Classical Orchestra performing Aphix Twin

Gosh, there’s a lot of great musical performance available on YouTube, isn’t there?

If you’d told me there was a classical orchestra performing the hyper-kinetic electronic work of Aphix Twin, I would have said it couldn’t be done and probably shouldn’t.

But hot damn, if this isn’t the most fun I’ve ever had watching an orchestra.

There’s several great performances of this orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, posted to Youtube. I know, because I just lost a few pleasant hours to them.

If you feel compelled to explore more Aphix Twin, start with Drukqs. There’s some great fusion of electronic and traditional sounds in that album, and it’s the work I keep going back to as I try to explore his other stuff and discover it might just be a little too hardcore for these innocent ears.

Musical Find of the Week: Paul Hindemith

There is so much good music out there that I don’t even know about yet. The last century was a particularly rich one for music, with a lot of experimentation going on. Markets don’t have the room for this sort of innovation, anymore.

This music, it feels like being a child again, and looking into unfamiliar rooms. Going through a long-forgotten attic. Encountering ancient family artefacts for the first time. Turning them over, rubbing off the dust, puzzling at the function. What is this old tool? Who did this belong to? A grandfather, great-aunt, distant family friend? What images does this antique camera contain? To what would you attach these brittle rubber hoses? It might have been a horror or a salve. It might be trying to forget its stories.

It’s been a long while since I’ve had the patience to just listen to music for it's own sake. Hindemith has broken me out of that funk. There are new harmonies that are unsettling as they are brilliant. Meditative spaces.

Use good headphones.

Valentina Lisitsa plays Rachmaninoff Sonata No 1

The fluidity, the strength, the precision of those hands.

It's as if a tornado passed through a field and erected a cathedral.



And to think that this morning I never even heard of this pianist. There are days that I absolutely love the Internet.

Balmorhea: Traditional Instruments making Ambient Music

Balmorhea is another gem of a band I stumbled upon thanks to that massive torrent of music made available by the South by Southwest folks. I like playing minimalist/ambient music when I’m working on other things. Unique harmonies can set a mood and simple melodies can enhance it; without too much to distract and especially without words, music can be one of the best mind-altering cognitive enhancers there is.

Often I fill this need with electronic music, provided the beat isn’t too heavy and the “instrumentation” too “experimental”. Orchestral stuff can work too—some of Phillip Glass’s less obtrusive stuff is brilliant. And of course keyboards. Glenn Gould playing Bach is about the most exquisite background music there is. But until now I’ve never found this same satisfaction from plucked and bowed strings. But this combination of sparely plucked banjos over haunting strings is brilliant.

Agent Ribbons Reporting Typewriter Sighting

Many thanks to Eclectic Ephemera for the Antique Pop post with the links to some new renditions of vintage music. As a result, The Wife and I have found some new things to enjoy. (And that’s what this whole internet-community-typosphere-vintage-gabfest is all about, isn’t it?)

Here’s another music video, with a typewriter sighting! Agent Ribbons has a great 1960s vintage glam-rock feel to it, and I love the style, energy, and sheer joy of these girls. Plus, did I mention there are typewriters in it (briefly, at 3:10).

I wonder what town this is?

I stumbled across Agent Ribbons in the massive torrent of music made available by the South by Southwest folks, and the sound struck me as intriguing enough to follow it up with a visit to Youtube.

There’s over 45 GB of freely available music behind that link, by the way. Turns out lots of artists want you to share their material via BitTorrent. I can’t say I like every one of the songs I’ve heard, but with 9000 songs to choose from I’m bound to find a decent measure of bliss.

Musicians wanting to be heard, who would have thought of that? Turns out file-sharing isn’t just for pirates and scofflaws after all.

Why not fire up the BitTorrent client of your choice and join me?

Spectrograms

My new favorite (and free) music player, Foobar, has a spectrogram visualization tool built in by default. I haven’t really looked at spectrograms before, but I have looked at lots of sheet music, so the idea of tying the heard to the seen is nothing new to me.

