One of several things I do for money (working for a living is so inconvenient!) is transcribing audio from business meetings, conferences, interviews, etc. It’s a telecommuting job with very quick turnaround times, and that suits me pretty well; I get to work in my Cheeto-stained pajamas, but I still have that looming external deadline that I need for motivation.

I tend to keep the local classical music station playing in the background while I work, because when you’re listening to corporate-speak for hours on end, you definitely need the counterweight of some untarnished beauty to keep your soul from shriveling.

For a couple of days last week, one of the station’s hosts went on Chopin Ballade kick. I mentioned in my previous post how hearing two of them in a row sent me stumbling down memory lane.

The next day, that pesky host just had to go and play the Ballade no. 1 in G minor.

There I was, minding my own business, typing away as fast as I could while some slick suit bloviated in my ear, when outside my headphones I heard a sound that grabbed me the way I imagine a child’s cry seizes the attention of a parent. Whatever I was currently doing seemed insignificant; that sound was not just the most important thing – it was the only thing that existed in the world in that moment.

Naturally, I was annoyed. I didn’t have time to go to Music Nerdvana! I had a deadline of ASAP!

But I couldn’t help it; as had happened the previous day, a wave of emotions and memories welled up in me in response to that music. I’m no Oliver Sacks, but I know from experience that when you’ve listen to a piece of music over and over, when you associate it with certain events or situations – sometimes even if you hear it only once but it impacts you deeply – that music gets stamped onto your DNA, and when you hear it again, it’s as if some crazed brain surgeon stuck an electrode into your brain in just the right place so as to bring up everything you associate with that music.

Who needs hallucinogenic drugs, man?

I don’t want to go off on a tangent right now (I know what you’re thinking: “Why change now?” Shut up! ), but I suppose I should write up some of my Ballade-associated stories, by way of explanation. They involve such things as frizzy hair, teenage angst and Gunne Sax dresses — I know the world is breathless to read all about it!

In the meantime… It’s your turn, music nerds: what music stops you in your tracks?

Musical magic sneaks up on me when I least expect it!

I can be rather jaded and cynical when it comes to music; it’s an occupational hazard, and a common side effect of too many years of music grad school. Depending on how ornery a mood I’m in, a mere second or two of a kind of music I don’t care for can get my eyes rolling back in my head. I can diss that tune in 3 notes, Tom.

So I’m always relieved to be reminded that my cynicism is actually just a thin veneer, and it takes but little to reveal the soft, gooey center underneath. Click Mr Readmore for a few examples.

Looking rather elegant in our concert garb!

McDoc and I have joined a choral group, and we had our first performance of the season yesterday. To be honest, I felt rather lukewarm toward the music on the program at the beginning of the rehearsal phase, and though it grew on me as the performance neared, I still wasn’t 100% gung-ho about it going into the weekend. The dress rehearsal helped; being on a real stage with an orchestra and everything, as opposed to in a dry rehearsal hall with a digital piano, always makes a huge difference.

But the magic didn’t really arrive until after 3 p.m. on Sunday. Our esteemed director made the just-right amount of onstage remarks introducing each piece, and his intense energy and enthusiasm lit a fire that spread to the rest of the stage once we started singing.

It’s hard to sing when you start to get verklempt.

This morning, I was doing some work on the computer while the local classical station played in the background. All of a sudden my ears pricked up as some intensely familiar piano music came on: two of Chopin’s Ballades that I played when I was an undergrad. I confess that I can no longer fit in the kind of practice time needed to keep a Chopin Ballade in any kind of adequate shape, but hearing the music instantly transported me back to the time when I was playing it regularly. I spent the summer after my sophomore year practicing my brains out on this piece, and still never got it to the level I hoped for. Hearing it is always bittersweet. This morning, it stopped me in my tracks, bringing up a every regret and misgiving I’ve ever had about this hare-brained endeavor known as being a professional musician. Verklempt once again!

