Shredder-on-Piano Violence
Pianists of a timid disposition should avert their eyes now:
Well, it did sound pretty horrible.
Taxation
Taxes, taxes, my room is covered in bloody taxes. At least they’re all done, if slightly incorrectly. The online tax software I was using wasn’t quite advanced enough to correctly work out when my estimated payments were and… this isn’t very interesting is it? The short of it is that I ended up paying an underpayment penalty unnecessarily, but it would have cost more than the amount of that penalty — plus another three hours of my life — to switch to another piece of software. Eugh.
Beethoven also had to deal with all this crap, as detailed in these pages over at the Beethoven Haus, which sounds like a nice place to visit. Having had my fill of finance for the weekend I am far more interested in their store. I could do with some Beethoven brandy, for a start. I also kind of like the creepiness of the death mask bust.
Aside form the consumerism, there are all kinds of museum-cool type things on this site: pages from his notebooks, portraits, caricatures, instruments. Start at the digital archives section and browse away.
Initial Steps In Understanding A New Piece
One of the things I always try and emphasize to people unfamiliar with classical music is the long, long process of getting to grips with a piece. I don’t know if everybody experiences this, but for me it takes significantly longer to “understand” even just one movement of a symphony, compared to music of other genres. I really have to slog away at a piece, listening many times over, before it starts to make sense. I think it’s a combination both of the extended length, and of the subtleties and complexities of the form.
While introspecting into the appreciation of my latest classical insinuations, I’ve been trying to identify some of the stages of understanding in the acclimatization process.
One of the most important milestones is becoming familiar enough with the piece that you can routinely identify where you are in the music. That is, having a vague awareness of all the little musical episodes, and approximately which order they come in. Initially when listening through a piece there are particularly strong melodies or musical textures which I can latch on to without really knowing anything about the piece. After a few listens I start to get a feeling for the musical structures around these catches, and anticipate them. For me this is stage one of understanding a piece. It’s somewhere around this point when I’ll be able to whistle a few snippets of the melodies.
However, at this stage most of the rest of the music sounds sort of blurred. I hear the music as a string of the standout sections mentioned above, connected together by material which is confused and not very interesting. The next stage of understanding is when melodies start magically popping out of these mires, when instead of a jumble of instruments playing pleasant but pointless interconnecting bridges, these sections start to crystallize into understandable forms. Each instrument seems to pull apart from the others, and melodic strands are illuminated like dewed gossamer. I think that’s stage two.
The rest of my stages will have to wait for some more introspection.
Naked Ballerina? [SFW]
Via Presscue.
Update (October 2009): Presscue no longer exists, and it turns out the original photographer is Carol Lynn Fraser, who kindly gave me permission to continuing use the photograph, but owns all rights to her artistic work.
Saint-Saëns and Cell Biology, and How I Got Into Classical
One of the most exciting things about this updated version of Wordpress is that you can bring up a fancy little character-map type deal, so as to easily insert all those wild decorated characters. Like that one up there, perched on the title line. Seriously, inserting that character was basically the most exciting thing that has happened to me in the last hour and a half, due to studying. Oh studying. How you tease me with your frequent absence, but inevitable recovery.
To make matters more bearable I completely pumped up the key, the gate, the music which got me into the world of classical in the first place. Which, you may not too cunningly have guessed, is by Mister Camille Saint-Saëns. Necessary umlaut guy.
The piece in question is his piano concerto number two. It was this piece, which, just beyond four years ago during the epic emotional crisis and mess of my first year in graduate school, grabbed on to me. That was the entry, the accidental engagement. It was innocently serving as background music due to being one of the few classical CDs I owned (all of which were purchased as one of those 3 for fifteen quid deals) and was on repeat to save me from getting up from my work/self-pity. All of a sudden — and it truly was suddenly — a melody existed which through all the previous listens had not.
It was the one after the intro in the first movement. From there I worked through that movement, listening over and over again. Then to the excitable, driving third. The second sounded way too tinkly and pretty back then, although I like it loads now. Inspired, I bought a set of all five of the piano concertos.
That’s how it all began for me. And that’s the end of story-time for tonight.