I soon found myself entranced by trying to make sense of this sort of visualization. It plots time on the x-axis and frequency (on a logarithmic scale, which is how we hear music) on the y axis. The brightness of a marking represents the intensity of a frequency. Keep in mind that most instruments play with several harmonics at once—the different combinations of harmonics are what make a guitar sound different from a flute or a piano.

When you consider that most music has lots of voices going at it at the same time, each with their uniquely overlaid harmonics, it’s obvious that the spectrograph of a piece of music is going to be damned complex.

After you watch it for a time, though, it feels eerie how you can begin to “see” the sounds. You can tell a raspy voice from a pure one, and trace melodies across the landscape like ghosts in a storm.

As bewildering as it is for the eyes, though, our ears and brains take it in effortlessly, all the time, and it makes us feel great. This is perhaps even more fascinating: that there’s a mechanism to translate fluctuations in air-pressure into what we experience as music.

Here’s a part of Bach’s Art Of Fugue which is played on the organ. Look at those isolated tones with their perfect, evenly repeating harmonics.

Here’s Glenn Gould playing the C Minor Prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier Book I. Three things stand out for me: the geometrically steady rhythm, the cross spectrum regularity of the piece, and the subtly dramatic affect created by the slight sustaining of those bass notes against all this activity.

Here’s Gould is playing the C Minor Fugue. Again, the rhythmic regularity is impressive, and in this case it sets the stage for the playful interweaving of melodic lines.

And here’s some ambient electronica, the sort of stuff you might put on to meditate to, or to help you fall asleep. There’s a slow melodic rise and fall here. It’s so gradual it’s felt more than heard. This is music in slow-motion, and it draws a scene like a windblown Martian landscape.

 

Who would have thought that at this age I would find a new way to listen to music? There are times when I absolutely adore technology.

Versitility In The Artist: Emilie Autumn

I love it when an artist's spark shows through in a variety of work. It's so rare, mostly because early success at something creates an economic demand that they produce more and more of that thing. The book, the music, the art is a product, and can you blame the artist for producing more and more of what puts food on the table?

This is why novelists write under different pen names. Once their own name is a brand, they can't sell anything different until they change it.

But once in a while someone comes along who doesn't give a damn, she just makes one thing after another.

What if I could tell you that the same artist who could play the violin like this...



could also play it like this:



What if I told you she could sing and put on a hell of a show...



complete with aerial dancing...


and that she could take it completely over the f///ing top like this.



Also she plays the keyboards and writes books and poetry, and records spoken-word and music albums. She owns her own music label and she's strong enough to stand up to the producers who want to tamper with her work.

There's some music for the end of the world, right here. Steampunk meeting cabaret meeting Victoriana meeting Baroque. There's so many influences in here that her work just becomes its own thing. Good artists borrow; great artists steal. But this is more than remixing. This is taking all of the ingredients of shared culture and baking it into something delicious.

Part of the brilliance, I think, is that I don't necessarily like all of this music. I'm not a metal fan, and I've never felt compelled to go to a cabaret show.  But the more I listen the more I find myself liking it, despite my prejudice. The fact that fans of one of her albums might not care for the next one hasn't stopped her from making them all anyway.

I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.

Emilie Autumn's own website.

& her Wikipedia page.

Nick Drake & Pure Versus Processed Music

There are times when I actually like listening to highly processed, electronic, atmospheric music. Particularly when I'm writing, or doing something where I just want some background noise to set a mood.

There's something to be said for the moody and ethereal -



As well as the optimistic and ebullient -



But I can only take so much of this unbridled electronic energy. Too much of it and I start to feel drained, hollow, and unfulfilled. I feel like Bilbo Baggins after he held on to the ring too long: "thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped across too much bread."

And I have to return to voice, vision, and talent.

Nothing restoreth the soul like some Nick Drake. A boy who died at 26, two years before I was born, leaving behind too few perfect gems of lyric and melody. Sparely composed and simply performed, the tracks are just long enough to share their message and then get out of the way, doing their quiet work on your memory.