This topic always reminds me of when I saw Donnie Darko in the theatre. I had to be dragged to it by a guy I was dating at the time, but as I sat there and heard that Echo and the Bunnymen song under the opening scene, it was like I’d been kicked in the gut: I was back in high school, wearing black, smoking cloves (didn’t inhale, really!!) and writing bad poetry.

So how, and more importantly why, does music academia suppress these kinds of reactions, and sow the seeds of cynicism in the hearts of its earnest denizens? Well, I won’t take the time to ponder the why at the moment, but here’s a little anecdote relating to the how:

I remember once taking a seminar on music cognition, which is a subdiscipline of music that draws on psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics, among other fields. During one session, there was a discussion regarding the phrase “musical language,” a term which is often used to describe a particular composer’s music; it could be roughly translated to something like “style.” Most of my colleagues objected to the term as being squishy and inexact, because music doesn’t have syntax and fixed meaning the way verbal language does; the meaning we ascribe to it is culturally assigned and developed. Are you bored yet? Me, too.

Around this same time, I was performing with a friend of mine as part of outreach activities for the university’s music library — activities which were conspicuously not associated in any way with the music department itself. We would go around to schools, public libraries, senior centers, etc., and play all kinds of wacky music on toy instruments, I on a little toy piano reminiscent of Schroeder, and my friend on a variety of wind and percussion instruments, both miniature and full-sized (his nose whistle playing was particularly memorable).

Our big money number, though, was an arrangement of Saint-Säens “The Swan” for toy piano and English Horn. (It was even more beautiful than this version.) Quite often when we played it, people in the audience would cry. I was playing this tinkly little piano, sitting on a ridiculous little stool on the floor, but still, people cried.

Music intellectuals can sit around seminar tables and bloviate on what music is and isn’t all they want, but when the rubber meets the road, people respond to music in a way that can be neither faked nor dismissed. And there are certain pieces that get me every time. “Sucker!” I say to myself. And I rejoice.

Victoria Requiem: Introit

Last night, McDoc and I attended the Solemn Requiem Mass for All Souls Day at our local Anglo-Catholic joint, which we visit whenever we need a dose of good, old-fashioned smells ‘n’ bells.

This church is renowned all over town for its excellent music, and that reputation was ably upheld as the choir performed the Missa pro Defunctis cum sex vocibus (Mass for the Dead for six voices), by Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611).

Whenever I attend services like last night’s, I think to myself, “I can understand why some Protestant sects throughout history have objected to the use of elaborate music in worship services.” That may not sound like a compliment, but I intend it as such, honest!

Click Mr. Readmore for the story of the jelly!

McDoc is a big fan of ultra-high church liturgy, and I am, too, but with a couple of qualifiers. A retired Episcopal priest of our acquaintance once told us that he feels liturgy is an art form that can be exquisite when done well. Many churches these days don’t go the whole nine yards with it, for better or worse. Half-baked liturgy can feel a bit silly, like little kids playing dress-up, but the whole high shebang can be positively transporting.

When I attend the kind of Solemn Mass you’ll find at a large Anglo-Catholic parish with a professional choir, where they perform an entire composed mass as part of the liturgy every Sunday (a very rare bird nowadays, I think), I feel like I’m attending the symphony as well as sitting in church. I say ‘the symphony’ intentionally, rather than just ‘a concert,’ because I am most likely to have something akin to a religious experience when I go to a full-on symphony or opera, as opposed to a smaller-scale, less formal classical concert — though there have certainly been exceptions to that. I’m talking about the kind of experience where your sense of clock-time is suspended, your chattering inner monologue (what Buddhists and others call “monkey mind” is silenced), and you are, well, just plain transfixed.

Listening to the exquisite interplay of six-part polyphony does that for me. And that’s where I can get the theological objection to it. Put a person in that state, and you can sneak all kinds of stuff by them. For example, I’m not a big fan of reciting the Nicene Creed, but I don’t mind singing it. Heck, I just like to sing in church — who cares?

