piano
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Piano at Thanksgiving
You are viewing stuff tagged with piano.
Yesterday I sat down at our piano, a piano purchased by my mother’s mother. It is a lovely Baldwin Hamilton upright with acceptable action, lovely bright sound, surprising resonance. I play it when I can, though Ess sometimes asks me to stop. The point of this story, though: I didn’t have to earn it. It was given to me. In the care of my mom’s sister, who was moving, it found its way to me because I still played piano.
Essie sings it “We wish you could Merry Christmas” and it is perfect.
When it isn’t even November, but your three-year-old wants you to play Jingle Bells so she can dance to it, that’s what you do.
The Most Beautiful Shots in The History of Disney is, of course, filled with plenty of amazing scenes of animation. But the music, my god, hook up some headphones and behold Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Flight from the City.
Let’s see, well I don’t know enough about classical music to correctly name this piece, but the one I’m listening to right now is performed by Lang Lang and is called Chopin - Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58, III. Largo. Ok, well now I feel guilty and I need to sort out this title. Ok, off to Wikipedia.
Keith Jarrett and neuroscience. Sympathetically innervated sweat glands are the exception when it comes to neurotransmitters — their transmitter is acetylcholine, but you would expect norepinephrine! Whoah!
It’s the Köln Concert.
I really want to sit down in front of a concert grand piano and play the melodies in my head. The only public piano I’ve found near Moos tower is in the hospital — its action is hopeless, and it’s stunningly out of tune. The practice rooms at the U are extremely well equipped… but essentially unavailable to non-music majors (and cost money to get time in, anyhow). There are a few slightly decrepit pianos in Coffman Union… but I just feel like a jackass playing in that type of airport terminal setting — just feels all sorts of wrong.
I occasionally hop on the mic here and say “disregard everything I’ve said before about listening to something, you simply have to listen to this.” Well, this “this” is the best “this” (or at least most classic) that I’ve yet come up with. It is: Liszt’s “Un Sospiro” from Trois Études de Concert, performed by Jakob Gimpel. I liked the YouTube comment from user cheries5:
Notice the super narrow depth of field. Thanks for the new lens, Mykala! It’s a Canon 50mm f/1.8.
I’d have you guess what this is, but the picture tag gives it away.
The magic of video editing - This guy can neither play the piano nor the drums … but phenomenal editing puts this entire song together out of video fragments.
I’ve started one or two journal entries here, and then immediately deleted them. I am saying the same thing over and over in a side-long and vague way that leaves me with no satisfaction. When my fingers cease flitting over the keys, the ideas are still in my head, and I’m looking at a couple of paragraphs of junk. To get in the blunt state of mind, I thought I’d list out some things about myself:
Dear Iron and Wine,
Vis a vis your cover of The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights,” I’d like to say that, I get it. When you strip away the (albeit magnificent) electronic(a) going on in the background of the original, your acoustic version cuts closer to the heart … it has fewer things to get in the way as it slices into one’s inner sanctum. And yes, I know you guys licensed the song to Mars, Inc. for an M&M commercial, and you know what? That’s ok. Fine by me. The song is still great, even with the goofy kaleidescopic imagery that goes along with it in the commercial (which, in and of itself is not bad; the constrast between music and video is striking). In fact, that delectable clip on the commercial is what reminded me again of your cover, which I had only given 10 seconds of playing time in the past. The track of which I speak is spinning right now: I think I understand what you were thinking when you sang this, and what Ben Gibbard of the Postal Service was thinking when he, surely in a moment of inspired poetry, penned the words.
The closest I ever came to dying was over two years ago. Like many teenage near-death experiences, this one was entirely unexpected and so quickly recovered from that it barely registered as a blip on my adolescent radar screen. And yet, looking back now, I can frame the event in my mind: an inch or two one way, a half second more slowly or quickly, and I would exist either in a vegetative state or as a memory of existence, whose tenure on earth would be marked in cold marble on a sunny hill near a church in Woodbury.
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