Migratory music

Someone around here is eating sheet music.  And it’s not me.

Our piano bench, poor decrepit, rickety thing that it is, has no inner storage, so all the music in current use is kept on the piano.  We have four “boxes” (cardboard magazine holders) up there – one each for Jessica, Andrew, and me, and one for music we share.  Yes, it is rather surprising to me, too, but in some areas we are all at about the same level.  Rather than buying three copies of Czerny and Hannon (heaven forbid!), we share.

Today, it was discovered that one item from my box (“White Christmas” – which I LOVE) and one from the shared box (“Major Scales and Arpeggios, One Octave – significantly less fun) have gone missing.  I have checked diligently on, around, behind, and under the piano, to no avail.  Since there’s really no where else that we keep music, I can’t figure out where they made off to.

Scarier is the fact that I distinctly remember using both those pieces of music, shortly after my lesson in mid-June.  I doubt that Jessica or Andrew used the scales lately, and I’m sure that neither of them has played “White Christmas.”  This means that the finger of guilt points squarely at Guess Who, and if I really have been eating music, all I can say is that the taste was less than memorable.

Playing the piano

I like to play the piano. I am an average probably “intermediate” level player. This means that I can play slow, uncomplicated songs fairly well, and fast difficult songs not well at all.

In a little over 48 hours, I (and two of my children) will be playing in a piano recital. This means there will be lots of people and potential distractions to my already fragile ability to concentrate. The first song I will play is a really rich arrangement of the hymn, “Fairest Lord Jesus.” I memorized it. When I played in recitals as teenager, I don’t remember having a particularly hard time memorizing, but my current brain really strains at it. For my playing level, I was supposed to memorize 15 pieces this year, but I memorized exactly ONE piece: “Fairest Lord Jesus.”

I am scheduled to play my hymn (by memory) fairly early in the program, and I am not too worried about it, because if I mess up, I can hopefully make up something up and just keep going. I can also slow it down a bit if necessary, which will give me time to think what to play.

The other piece is a bigger concern. “Russian Dance” is a duet that Jessica and I will play near the very end of the recital. It is very fast AND the fingering is tricky, AND we are playing with the music (standard practice for all duets), AND I have to whip two pages off and onto the floor without losing my place or missing a beat, AND although we’ve practiced it a million and six times, I am still making mistakes on it. Not only all that; if I mess up, Jessica will keep right on going, and I will have to figure out how to come back in with the right notes at the right time. It’s a fun song, but it’s like a frantic race – six pages of music in about a minute and a half – and it even speeds up at the end!

I really hope “Russian Dance” comes off well and that people enjoy it, but either way, by 8:00 PM Friday, the recital will be over and I can go back to simply ENJOYING playing the piano.

The Russian Dance and salad tongs

The Russian Dance is a song I love to hate. It is a duet Jessica and I are working on, and we are hoping to get it perfected enough to be able to play it in the May 9 recital.

It is a very fast song; six pages long and we probably play it in about a minute and a half. It gets even faster at the end. Jessica plays her (high) part very well. Not only does she hit the correct notes, she heeds the dynamic markings. I, on the other hand, manage to play about 80% of the notes right, but the loud and soft stuff I have not mastered. Today we worked on the beast for about an hour in two half-hour sessions. We can only stand to work on it for 30 minutes at a time. = )

The other issue with the Russian Dance, at least in our house, is that, due to the location of our piano (in the corner of the dining room), I am sitting right against the window. Normally this would not be a problem, but when you play a duet, you always use the music. This is because if one of you gets off, you have to have the measure numbers in front of you to get back on track. Hence, we each have three big (two-page, taped together) pieces of music stacked on the rack. As we play, we can’t turn the pages; instead we throw them on the floor. This is evidently protocol for piano duet performances. We saw students do it in last year’s recital.

At the recital, while we take our bows, I think someone else will be assigned to run over and pick up our “litter,” kind of like those kids that grab the dead tennis balls along the net. However, at home, there are no such litter-grabbers, and each time after we finish, we have to gather up all the music. Jessica throws hers off to the right and it slides onto the dining room floor. No problem, she just leans over and gathers hers. I, however, sling mine over my left shoulder, where it hits the window and slides down the wall in the small space between the bench and the wall. This creates a few inconveniences.

