No shortage of offline things to do
During the last round of freezing rain and wind a neighbour’s tree came down and took out our internet. Because it happened late on a Thursday, Cogeco couldn’t send someone out until the following Monday. Now, there was a time when an internet outage of that extent would have thoroughly destabilized me, but when they told me it’d be four days before I’d have my internet back, I thought: I can manage this. Partly because we have iPhones and more data on our plans than we can realistically use, so we’re not actually cut off; partly because I’m trying to orient my life to be a lot less online. While increased reliance on streaming services meant that what we could watch or listen to was kind of limited, we had no shortage of offline things to do.
Like, um, practice the piano. Because the Renfrew Rotary Music Festival is not just fast approaching, it’s on right now—and holy shit, I’m playing tomorrow.
Per the final program (PDF), I’m (still) scheduled to be at the piano at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday the 24th of April at Trinity St. Andrews United Church in Renfrew, Ontario. (I think there might be a small cover charge, and parking near the church can be a bit scarce, in case you’re thinking of turning up. Also, I’m the last performer of the day, and things can run long, but that doesn’t mean you or I can get away with being tardy.) Here’s what I’m playing—with some links to performances on YouTube by real pianists so you know what they’re supposed to sound like.
- J. S. Bach, Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 847. From Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, and the only one at RCM level 9: not the easiest prelude, but the easiest fugue (for fugue values of easy, viz., not very). Bit of a bucket list item—in a, wow, I’m actually playing something from the WTC way—except that there’s 47 more of them to go. The challenge: Not playing so fast that I leave no room to speed up for the prelude’s presto section without getting completely finger-tangled. Sample performances: Vikingur Ólafsson’s version is quick and extremely clear but heterodox, with held notes and pedalling, for the latter of which András Schiff probably won’t kill him. Schiff’s own performance is a bit more ponderous but mainstream. Angela Hewitt recorded both prelude and fugue from her home piano during the lockdown.
- Franz Schubert, Impromptu in A-flat Major, op. 142, no. 2, D. 935. My piano teacher is a serious Schubert fan, and handed me her copy of Schubert’s impromptus to explore early on in our collaboration. I immediately gravitated to this one, which happily turned out to be listed in the RCM level 9 repertoire. Deceptively simple and devastatingly sweet. The challenge: Not speeding up during the trio section, remembering the accents and other dynamic markings. Sample performances: Alfred Brendel and Marc-André Hamelin.
- Alexander Scriabin, Prelude for the Left Hand, op. 9, no. 1. It’s not just because I’m left-handed that I have an affinity for the left-handed repertoire. It’s a disability repertoire. Apart from some exercise pieces, most of it was composed in response to a pianist’s temporary or permanent injury (Brahms transcribed Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor for Clara Schumann after she injured her right hand; Paul Wittgenstein famously commissioned a number of piano concertos for the left hand after losing his right hand in World War I; less famously, Leos Janáček composed an ensemble piece, Defiance, after a similar suggestion from Otakar Hollmann). What sets apart Scriabin’s prelude, and its accompanying nocturne, is that the injured pianist for whom Scriabin composed was Scriabin himself. He’d messed up his right hand while still at conservatory after overdoing it practicing Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan. He eventually recovered. But at the time? “Insurmountable according to the doctors. This was my first real defeat in life,” he wrote. When I play this piece I try to put myself into that headspace (which as some of you may remember, was also my headspace circa December 1997). The challenge: Keeping things pianissimo on the second page. Sample performances: Alessio Bax, Yuja Wang.
- Felix Mendelssohn, Song Without Words, op. 19, no. 1. I slated the Scriabin for the concert group category, which meant I needed a second, contrasting piece. And it needed to be something tonally appropriate. If I was going to evoke wrenching sadness from the Scriabin, I needed something akin to hope and relief for its companion piece: if the Scriabin is about injury and disability, I wanted something that evinced recovery. So, a major key, and just to make it harder, something in a key that would modulate from the Scriabin prelude’s C-sharp minor, and something at my skill level. And also a pony. This one didn’t just fit the bill, it grabbed me by the scruff. It’s simply gorgeous. The challenge: Voicing the treble melody; also it’s the last one learned and memorized, so, you know, remembering it all. Sample performances: Yunchan Lim, Leon McCawley.
This is, believe it or not, my first solo performance at a music festival: I accompanied voice students last year (and will be doing so again on Friday morning), and I might have participated in them as part of a school choir or band decades ago. Can’t remember. I haven’t played solo piano for an audience since elementary school assemblies, and since then I’ve managed to accumulate non-homeopathic amounts of stage fright.