I can still remember, back from my undergrad days, a lecture one of my music history professors gave on Victoria’s music. The particular piece he was talking about employed the device of antiphonal singing, where the choir is divided in two sections, and for maximal effect, placed in two locations, then they alternate singing in a call-and-response sort of way. Just imagine being in a huge stone church listening to those voices echoing back and forth! My professor said the composer’s intent was to turn you into “a mass of quivering, believing jelly.” Yup, it’s true!

Personally, I have trouble taking seriously the idea that this is a bad thing, because at the end of the day, I expect people to be grownups and think things through. I do, however, have a sick fascination with reading online articles like this, that warn of the dangers of anything… well… enjoyable. Hey, everybody needs a hobby!

But enough of me and my preoccupations… let’s hear the rest of the music. The first part of Victoria’s Requiem, the Introit, is embedded above. Here are the others (I’ve linked to youtubes instead of embedding, to make this post less browser-eating):

Kyrie
Gradual
Offertory (Domine Jesu Christe)
Sanctus
Agnus Dei
Communion (Lux aeterna)
Responsory (Libera me)

I couldn’t find a youtube of the In Paradisum that closes the mass. The setting by Fauré has taken over and kicked out all the other versions, it seems!

p.s. Here are some Dia de los Muertos cookies:


Click the photo to find out where to get them!

I’m a big fan of ambient knowledge.

In the course of my various pursuits, both musical and non-, I occasionally find it necessary to re-look-up terms and concepts that I learned a long time ago — things I’m sure I know, but which are momentarily beyond my mental grasp, due, I believe, to a combination of The Law of Accelerating Returns as it applies to what I need to know, and the socio-ecogenic ADHD with which I am afflicted.

(And if the sentence above weren’t a description of my real life, I would enter it in The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest!)

Case in point: while writing my previous post, I needed to refresh my memory of how to refer to specific musical pitches using a letter name and a number, such that it’s clear exactly which octave you’re talking about. For example, middle C on the piano is labeled ‘C4′, not to be confused with ‘C3′, which is an octave lower. It’s called scientific pitch notation, evidently — I’d never heard the official name of the system before. But it’s more concise and precise than saying, “the G an octave-and-a-half below middle C,” when you can just say, “G2,” and know that you’ll be understood (by other music nerds, at least ).

The Wikipedia article linked above also contained the following juicy little tidbit:

Scientific pitch notation is a logarithmic frequency scale. Although pitch notation is intended to describe audible sounds, it can also be used to specify the frequency of non-audible phenomena. For example, when the Chandra X-ray Observatory observed pressure fronts propagating away from a black hole, the frequency of the waves was reported in the press as the B♭ 57 octaves below middle C, or B♭−53, corresponding to one oscillation every 10 million years.”

Whoa, talk about your nerdy examples! That’s some far-out cosmic instrument, btw — I thought I had spent some long hours in the practice room, but 10 million years?!?

Now, I know that you can’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia, so I searched around for other sources for that wacky little factoid. I found one that has a title I envy immensely: I Know Why the Black Hole Sings.

Turns out, the universe is one vast Mighty Wurlitzer! Awesome!

Pianists are so misunderstood! :’(

As an itinerant accompanist and sometime starving-pianist-without-my-own-instrument, I’ve played a lot of different pianos. A few have been very nice; most have had various issues while still being adequate; and some can only be charitably described as piano-shaped objects.

My piano encounters last weekend in Pittsburgh fell into that middle category. Now that I think about it, the “various issues” descriptor encompasses a hilariously broad range of surprises and challenges I’ve gotten to deal with over the years. And now I have two more to add to my scrapbook!

Piano lock, shown on a white piano so you can actually see it, but -- white pianos, ew!