I've taken to playing him in the office in the mornings, when I'm doing paperwork. No one on the staff has complained. Before a particularly stressful day of customer service and corporate shenanigans, he reminds me that there can be a meaning to song, and it doesn't have to be pure product.



And that the day's struggles are temporary, even though the truest poetry endures.

Piano Guys' Unconventional Use of Instruments

Thanks to the Flip the Media blog for pointing me to these guys.



There's something especially satisfying in using an instrument in a way other than it's intended, so long as it comes out sounding like more than a gimmick. I think these guys are the real deal.

It reminded me of this interpretation of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" played on guitar. All the different sounds Jorge Caballero gets out of one guitar are difficult to believe. That piece was written for an orchestra, after all.



This performance by Kazuhito Yamashita from the 80s is just as impressive. (I wonder if we could get him in front of an HD digital camera to do it again?)



Good grief, I'm about to lose a whole afternoon to watching classical music performances again, aren't I?

High Tech Hallucinations

When I think about it, it seems like a lot of energy was expended in the second half of the last century trying to get high in one way or another.

Drugs, literature, art, music. Choose your poison. A lot of it came down to the pursuit of that wow man, far out, sort of experience. Jimi Hendrix playing an electric guitar with his feet, Jackson Pollock splattering canvases with house paint, Philip Glass droning on with his repetitive rhythms and harmonies, Phil K Dick blurring the boundaries between the real and the hallucinatory, movie directors translating those visions to the screen, quantum physicists seeking the cracks in the fundamental laws of nature.

There was this sense that we were constantly on the verge of something fantastic and abstract and mind expanding. Much of the time, this something didn’t seem like it could come from outside, in the world. It was just waiting to burst out from within us, if we could just find a way to give it permission. If only we could nurture our inner child and rub the right crystals and find the reiki practitioner with a light enough touch.

Well, the quest goes on, I suppose. Because, well, let’s face it: if we find these moments at all, they never last. That’s why the addict always needs another hit, and why yesterday’s paintings don’t evoke the same response the second or third time we’ve seen them.

Fortunately, there is this: the portals into these sorts of experiences seem to be everywhere now, and most of them are a good deal safer than the pills and needles so many resorted to in the past.

I just lost a couple of hours messing around with a few free gizmos on my PC which I hadn’t even been aware I had.  I’ve long used Winamp, for example—it’s a far superior media player to the toxic ITunes disaster that Apple foists on the world—and I’ve used it to rip, play, and organize my audio files for years. I just hadn’t bothered to click on the little “Visualizations” button before. Which, in a moment of idleness, I did today.

At which point these images you’ve seen here started cascading across my monitor, in full high definition, at a rather dizzying 30 frames per second, and pulsing and dancing in sync with the music. Screen edges crumpled, vortices spun, fireworks launched, fractal ferns swayed, clouds and stars fought for dominion of the moon.

It helped that I was listening to Ludovico Einaudi, who tends to be fairly meditative and soothing. But the program transformed my easy listening background music into something utterly captivating.

And I thought, hell, any one of these frames puts to shame anything Jackson Pollock ever threw against a canvas. The Evernote screen capture utility did a nice job catching a few of the stills, since I had the odd compulsion to grab some of this stuff that was being generated on the fly. But after a few minutes of doing that I just sat back and listened to the entire two-disc album.

Far out, man. The things I’ve seen. And it’s nice that I didn’t have to drop acid or otherwise put my neurochemistry at risk to do it. William Burroughs should have been so lucky.

The Quiet of the Future

[Note: the grandchildren referenced in the following story are unlikely to be mine. Perhaps they will be yours?]

Grandchildren, clamoring for a story? How strange. I would that we had clamored for the same. The advice we got from our grandparents might have been better than anything I can provide for you.

Still. I think I'll begin with the roaring in the ears. With the sound that was everywhere, inescapable, whether you had asked to hear it, or not.

Just another one of those things which are kind of amazing to think about, now.

Sure, many of us chose to listen to music. Or noise. Video games, movies. We had speakers in our homes, our cars, our businesses, and our pockets. If what we were listening to was not what our neighbors or roommates wanted to listen to, we had headphones--personalized speakers that we strapped on to the sides of our heads. And then later on, these were not loud enough for us. If we turned them up loud enough to satisfy, the people around us could still hear.