1. I can’t lean to the left to gather it because my head hits the window.

2. I can’t very easily lean forward to gather it because my stomach is too fat to allow that!

3. I can’t lean backwards to gather it because our piano bench has a back on it. Reaching the floor over the high back of the bench would require a backbend and Andrew’s the only one in our family that can do those.

So, EVERY time we finish, it’s a major pain to re-gather my music. And we finish every 90 seconds or so! That’s a lot of re-gathering in a thirty-minute practice session.

Well, today I came up with a brainy idea: salad tongs! When we get ready to practice, we bring the salad tongs to the piano, too. They recline atop the piano while we play (probably laughing at us), and after the song, I grab the salad tongs and use them to snag my scattered music. Works every time.

I’m not Russian, and I can’t dance, but I DO wash the salad tongs before using them to serve salad.

Two superiors in one family!

Jessica and Andrew played (each before a judge) in a piano festival yesterday. They both played very well, and we learned today that they both received SUPERIOR evaluations. Superior is as high as it gets. They have been preparing for this competition for several months and we are all glad that it is finally OVER. Boy, am I ever proud of each of them!

So much to blog and so little time

I know that if I disciplined myself to write a little bit every day, we’d all enjoy this blog more.  Life piles up pretty quickly around here and there are so many interesting and funny things to write about.  I often think, “Now, THAT would make a great blog post,” but I don’t have time to write well about it, so I don’t write anything.  Then several days go by and it’s hard to get back into the moment that so struck me.

So . . . back to the recital. . .

It was held at the Old Stone Church in Branson, which is a lovely, historic venue.  The piano is a wood (not painted) baby grand with significantly firmer action than our home instrument.  There were actually 68 students signed up to play in the recital, so the organizers had broken it in to two recitals, back-to-back.  We three were in the 3:30 PM version.

Nerves were a big deal for me.  I must have an over-active nervous system or something, because between the adrenaline and the sheer fear of doing something I hadn’t done in 32 years, I was literally a nervous wreck.  Andrew seemed calm as a cucumber, and although Jessica may have been nervous, she didn’t let it show.

My teacher seated all of us students in the order we would play, which was very roughly from youngest to oldest.  However, I was seated next to an 11-year-old whose dad is the professor of piano at our local college.  I was terrified that she would play hers perfectly and I would blow it.  While I sat there and tried in vain to calm my nerves, my teacher came over and talked with me.  She wanted to let everyone know that I was an adult student.  Now, I thought that was pretty obvious, but whatever.  Furthermore, she told the head organizer – the emcee type lady – that she wanted me announced as such before the thing started.  Lovely.

Mrs. Emcee welcomed everyone and talked for a long time and then pointed me out to the crowd.  She told them I hadn’t played in a recital in over 30 years and that they should give me gracious applause when I played.  I could feel my ears burning, and I’m sure they and my face were the color of my skirt (very dark red).

The three of us were spaced out through the program, and I played first.  God was good.  I did make several small mistakes, and one big one, but I was able to keep going and I think it came off okay.  Everyone clapped (but of course, they had already been told to do that) and I was so relieved that I almost started crying.  I was trembling as I stumbled back to my seat.  amazing what having all your blood turn to adrenaline will do to you.

Andrew played his piece the best I’ve ever heard it!  He was wearing an outfit that I just happened to find a week or so ago.  I was decluttering and found a pair of black boys’ dress pants and matching jacket that someone had handed down to us years ago.  I don’t even remember who or when, but it was probably three or four years ago.  I just set them aside, because they were too small for Josiah and way too big fro Andrew.  It turns out the pants are a size 10 slim (Andrew’s EXACT size), so I sent the (terribly dusty) jacket to the cleaners.  With a white shirt and tie, he was really dressed to the nines.  So he marched his smart self to the piano and FORGOT TO SCOOT THE BENCH IN.  I sat there thinking, “Oh no.  He’s going to have to reach for the keys, and the part at the end where he uses the pedal – he won’t even be able to reach it!”  But not to worry.  He played like a pro AND reached the pedal somehow.  We all clapped like crazy.

Jessica had the most time to get nervous, because she played nearer to the end with all the high school students.  She was lovely with her long hair, and she played so gracefully.  Jessica puts a lot of emotion into everything she does, and her piano playing is full of feeling.  There was one note that I wondered about, but she just kept on going.  The ending of her piece is very dramatic and she made it shine.

