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Music

What a Difference Thirty Years Makes

When I went to college, I used to carry a lot of stuff with me.  I took the bus…  and I would lug around a large filing box on wheels full of sheet music, a backpack that had all of my books and stuff in it, another box that had floppies and stuff…  I carried around a lot of stuff. This was thirty years ago. I realized today that probably the only thing I’d need to carry was a tablet, maybe a laptop if I needed to do something particularly intensive,… Read More »What a Difference Thirty Years Makes

Eufo ga suki da mon

Or… “How Sound! Euphonium changed my life”. I was looking back on some old posts on this blog yesterday, and I encountered one with a comment thread (something that never happens anymore, I wonder why… and I don’t at the same time).  In that thread, the commenter (someone named iSmarty) made some mostly accurate commentary about my personality, and not all of it was flattering. (It was delivered in a respectful tone, so I engaged and did not block or anything.  If you engage with me that way, I’m very… Read More »Eufo ga suki da mon

Artists Don’t Think

How’s that for a clickbaity headline?  Well, it’s a general statement, but I think it’s defensible, and I’m going to try to do so, here. I related the story here, a couple of times, how my highly educated, doctorate degree, former piano teacher in college couldn’t understand how the escapement mechanism of a piano utterly precludes the idea that you can wiggle a piano key and get vibrato out of a piano.  It just doesn’t happen (well, there are digital pianos now with special keyboards that make it possible… thirty years… Read More »Artists Don’t Think

Making Sense of the Past

I took my first piano lesson in twenty years.  In that lesson, I relayed to her a story I might have mentioned here.  How there was a masterclass in my college thirty years ago, I went up on stage, and played just a few bars of a Mozart sonata.  She stopped me, said “you have no idea what the music’s about”, and sent me off the stage. Now…  at the time, I thought she was right.  To a degree, I still do.  It took me twenty years or so to… Read More »Making Sense of the Past

Why degrees don’t matter.

When I was a college student, I was a piano performance major, and one of my classes was piano, of course.  I was studying under a guy with a doctorate who styled himself a “doctor”, who had graduated from Juilliard, and was somewhat celebrated in his field.  Of course, he was a professor at a crappy college in a crappy town in the midwest, but still.  The guy was highly educated and considered one of the better pianist out there – I suppose, anyway. I remember the day when I… Read More »Why degrees don’t matter.