The sight of a locked piano always makes my heart sink. Oh, I completely get why they’re necessary, mind you. Overenthusiastic children, drunken louts, greasy fingers, overfull drinks — I understand the dangers. But pianos are made to be played, dammit! It’s such a shame to see them sitting there like large, expensive, useless furniture so much of the time.

I think it should be possible to get certified as a Bona Fide Pianist® by some international piano organization, and the certification should entitle one to a universal master piano lock key. I would vow to use it wisely — honest!

Our nice shiny rehearsal piano

There was even more fun in store for me on Sunday morning, though. Click Mr. Readmore to see the secret toy surprise!

The interfaith service at Netroots Nation was held in a conference room that suffered from a marked lack of anything resembling a piano — as most conference rooms do, I suppose. We had requested a rental piano through the conference organizers, so everything was going to be fine, right? Wellll… I had this nagging voice in the back of my head saying, “Do they know everything they need to know about arranging for a piano? Should I maybe stick my nose in their business to make sure it’s done right?” I wish I had listened to that voice. I will from now on.

This is what arrived at 8 am on Sunday morning:

Look what I found in my Cracker Jacks Box!

It seems that the piano request ball got dropped somewhere along the way, and this was the last-minute solution. And I was grateful for it, truly. Except for one little thing…

The A/V tech who delivered this spectacular ax was a rock-band sound guru and recording studio denizen, straight from Central Casting — and I mean that in the nicest way. He had the shoulder-length layered hair, T-shirt and skinny jeans uniform, and he looked like he’d done some partyin’ in his day. He also knew exactly what he was doing and genuinely cared about setting me up right. He was a keyboard player himself, so he felt my pain.

He told me that the Casio pictured above had been borrowed from his boss’s daughter’s second-cousin’s ex-mother-in-law, or something like that, and had been picked up the night before. I was grateful for what I imagined to be several frantic phone calls and last-minute machinations undertaken for the sake of our modest enterprise.

I was also grateful that the thing came with a music stand — they don’t always, you know. (Yeah, I should have those hymns memorized by now, I know…)

When my techie friend was just about done setting me up, I asked, “so, where’s the sustain pedal?’

Oops.

There was no sustain pedal in the carrying case.

For a brief moment, I wanted to cry. You see, piano without sustain pedal can sound very clunky, no matter how well you play. Fortunately, as an organist I’m used to creating my own legato, but that only carries you so far.

I didn’t want the folks who came to the service to think I was still drunk from the night before. Especially when I had been very careful to have only one drink. One! And I drank it really early! And I followed it with lots of water!

Tech guy did his best to problem-solve. “I could look around in my workshop downstairs and see if I have a proximity switch — then I might be able to build you a pedal… I’d need a soldering iron, though, hmm…”

My hero!

Not because I really expected him to do any of that, of course. Just because it actually crossed his mind.

“Don’t worry about it, I can make this work,” I told him. “It seems like several people have already gone above and beyond to set this up, and I really appreciate that.”

“Well, I appreciate that you appreciate it,” he said. I’m sure he’s been on the unwarranted receiving end of any number of sensitive-musician temper tantrums in his time. I pride myself on the fact that homegirl don’t roll that way.

“It could be worse,” I said. “I could be outside, and it could be raining!” (I didn’t completely make that up — I once took my digital piano to an outdoor gig where it was not exactly raining, but heavily misting. I was less than thrilled. Miraculously, my gear came through just fine.)

The service went beautifully, and no one seemed to doubt my sobriety.

Literally!

I’ve just returned from Netroots Nation, the annual progressive bloggers’ conference. And I don’t know if I need to adjust the settings on my camera, or what, because in most of the pictures I took, people’s skin has a distinctly red or orange cast. One thing I’m sure of, though, is that my lighting designer, hairstylist and make-up artist are all FIRED!

The conference T-shirt I’m wearing here actually looks nice in person — I don’t usually wear orange, but this is an okay shade. Well, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

As you know, my profession is music, not politics, but I attend this event each year for two main reasons:

• To hang out in person with my online friends
• To participate in the music-making for an Interfaith Worship Service, which we hold every year — even though most of the attendees are still sleeping it off after the wild partying of the 3 previous evenings. (Not that we refrain from participating in that, as I chronicled last year!)