We were always trying to get away from each other, those days.

So we made the speakers smaller and stuffed them up into our ear-canals, so we could have it roaring loud and personal, just for ourselves. And these little ear-canal speakers were cheap. We could buy a pair for around ten dollars, which most of us could earn in an hour or two, working even the most menial of jobs.

But putting the music aside for a second, consider what the rest of the world sounded like, in America, at the turn of the century. We had a little house that had stood for 300 years. It was built along a main highway, in its day. Its timbers were hewn and raised to the sound of foot-falls and horse-hooves. But when it finally crumbled it was to the whisper of electric cars, the constant rumble of gas burning engines, the throaty growl of diesel trucks. It was a loud place to live. When the traffic backed up out front, it was like a pride of lions purring, all at once. When the traffic flowed smoothly, conversations would have to stop and resume to the whim of the vehicles flying past, vehicles that moved more miles in an hour than you or I could ride in a single day.

Most of us didn't live so close to major roads, of course. But the highways were everywhere. The most remote and isolated of us would still hear them, like a constant, distant sigh. I remember hiking in the mountains, once, and descending after a long day's walk into the crater occupied by an alpine lake. I think the hours we sat there were the only hours in my life where I could not hear any traffic. A single jet passed overhead, trailing it's contrail, too high up even to be heard.

That kind of silence was a treat, a symphony. I remember thinking, a person could become a connoisseur of such silences. The silence of the mountains, the silence of the desert, the silence of the forest. That kind of silence was precious and rare.

What a shock it was, then, when the oil ran out and the engines stopped running, and today’s silence descended, gradually, everywhere. What a surprise to hear it every day, and not even have to travel for it. But it was a cruel consolation, given the hardships we faced.

I say gradual, of course, because the gunfire went on for a bit after the cars stopped. But that was sporadic and eventually it, too, would cease—to make room for quieter violence.

How strange this must sound to you, with your carefully preserved, hand-cranked record players, as you dance at the hall to music my grandparents danced to. Anything as loud as a car or a plane is an alarm, a surprise. And music, music is a treat. There are no digital recordings of the best singers to ever sing—or rather there are, but we haven’t the machines to play them. Pianos only as good as the people who play them, guitars only sing at the hands of their players.

For the most part, that’s enough. I understand our county has a symphony again. Over eighty musicians, playing at once, well practiced and in tune. If you can afford to hear them, do. I doubt you will ever forget it.

And to think, for a hundred years there, we could listen to that sound any time we wanted to. We could turn it up and play it again and again, until we went deaf from it. Even now, I wish that I had listened to more.

But you will forgive an old man his regrets, I hope.

Evgeny Kissin Concert and Audience Size

Stumbled upon a wonderful documentary about Evgeny Kissin, one of the world's greatest living pianists.  There's a short interview at the beginning, but most of the film is of his historic performance at the Royal Albert Hall, including several encores presented in full.  Here's the first of the 11 part series on youtube:



The Haydn he plays in this documentary is a piece I've been working on for the past five months.  Mine doesn't sound quite the same, but I'll blame my tools and say it's because my piano has not been tuned in years.  (Piano tunings are expensive, and it's something I keep meaning to teach myself to do.) 

It's a wonderful time to be interested in classical music, with so many resources available, videos and recordings of just about any piece in the musical canon.  It makes me jealous of kids who are just starting to study piano today.

But here's a question for classical music fans to get all steamed up about: How come that Lady Gaga video with the tape over the nipples and the blurred out crotch has over 20 million views, but this historic performance by one of the greatest living pianists in the world has less than a thousand?

Oh well, I guess it doesn't matter.  I'd rather be one of a small, exclusive audience, than watch Mr. Kissin hook up with Beyonce in an attempt to boost his youtube statistics.

Listening

I seek out silences.  I flatter myself that I am the last of my generation who can tolerate them.  I may blog, but I will never tweet.  I rarely receive email.  My cell phone almost never rings--to the point that I am sometimes in trouble at work for forgetting to switch it off when the exception occurs. 

