Classical Convert

Sightreading

I really want to able to sightread, as I previously bitched about. It seems as though all those piano lessons all that time ago didn’t teach me much that stuck in my head, except for playing Strawberry Fields. That still works pretty good. It has chords and stuff and everything.

The really frustrating thing is not being able to reliably jump between C’s without looking at the keyboard, they’re almost always off by one note, and I’m steadfastly refusing to look down, to try and force my hands into being smart.

The Bartok string quartets are making more sense, they sound like they’re gonna be good when my head processes them through enough. Okay, off to the first hockey match of the new year now. Kick arse!

Quick thought…

I should put up a page which has examples of classical music that don’t sound very classically. That is, contradictions to the usual idea of it as a stale, old, boring type of music. For example: Shosty SQ12 Mvt 2, Prok PS 7 Mvt 3, Adams “Roadrunner”, Schnittke CG 2, etc…

I’m in lab while I type this, supposedly calibrating a laser. I feel so naughty.

Prokofievified

I got me page on Prokofiev up and running now. Two whole composers! It’s almost like an internet legend by this point. I think I need a few more and then I’ll actually submit it to search engines and stuff. Lets see… who do I need? Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Brahms. Maybe Bartok, Schnittke, Mahler (although I don’t really know enough about Mahler…) and really I should put Schubert up as well. With those bad-boys I could actually let people see it.

Last night I though of another thing I’d like a lot… I should make a page with snippets but it should be my favorite parts of certain pieces. I could do one page for each composition I really like. That’d be good.

I think my piano playing is going somewhere, I can sort of play stuff with both hands and not very notes, very slowly. I want to be able to play without looking at my hands very, very badly (well actually I can do it very, very badly already, har har)

Development

The parts-of-sonata-form titles will die soon, don’t worry. I’m just milking ‘em while I can so that I don’t have to be creative enough to come up with an actual, quality, content type title.

Yesterday I’ve been hammering away at the background of my charming old Wordpress template (aka the thingy which makes all this website look like it does) to stick a blog button at the top of the page, and make archive indexes appear on blog pages, but magically not on the other pages. It’s pretty nicely easy, surprisingly. PHP and Wordpress are a joy to work with.

Musically: the last movement of the Tchaikovsky Pathetique got stuck in my head after last night - a sign that it’s growing into me in serious ways, setting roots down deep in there, somewhere. When I wake up in the morning and a melody fades into me as soon as the daylight does, I’m almost certain it’s going to be a favorite. I’m also starting to try and pick up the piano again, but from a classical point of view this time. There’s this book in the music library which is from the twenties and aimed at teaching older people. The language is fantastic, quite literally. Some sample snippets should appear up here when it gets retrieved from the lab.

What I got for xmas

I’m baaack in shiny 14850 after adventures in the Maineland. My poor little Fraser fir is sitting outside on the sort-of compost heap at the back of our parking lot. Every time I pull in and it jumps into my headlights I feel guilty and want to take it back inside.

I got a bunch of CD’s for Christmas. My girlfriend bought me some Wagner overtures, including Tannhauser - which we heard at Severance hall, and which is growing on me more and more. The others are heavy and slow moving and I haven’t got them down yet at all. I also got all six Bartok string quartets, which sound promising, but a little tricky as the genre tends to be (for me at least) I got Prokofiev’s Cinderella and Scythian suites, which I really wanted for the latter because of it’s relation to the second symphony, which I absolutely love. It sounds good, but much less satisfying - a bit too ballet-y. The last thing is Schnittke Concerto Grossos one and five, which haven’t really been listened to preoperly yet at all.

In the meantime I have been listening a lot to Shostakovich symphony No. 1. The first movement is great - I’ve noticed that the second theme is the same one he uses in the last movement of the ninth symphony, that of over-the-top circusy one. It’s also reminiscent of the climax in the first movement of the fifteenth (an interesting parallel… I think that he was deliberately harking back to the first a lot in that). Additionally… there is major theme in the last movement which is based on the Wagner “fate” motif! The same thing which comes up in the last movement of the fifteenth! So in that last symphony, he is echoing the conclusion of the first, while also bringing in the idea of Fate… how all too appropriate.

I have to go back to work tomorrow. Boo-hoo me. I’ll spend a tonne of time deciding what to grow in my garden this year instead, the 2007 Burpee seed catalogue just arrived.