As a side benefit, I get to attend panel discussions on the hot topics of the day, and hear speeches by some big names in politics. This year’s headliners included Bill Clinton, Howard Dean and Valerie Jarrett.

I don’t usually brave the crowds to get a handshake or photo with the various VIP’s in attendance, but I did go to Dr. Dean’s book signing, because I thought a signed book would make a nice present for McDoc. It was fun to chat with him a bit; I asked him what advice he’d give McDoc about getting through residency with his sanity intact. His answer in a nutshell: “Don’t hang out with other doctors during your off hours!” (And no, he didn’t scream, not even once. He’s quite personable and, as they say ’round here, wicked smaht. I’d love to have him as a dinner party guest.)

Back story to the picture above: I was able to sweet-talk the hotel staff into unlocking this piano so that I could rehearse for the interfaith service with the Prophecy Street Singers, as I’ve dubbed us. (Photo credit for the non-orange-y pics: snorfbat, who also plays a mean banjo!) The service itself took place in a conference room with a rented keyboard; more about that little adventure later — stay tuned!

I admit it — I fell for it. How ’bout you?

Yes, I believed that this was an amusing stunt pulled off by a bona fide flash mob, rather that a slick, rehearsed Hollywood production created to promote a reality TV show.

I believed because I wanted — nay, needed — to believe. I needed to believe that a group of people of diverse ages, races and sizes could band together and, armed with nothing but the sheer, unadulterated joy of their synchronized dance moves, tweak the collective nose of the L.A.-hipster-overpriced-skinny-jeans-buying beautiful people. Being able to believe that gave me hope — even if just for a moment — that everything was going to be alright.

But I got hip while reading the comments here. My grief was immense, but mercifully short-lived.

Life goes on. After all, it’s always hammertime somewhere in the world — or somewhere in a galaxy far, far away:

Earlier this week, while on a visit to our country estate (a.k.a. my sister-in-law’s house northeast of Cincinnati), McDoc and I stumbled upon an amazing sight!

Sure, it looks like just an ordinary parking space, but look closer:

That’s right, yo! If you’ve ever been in a church parking lot (and who doesn’t hang out in them?), you may have noticed something along these lines. Oh, sure — that’s easy. But if you took a survey of churchgoers, asking them whether they’d rather skip the sermon or the music — well, I think you’d get a good idea of who the real VIP is in this context.

BTW, when we stopped to take this picture, a car was just pulling into it. “Are you the organist?” I asked the driver, fully prepared to make a citizen’s arrest if he had said no. He identified himself as the choir director, so I had to let him off the hook. He kindly backed up so I could have my photo opp, then he told us the back story. It seems a previous organist liked to do her grocery shopping in between the early and late services, and having a reserved space meant she could slip into the church just in time even after the rush of congregants had arrived. Very efficient, I’d say!

Thanks to the choir director of Lebanon United Methodist Church for being so friendly!

McDoc wants to take piano lessons.

He asked me the other night what I thought the general prognosis was for adult piano students – how well do they generally do?

In my experience, the challenge for adult students is to tolerate the discomfort of not immediately being able to play as well as they want to. Typically, they know what the music is supposed to sound like, and they have particular pieces they love and really want to be able to play, but there’s a gap between what they hear in their mind’s ear and what they can do – at least at the beginning. Of course, the same is true of kids to some extent, but I think kids are more accustomed to, and comfortable with, being in learning mode. Adults have a strong expectation of competence from themselves, and can get frustrated easily when it’s lacking.

Having said that, though, I think the prognosis for adult students is very good, IF they’re willing to work at it. You know the saying, “Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing well?” Well, that’s fine when you’re already at the top of the mountain, but I don’t think it’s very encouraging when you’re staring up from the base. I actually prefer to say, “Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing badly,” meaning that it’s okay to be imperfect – the only way to improve, the only way to work out the kinks, is to see where they are.