So we all did well and survived.  Mrs. Walker also thought we did well, and if if was good enough for her (the nicest lady you’ve ever met, but also the pickiest, most perfectionistic, most demanding-of-excellence teacher you can imagine), it was good enough.

Whew!

Not much time to blog tonight, but I did want to record for posterity the fact that Jessica, Andrew, and I all played well in the BAMTA recital today.  More details in another post on another day, but I will say that I was SO nervous and I had SO much adrenaline coursing through my cells that I almost cried as I took my bow!

Cold feet

I am going to play in a piano recital on Sunday afternoon.  Although I did play in two organ recitals (no dumb anatomy jokes, please) in college, it’s been about 30 years since I’ve been in a piano recital.

The piece has to be memorized, and I do have it memorized – most days.  I had it very-well-memorized before my lesson yesterday and I proceeded to go completely blank not one, not two, but three times during the piece!  I was SO disgusted with myself.

The next three days will be so full of “Fairest Lord Jesus” that we will all be sick of it.  My teacher has said that the thing to do if I play a wrong chord or go blank is to just calmly keep going at the same tempo, no matter what.  This is easier for her to say than for me to do.  She says it would be easier for me if A) I were younger, and B) I weren’t such a perfectionist.  I’m sure she is right on both points.

I am off to wash the supper prep dishes, make a salad, meet with Scott on some ministry things, and practice, practice, practice!

Pharmacy funded

We picked up the long-awaited prescription this evening at the Walgreens drive-through window.  I think I can breathe easy for about two weeks now.

In other news, I memorized my first piano piece (of this season of my life), “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”  I am doing well at theory, well on ear training, well on hymns, and terribly on memory.  I don’t know why it’s so hard for me.  Jessica can memorize like crazy – piano music, Bible passages, anything.  She has memorized the same piece.  Andrew has, too.  He also transposed the first page of it from C to G, but that is another story.  Anyway, I had a great piano lesson, and I have lots of fun stuff to work on over the next two weeks.

That would be during the two weeks that I am NOT working on getting prescriptions refilled!

Some would say I wasted an afternoon

I don’t think that’s really true. What happened is that after we got home from taking the big kids to AIM, and after we finished lunch at 1:00 PM, Andrew and I made a deal. If he did ALL the rest of the clean up, I would wash the dishes. So he cleared the table, put food away, and took out trash, while I ran a sink of hot soapy water. Then I had to wait for him to “empty the dishwasher” (put away the dry breakfast dishes from the dish drainer), before I could start washing. I hate washing with nowhere to go.

While I waited, I went to the piano and played around a bit. I have really been wanting to learn a jazzy arrangement of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” one of my favorite Christmas songs, but I couldn’t find a free one online, and I am too lazy and/or cheap to go to Springfield and pay for one. Of course, I have the standard four-part version in the hymnal, but I wanted something more harmonic with some chromatics and mood.

As I sat there, it occurred to me that I could write my own arrangement. Now, there’s a thought. I’m sure the last time I wrote any music had to be about 30 years ago. I had printed out some blank sheet music paper the night before, so I took a page and started trying to put down how I imagined such an animal would sound. Andrew took a sheet and started writing music, too!

That was about 1:10 PM, and at 6:00 PM, the Hark arrangement was finished. I think I even like it. However, it’s pretty hard to read, so I’m probably going to need to re-copy it. Ugh. After that, I’ll try to learn to play it well. It has a lot of accidentals, which mess me up a bit, and I’m not at all sure I have the stems going the right way(s).

The most amazing thing was that Andrew stayed right next to me at the piano all afternoon. He was writing is own songs, playing what he had written, and then copying a bunch of short songs he’s already learned to play from his piano book(s) to these sheets of blank staff paper. He didn’t complain at all! Maybe the guy really has some musical talent. I can just see it now: “the musical cooking gymnast of Walnut Shade.”

I wanna take piano lessons, too.

Jessica and Andrew today had their second lessons with Mrs. W., who, I am convinced is a fabulous teacher.  I had a couple of very good piano teachers in my younger years, but Mrs. W. surpasses them all.  She is SO fun and motivating and organized that I am finding myself trying to carve out time to practice piano – something I have not done in over 30 years.  Rusty would be the word.  However, a lot of it is coming back to me, and I am having SO MUCH FUN!  I would really like to do the theory work the kids are doing, too; maybe I just will!