I love music, but I listen to very little.  Driving in silence gives my mind room to wander over spaces it might not otherwise find.  I listen to music in two very distinct ways: with full attention, giving it all the respect it deserves; or with complete disregard, using it as its own kind of silence, masking some more distracting noise, like a conversation at the next table, or a television rattling away.

There are times for the iPods and earbuds.  Riding the subway listening to Phillip Glass, for example, or listening to Bach while you navigate Beacon Hill on foot.  Airplane rides.  Board meetings, perhaps, after the first hour.  At the gym, if you're unfortunate enough to be paying for your exercise.  But I'll never understand the kids who need tunes the second they punch out for a lunch break.  I need some peace and quiet to sit and enjoy my lunch, and perhaps have a conversation with the people around me.

Maybe that's just because I usually have a better lunch packed than they do.

This is all long way round to saying I found a lovely silence this afternoon.  There's a couple inches of crusty snow left from the storm earlier this week, but it's been plowed away from the trail along the canal, leaving pure uninterrupted blanket along each side, even down the rocks to the high-tide line.  Snow is plastered on the north side of every tree and power pole, and clings in intermittent chunks to the power-lines.  The sky is a constant silver gray to match the soft pewter of the water.  A single duck floats along the surface at a magical pace, it's motion the only indication of the violent current beneath the surface.  You can feel the threat of ice in the air, but it's an idle threat, no wind behind it, clear and cold enough to make you thankful for your scarf and gloves.  The traffic on the bridge blends into a steady rumble, a sort of whistle to match the wind the world never knew until 100 years ago.  Louder is the coast guard vessel that comes along, labouring steadily against the current, not quite cutting through the waters but agitating them nonetheless, laborously heaving gentle swells out in its wake. 

I wonder--every time a wave reflects against a surface it is much diminished but still there.  The wake strikes the rocks and heads back to the other side.  Before they make it all the way they are too small to see, lost in the swirl of the current and the silent swell of the tide.  Water is quick to erase evidence of passage, much quicker than the snow that still holds the footprints I made on the way here.  But really, can the waters ever be the same as before that boat laboured through, or that duck?  Boats passed here on cold evenings in 1956, evenings that no doubt held silences very similar to this one, and though their passage is long forgotten, the world was forever changed with every one.

There's really no soundtrack that can improve a walk like this, though the jogger chuffing past with the blue spandex and the clip-on eyepod seems to disagree.

Let him have it, then, because this one is all mine

Six Part Glenn Gould Interview on Youtube

Really need to get down to the piano tonight.  Haven’t had the energy for practice on top of work and blogging, and I don’t want to lose the progress I’ve made in the past several months. 

What a conundrum, huh: being beset by too many things that I love to do?  If only we all had such problems!

Here’s another lovely problem: there’s more Glenn Gould videos on Youtube than I’ve got time for watching.  I could really curl up for a Sunday or two and just absorb, the way your modern teenager could veg-out to a marathon of “100 best celebrity freakouts” on MTV.  I think I’d get more pleasure out of my Sunday than this hypothetical teen.  But all things in moderation.  Even Gould.

I used to think Gould’s interpretations of Bach were slow and stodgy.  Now I love the simple austerity of them. 

Here’s the first of a six-part interview entitled “Glenn Gould Moments.”  It looks like it was filmed in the 50s but I can't confirm.  What do you think?



The whole series is worth watching.  What a nut!  He’s an early example of the self-absorbed eccentric, but I’ll forgive him that because what he makes is so perfect - even if he insists on the pretense of having one specific chair dragged around the concert circuit.  He hasn’t given up the concert performances yet, as in later years he dedicated himself strictly to recording in studio.  You get to see him interacting with the manager of the concert hall, picking out just which of the super-high end pianos are going to be right for him.  And you get to hear some cutting comments about some of the “modern” music of that decade which has since faded into obscurity.