I also said that how well an adult student does depends on what their goals are starting out. McDoc said, “Yeah, I know you can’t expect to play all 106 Beethoven sonatas right away.” Indeed!

“I think you’re thinking of Haydn,” I said — Haydn having written 106 symphonies.

Beethoven wrote only 32 piano sonatas – though it might as well be 106, considering how difficult they are.

That thought activated my brain’s random memory generator – what, you think that’s weird? C’mon, everybody has one!

At a summer “piano camp” I attended when I was 18, the students were required to memorize the statistics of all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas: opus number, key, and title, if any. Maybe the number of movements, too – I don’t remember exactly (if not, I think that would’ve been a good idea). It was a good mental exercise, I think, though I must confess I haven’t retained more than a vague sense of it in the intervening years. At the time, there were as many anguished cries of “why do we need to know this?” as you might have expected to hear in a math class.

I was at the top of the eligible age range for this particular program, so I was surrounded by hordes of little prodigies, dang them. I had a couple of advantages, though: for one, I had just finished my first year of college (I was something of an overgrown prodigy myself), and had taken the full load of music major courses, so I was excused from the music theory class when the instructor discovered on the first day that I could have taught it myself. (In fact, if he had been smart, he would have paid me a cut rate to take his place while he went out for long lunches!) Also, since I was legally an adult, I was allowed to wander off unchaperoned from the college campus where the camp was held. I didn’t have a car, but I had a map and motivation beyond all logic, so I put a water bottle in my backpack and trekked through the streets of Orange County, California in the summer heat in search of a drug store. An 18-year-old woman who’s determined to buy makeup is a force to be reckoned with.

Happy June, Music Nerds everywhere!

I have been in a dark place lately. Way too much of this:

…and not nearly enough of this:

That being the case, I have been hesitant to inflict myself on the world.

What is the cause of this sad state of affairs, you ask? Well, I have been afflicted with the paralysis of perfectionism. It’s an insidious condition that stops you in your tracks, so afraid that anything you do will be inadequate, you just don’t do anything at all.

If ever you’re able to look at it in the light of day with a rational eye, you see very easily that it’s complete and total horse hockey. But when it’s the middle of the night and those random shadows on the wall seem undeniably real, you sorta lose perspective.

And after awhile, up crop all the nagging questions that typically accompany generalized existential angst:

Why am I here?

Why do I write?

What’s the point of it all?

(Side note: I noticed from looking at my stats that readership is higher during the weekdays than on the weekends. That led me to conclude that people were reading my blog when they ought to be working instead. Am I responsible for distracting people? Leading them down a garden path, and contributing to a decrease in productivity, hurting the economy — and thereby hurting America? )

You know what, though? If you do this tortured-artist song and dance long enough, it becomes tiresome, finally. I know I’m tired of it. So I’ve made a decision.

The internal voice that reflexively says “not so fast, young lady” – the inner critic that finds a way to damn everything before it even exists – I hereby banish it.

Enough already. Whether I really did something so outrageous on some long-ago occasion that I needed to install such a filter in my brain, or whether it’s just part of the birthright – more like a birth defect – of my cultural milieu, I now declare: point taken. Lesson learned. We can move on now.

I’ve decided to simply give myself permission. Carte blanche. To write about whatever I want. Music will always be my first love, but music won’t be jealous if I love other topics as well. (The first commenter who asks, “Why are you writing about [some non-musical topic] on a blog called ‘Miss Music Nerd’” will get some kind of a prize. Maybe something like this.) Does that mean I risk going overboard occasionally? Sure. Is this whole thing a bit of an over-correction? Absolutely. But it’s a risk I’m willing to take, finally. No one’s physical safety is at stake, after all; if I screw up, it might be embarrassing, but no animals will be harmed.