Stage fright, you ask? I’ve done live media hits on TV news networks and radio stations, I’ve spoken off-the-cuff in front of hundreds of people—how on earth can I have stage fright? Turns out, yes, I can, if the stakes are high enough, and especially when it comes to music. Even accompanying the kids last year I found my hands shaking at times—I was quite caught off guard. I can control for it in public speaking: I can read from a prepared speech if I need to, and if I need to er and um and correct myself even on the BBC World Service, nobody so much as notices, much less cares.
But music is something else: if you’re a soloist you’re expected to have it memorized, and even if you’re reading from a score because you’re just an accompanist, you’re supposed to (at least try to) be perfect. Flubs happen all the time, and most of the time the audience doesn’t notice them, but a flawless performance is at the very least something to aspire to, if not necessarily expected at this level. It doesn’t help that music is also profoundly important and deeply personal to me. When I’m at the piano, I’m exposing my soul in a way I don’t when I speak or write.
Stage fright is a known known in classical music. The use of beta blockers to manage it is rampant among orchestra musicians. There are plenty of books on the subject (see, for example, Sara Solovich’s Playing Scared, which I should lay hands on at some point). Seymour: An Introduction, Ethan Hawke’s 2014 documentary on the adorable Seymour Bernstein, a pianist who walked away from performing, is putatively about stage fright, but that’s not much more than the point of departure (Bernstein is more interesting sui generis, as the documentary discovers).
All of which is to say that the main reason I’m putting myself up on that stage tomorrow is to see if stage fright is something I can manage with sufficient preparation. If things come apart up there, despite my having memorized the pieces—well, at least that’s some useful data going forward.
#
I expect a little more exogamy from our political leaders
One knock on Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre is that he hasn’t worked a job outside conservative politics (he was 25 when first elected). But reading that he met his wife that way, and also previously dated conservative operative Jenni Byrne, I thought: what, he didn’t date outside conservative politics either?
That set off an alarm bell. I’ve encountered plenty of subcultures that were ostensibly focused on a single shared interest that expanded what they did together to include unrelated activities. Let’s take snake keepers as a random example. Imagine snake keepers going bowling or curling with one another—as in, they could only go bowling or curling with other snake keepers, rather than sign up with general bowling or curling leagues/teams, which meant that all their social time was spent with similar people.
Now imagine that, but expanded to your work life and your family life, and you appear to have the modern Conservative party, whose elected politicians are apparently not even allowed to associate or go on delegations with MPs from other parties, I guess because the woke mind virus is contagious. But if your ideology determines not only your politics, but your work, family, romantic and social life, you’re not in a political movement—you’re in a cult.
If you live along axes of marginalization that make who you go bowling with a matter of personal safety, that’s one thing. Fair. But you’re not aspiring to run the country, for which getting to know and understand people outside your bubble—in fact, getting to know and understand as many different kinds of people as possible—ought to be a prerequisite.
#
#links
- Brian Johnson on the history and persistence of those little 88×31 buttons that were the hallmark of the early web.
- “‘Let’s not blame science fiction for this,’ he said. ‘It’s not science fiction that’s causing this kind of sociopathy.’” In an interview with TechCrunch, China Miéville has some thoughts about the Silicon Valley edgelords who claim science fiction works as the inspiration for their destructive nonsense. See also Sam Freedman in the Grauniad.
- The Hubble Space Telescope has measured the length of Uranus’s day with even greater precision: “Uranus completes a full rotation in 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 52 seconds—28 seconds longer than the estimate obtained by NASA’s Voyager 2 during its 1986 flyby.”
- The sudden rise and ebb of Quebec-made gin. “Sometimes, however, a trend just stops trending. The peak demand was never going to be sustainable. Bériault notes that, at one point, Quebec had around 450 different local gins. ‘It doesn’t make sense for a population of a little over 9 million people.’”
- The Verge on the Vintage Computer Festival East, held earlier this month in New Jersey, an event to provide hands-on experience with some very old but still operational hardware.
- Rob Shearer’s Mastodon Exit Interview is a systematic cataloguing of the ways he thinks Mastodon does not work, from federation to migration to moderation.
- Matthew Aucoin defines classical music as music that is written down first—i.e., composed first, then performed and recorded, rather than performed first, then transcribed.
- Alligator attacks are mostly humans’ fault. “Researchers found that in 96% of recorded incidents, some form of human inattention or risk-taking preceded the attack. The findings show how alligator bites are not random; they’re preventable.”
- Tyler Austin Harper worries that we’re being priced out of our hobbies.
- Paul Wells on what next Monday’s election won’t fix. “I think Canada’s politics have sunk into deep ruts. I think we need fresh and serious thinking about what kind of country we want to be.”