Ezra Brooks and Villa Lobos

Been busy with work and life the past couple of days. Saw some dear, long absent friends. Played with a two year old child. If we could be guaranteed a baby this happy, we might consider getting one ourselves. But of course there are no guarantees, and there a are a few more things we want to do first. (A very selfish and modern view, no doubt.)

Relaxing with a scotch and water and thinking I might get a post up before the end of the day. There are a handful of minutes left!

Here is my prescription for the end of your work week, wherever that may fall. Ezra Brooks scotch, which is in the budget range but which comes a very close second to Dewars for smoothness, flavor, and drinkability. (I like adding just a splash of soda or tap water to open it up a bit.)

And some music by Heitor Villa-Lobos, a modern composer whose career was coming to an end in the 1950s. Plug him into your pandora radio station (you’ll get mostly guitar solos) or search for performances of his piano works on youtube. More on him later, but until then, wonder why more folks don’t know about this music, and consider this my gift to you.

Returning to the Piano

I’ve talked about how wonderful it is to be able to combine the best of yesterday and today in today’s world. One of the things I most love about the modern world are all the resources available for the budding classical musician.

Not that I’m budding. I’m too old for that. But now that we’ve moved back into the presence of the old grand piano, I find myself aspiring, musically, for the first time in years. This is a great surprise.

The aspirations are modest. I’m not shooting for scholarships or admission to Juilliard or even a high score from the piano teachers’ guild. I’m not expecting to perform in front of thousands (or even dozens) of people and I’m certainly not competing for a recording contract from Columbia records.

I used to hope for these things. In fact, back in the day, they seemed inevitable. It was simply a matter of applying ass to bench and shoveling hours of practice into the keyboard. My mom said I was the cleverest boy in the conservatory. (She also said I was the handsomest boy in school.) My teacher didn’t contradict her, so it seemed only natural that fame and fortune would come as a matter of course as the hours and years of practice accumulated.

A few things knocked me off course. Predictably. Piano skills were a wonderful tool for acquiring a high-school sweetheart, but once she was acquired, spending another weekend in front of the keyboard wasn’t as thrilling as, say, making out on a sofa. Meanwhile, none of my guy friends could be troubled to sit through a ten minute piece which I’d worked at for months. When none of your friends give a damn about the thing you love, it sort of punches a whole in your motivation.

Then I noticed that when I went to classical concerts I was usually the youngest member of the audience. Who would my audience be, I wondered, when I was the eccentric old bat up on stage?

I might have had more encouragement had I grown up in a city. Then again, there’d have been more competition, too. Even from Cape Cod, I was starting to realize how fiercely competitive a life in music would be. Less than 1% of Juilliard graduates make a living as performers. My teacher started to hint that a dual major from a place like Columbia might make more sense than a straight degree from a music-only school. “Not that you don’t have the talent to make it., but you’ve still got to look at the numbers.”

I thought, if I’m going to do this, I should really do it 100%. What’s the point of splitting my attention half-and-half with some other subject? I liked absolutes, as do most teenagers.

So I stayed stubborn until I burned out. I took a break for a couple of months to see what life felt like without hours of practice every day after school. When I sat back down to play something, my repertoire had degraded to the point where I’d embarrass myself if I tried to perform. It really just needed a little brushing up, but it was maddening - like coming back from vacation and finding your library stolen. How unfair that painters can take a month off and find their canvasses just the way they left them. Music practice weaves its patterns into brains which are fungible and short-lived.

Too bad I didn’t have any talent for painting. I decided to dedicate myself to a creative endeavor that wouldn’t disappear if I spent a month or two away from it. This was about the time I got the bright idea to be a science fiction writer.

That’s all a long aside to let you know where I’m coming from as a relapsing musician - from a cultural sand-dune with no peer-driven support network for music students. Pre-internet, access to any kind of classical music was hard to come by out here. Sheet music was costly, and while folks would photo-copy, that involved finding someone with the original copy. (It also involved finding a Xerox machine.) My teacher was generous, fortunately, and would lend me a book of Chopin Etudes and suggest I flip through and pick one I liked. But my sight-reading skills are terrible. I’m not one of those people who can flip through a book of sheet-music and hear it in their head. (My strengths lie in memorization and interpretation.) So aside from the bars she’d play for me to give me an idea of the theme, I often didn’t know what a piece was meant to sound like until I memorized it. In some ways, this was exciting. I discovered new harmonies and moods as my technique and tempo with a piece increased. But it prevented me from looking at the large-scale form of music.

