BWV 772

She slew the dragon with her mighty sword, and there was much rejoicing! Except my life is not that interesting, and really I just learned the C Major prelude to the point where, if I were balancing an encyclopedia on my rendition, it wouldn't necessarily fall off and crush my toes leading to gangrene followed by a long and tortuous death.

Some observations:

1) Harmony is fun!

2) Yet, there remains something profoundly unsatisfying about the keyboard. It reminds me of listening to music that cries out for dancing, music with a propulsive beat and an irresistible melody, only you're strapped to a chair and all you can do is wave your index fingers from side to side. There you are, broken at the waist, arms broken at the elbow, every part of you divided from the whole. Your mouth does nothing. Your breath isn't even part of the equation. Strange.

3) It is easy to underestimate the pleasure of adding a really honky sixteen-foot pedal C to the final note.

4) Practice may make perfect (or close to). But practice also has its perils, most notably the danger of rising standards. One day you're perfectly happy with a piece that totters along behind you like a mangy, spavined sausage dog of advancing years, and the next day you want a greyhound. A greyhound that knows how to phrase. I suppose it's a hazard of life: wanting always better, faster, more.

Gotta watch that.

Tasto Solo

From Here to Epiphany

Eureka moment of the day: Christmas is in DECEMBER! OK, OK, my epiphanies are lame. Next I'll be discovering shoes, or cheese on toast. Still, there's a distinction between knowing something and realizing it. Knowing is sitting on the couch drinking eggnog. Realizing is having the eggnog shot directly into your bloodstream via the huge needle in your ass.

I don't celebrate Christmas, except in a formulaic kind of way, but it's impossible not to notice its approach. The thing is a sasquatch. This year the shambling progress of tinsel and schmaltz has coincided with the onset of a particularly nasty winter. There's been ice, snow, water, and every gradation of precipitation between. I've lost track of when I last saw the sun. The house is old, under-insulated; my hands are a frozen bundle of bones.

To come clean, I've been kind of low-grade miserable for a while now, and the winter has only made it worse. I miss walking and vitamin D and socklessness. Like trees losing the camouflage of their leaves, some truths strip bare: I do not like my job. I do not like where I live. I am wasting [time, self, words]. I regret: acutely, chronically, painfully.

Of course, there's nothing for it but to slap some tinsel on a tree and keep going. Earlier Christians knew this, smart little suckers that they were, and plunked down in the middle of the darkest season a great big shiny bright star.

Merry Christmas, folks. Maybe I'll see you on the road.

Your Opinion, Please

You may or may not have noticed that I am fond of polls. (If you haven't, please check to make sure that all lobes of your brain are in their full upright and locked positions.) I like writing them. I like voting in them. I like reading the results (vote, damn it!). In college, I won two penny-ante gift certificates to a mediocre local restaurant by voting compulsively in the (dull as a comatose actuary) online poll sponsored by the college development office. Those two bagelwiches changed my life.

Seriously, though, there is something profoundly reassuring about polls. They dice the world into neat little bite-size pieces. They elucidate your options. They allow you the luxury of making a choice without the pain or inconvenience of its consequences. Polls are decision-making lite: all the taste, none of the calories.

So I couldn't help but pay attention when I spotted the poll on local musical talent in the Indy Star's online cultural section. Apparently, 23% of internet readers think Indy is a rock 'n roll city. 22% think the indie rock scene is the best. A mere 2% opt for folk music. Eight categories were listed in all. Classical music was not one of them.

Are you surprised?

*Yes
*No
*Get to the point

I wasn't surprised. The fact of the matter is that no one listens to classical music. At least, no one capable of using a mouse. The only people under 40 I ever see at classical music concerts these days are people who would rather be playing it.

Then there's the advertisement I saw on the back of a theater program this weekend. Sponsored by Citizen's Gas, it shows a spunky little girl in a hat posed beside the following text: Lady Macbeth. First Chair. Lucia di Lammermoor. Prima Donna. Painter. Poet. President. With the support of Citizen's Gas, in other words, this little girl could fulfill any artistic dream (I fail to see how natural gas facilitates one's operatic career, but perhaps this is dull-wittedness on my part.) Nowhere on the advertisement is there any mention of who will be watching or reading or listening or buying the output of our heroine.

Is it just me, or is something ugly underway here? No one reads anymore, but everyone writes. No one buys art, but everyone paints. No one buys tickets to the symphony, yet music schools churn out a thousand wanna-be french horn players every year.

Of course, I have two music degrees and a blog, so I'm not really in a position to condemn. Still, why isn't "audience member" included on that little girl's list of dreams? Who does she think is going to come see her sing or honk or emote or read or splatter paint on canvas? Are we so deep in the thrall of ourselves that we no longer value the arts -and arts they are- of reading, watching, listening, sitting still?

*Yes
*No
*I am all the audience I need
*I am my own Grandpa
*Maybe
*Wanna hear my bassoon solo?

Potlugubriosity

n. The singular sorrow of bringing something to a potluck that NO ONE EATS BUT YOU.

Day Out

The world has slackened again. Your day-to-day life is pulled so tight you don't recognize how thin, how threadbare you've become until vacation arrives and the whole of creation hollows like a sheet before snapping you into blue air.

You remember being tossed like this. You remember how many hands it took, the way the sun leaned in. It's what wells up in you when you have nothing to do and nowhere to be, when you leave a blank. Nature abhors a vacuum -so keeps an untidy house.

You remember this and other inconvenient things, and you let them stew. The air is turning colder; the sky is an iron bar. The Fed-Ex man delivers the wrong package. You sit a moment with the gift: someone else loosing their grip.

Dates, Pomegranates, Plums

Dating is dead. Yes, we all knew this, but we didn't REALLY know it, because it hadn't yet been written up in the New York Times. Now it has. In an opinion piece called "The Demise of Dating," Charles Blow bemoans the skyrocketing percentage of folks of all races, genders, and educational attainment levels who claim to be "never daters:" that is, people who enter all relationships through the doggie door of hooking up.

According to Blow, "Under the old model, you dated a few times and, if you really liked the person, you might consider having sex. Under the new model, you hook up a few times and, if you really like the person, you might consider going on a date."

My interest is pretty academic at this point (marriage puts a distinct damper on dating) but it sounds to me like the "new model" is for chickenshits. Asking someone out is scary: hooking up is not. Hooking up puts physicality at the top of the bill; dating prioritizes non-physical compatibility. Physicality is easy. It's the non-physical stuff that's interesting.

I'm ascending toward high dudgeon when I recollect my single bona fide real-deal "date," a trip to the 2-dollar movie theater my freshman year in college with a senior I barely knew. The film was some wispy, chinless scion of the Bond dynasty, with lots of explosions and even more dirty jokes. My date laughed uproariously at every double entendre and kept trying to put his hand on my thigh.

Down with dating!