts-on-C is looking and sounding a lot better as of yesterday! Molto crescendo! Also, that trill-esque passage in bar 9 (repeated in bar 21) is looking pretty okay too in the right hand; if I could only get my left hand to keep up, I'd be set. Oh yeah, and how 'bout those acciaccaturas? They're coming along... It's a work in progress though, and I'm learning to be patient and allow myself the time I need to grow.

3. Musette

Musette on the other hand is a perpetual stumbling block for me—so much so that about a decade ago when I first tried this piece, I gave it all up under the presumption that piano just wasn't my thing. (Dare I shake my fist at Bach?) Seriously though, I do like very much the modulation of volume and intensity prescribed in the piece: it's p  f  p  f alternating all throughout, and the contrast really works. Plus, that middle staccato section (below) is pretty sweet.

 

But... for the refrain with which the song begins and ends, I simply can't get both hands to simultaneously jump the measly octave and consistently land the middle fingers  on F# without at least one sliding off or hitting a neighbouring note. It seems to require a level of precision I haven't yet developed to perfectly balance my fingers on such a narrow perch while descending at the rate of however many feet per second is prescribed by the term giocoso. I've managed to do it a few times, of course. I've been practising it for almost 6 weeks, and I hit the right notes maybe 35% of the time (smh).

I could get discouraged—I have done—but I no longer am. Instead, I've determined to make everything into a learning experience. Therefore, my current approach to this piece is to play it as fast as I can. Speed runs. My hope is that after several weeks at this ridiculous pace, when I finally get it back down to giocoso, the jumps will seem like a breeze.

Thank you, Bach :)

Sincerely,

T

2. Melody

Luckily this time around, I found the courage to push past my incompetence in playing the first piece in order to tackle the second piece, (Robert) Schumann's Melody. For an intermediate player like myself (and one returning to the piano in adulthood after a long, loooong absence), I think this piece is a good exercise in developing hand independence.

The left hand notably doesn't just chip in with a harmonising note or chord now and then—once or twice a bar, or something. Rather, it plays continuously throughout, even more so than the right hand, and provides (as J.T. himself put it) "a subdued, but ever-moving background." I actually play this somewhat to my satisfaction, though I'm still working out some of the transitions. The legato "singing tone" required of the RH complements my style of playing, I'd say. And thank God it's not too fast: cantabile and moderato are just my "speed."

1. Nobody Knows De Trouble I've Seen

This song was arranged by John Thompson (J.T.) himself, and it is a pretty easy song, I'd say. I mean, it's in 4/4 time and it's all crotchets and minims, with a few semibreves thrown in here and there... and yet for the life of me, I can't seem to play it right! It just never feels right in my fingers, and my timing's all screwed up. Now, I'm a person who prides myself on my innate sense of timing, so (ahem!) I think I'm just gonna blame a huge chunk of this problem on those arpeggios sprinkled over the piece. (Two consecutive ones are pictured above.) I can never seem to get them perfect the first time. Every time I play them, I have to practice them once or twice before they sound right. What's the answer... finger drills you say?  No argument there. I'm working on those, too...

Beckett?

I have been doing some Beckett. Or Beckett has been doing me. There's really no difference in Einsteinian relativity. Either way, someone's getting cork-screwed right into the ground.

But there are elements of Beckett that are amenable to thought. Let's face it: I'm not that twisted, so as for any other "relatively" normal person out there, I struggle with Beckett.

But I like the score with the frogs in Watt. It (among many other things) has inspired me to combine my interests and rediscover some old ones. One of those is piano. I wonder what piano playing might add to my reading of Beckett. Piano learning, that is, since (like many other "relatively" normal persons, I quit piano somewhere between the second and third John Thompson books.)

Let's say it was the third book. What if I resume playing alongside reading Beckett. (And Stein). And alongside some rudimentary education in mathematics? If I resume all this and chronicle my progress, difficulties, moments of epiphany (however few), would you read it?

Would it matter?

entanglement distilled

I bought a book on quantum mechanics, but I haven't cracked it yet because I also bought a text on classical mechanics that I'm determined to finish first. (I've been forced into autodidacticism by an incapacity to pay tuition for everything I'd like to learn.) On break, I've been cheating by reading The Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder--a good little book whose only "fault" is maybe getting a bit too involved in the narratives that hold the physics together, though that was perhaps her purpose for writing it. So for those interested in the physical insights and less so in the action that filled the interstices, I've embarked on creating a distilled version of the text that'll nevertheless bore you with my musings on the topic.

Entanglement refers to one thing's continued involvement with another with which it has previously been in contact despite its being spatially divided from the object after its initial encounter with it. Two electrons, for instance, that have touched each other and then been ripped asunder and flung far apart--these electrons will continue to transfer information between them as though they were still in physical contact despite being far enough apart that all known methods of communication would (should) occur too slowly to facilitate their interaction. A condition exists for the objects' continued entanglement: that they refrain from touching any other object once the initial connection has been established. In such an event, the connection with the initial partner is broken and a new one established between the objects involved in the latest pairing. Such a condition can usually only be met by very tiny particles.

Much talk and conjecture has been generated about such manifestations of faster-than-light (ftl) communication. The science fiction (fact!) of it all bores me. What I find interesting is the way the particles involved seem to disregard space almost entirely.