Cassettes and records were just as expensive as sheet music, and after the cost of lessons I wasn’t about to ask my mother to pay for albums as well. So except for what I heard on the radio, I missed experiencing much music beyond the little bit I had the time to study.

Cut to today: I can go on Youtube and search for just about any sonata or etude, and watch it performed by amateurs and professions alike. Meanwhile, the Petrucci Music Library is making available thousands of copyright-expired scores (and that means the vast majority of western music) for free on their web site.

One of my greatest modern indulgences is to plug an old monitor into my laptop so that I get a dual-screen display. I can display sheet music on one screen while Glenn Gould or Marta Argerich performs the work on the other. I can hear what those fussy trills I always struggle with are supposed to sound like. I can watch one artist and then another perform the same piece and really get an idea of the range of interpretation. This is miraculous! My high school self would never have dreamed of investing in two different recordings of the same piece.

Hell, I can even watch performances of music on instruments I don’t play. This would have been the height of luxury before - spending money on a piece of music that wasn’t intended to advance my career.

I’m not sure what this means for today’s classical musicians. I know the RIAA makes a hell of a fuss going after file sharing and music piracy, suing kids out of their college tuition in hopes they’ll make an example of a few poor schmucks and scare the rest straight. Meanwhile the volume of file sharing just goes up and up while the music industry makes record profits, so I’m not really sure we’ve correctly identified the victim here. I do know I’m listening to lots more music than I did even four years ago (when we bowed to the future and brought in broadband). Not that this impacted my buying habits. In the five years before we got broadband, I probably bought a total of four classical music CDs. When we lived in Boston, we attended a few performances at Symphony Hall as well as all the free performances under the Hatch Shell at the Esplanade. We may be fans of good music but we’re certainly not patrons of the arts in any financial sense. I’m curious to know what folks who make their living in classical music think of the big picture today.

Meanwhile I’ve got these new and ill-defined aspirations for my piano. They mostly center around getting it tuned, having a good time, improving my sight reading to the point where I can have a little more fun with a score before investing weeks of study, and keeping my mind sharp and my fingers quick.

I hadn’t intended to return to music in any big way. In fact, all that precious old sheet music got lost in one of our moves, so when the compulsion to practice struck, I spent a couple of weeks just going over my scales. (Major and minor, four octaves, performed in octaves, thirds, tenths, and sixths, working around the circle of fifths. Once you’ve gotten them back in your fingers you can complete this exercise in about 45 minutes.)

Then, when I discovered I could, I printed up a stack of Bach’s Two Part Inventions. They sound great at any tempo, which means I can play them slowly without offending my family. Plus I can get my head around them more quickly than, say, his preludes and fugues. Just a little at a time, I told myself. Don’t tackle anything too ambitious and burn yourself out.

Then Pandora (another great resource) served up a bit of Haydn. This reminded me of a sonata I never quite finished back in the day. Why not get the last two movements down and have a complete sonata in the repertoire? Before I knew it I was spending five hours a day sitting on the bench every weekend.

It’s the sort of flow experience and time-sink you expect from a Playstation or Xbox. It gives me the sense of incremental progress towards victory without that stretched-out, wasted afternoon feeling. It’s something I can be a perfectionist over. I can repeat a passage as many times as it takes to get it right. This is satisfying. Perfectionism isn’t something I have the luxury of indulging at work. Contrariwise, I don’t have any plans of performing or competing, so my own standards are really all that matter. I’m just making it perfect enough for me, not a teacher or a judge.

It’s recreation, in other words. I’m surprised and delighted to find it so satisfying. If only practice felt this much fun back when I had a shot of making a career out of it...

But then it wouldn’t have been recreation at all, would it?