My wife, Jan, gave up coffee. She is very focused.

But before she did that, for years I used to get up on the weekends to make her coffee for her and bring it to her in bed. I enjoyed that ritual. It was nice.

One morning, I woke up and said to her, "Honey, would you like your hot young stud to bring you your coffee?" Without missing a beat, or even opening her eyes yet, she replied, "No honey, I want you to do it."

Coffee and classical music are a lot alike. There's tons of both, and tons of it are really pretty good. Why did my wife want me to bring her her coffee when there is so much great coffee around? Well, first, because I was there. Second, it's nice to have someone you care about do something for you and to enjoy it together.

In other words, it wasn't just because the coffee was good.

Classical musicians for the most part produce music that has already been produced. And since everyone has access to every recording ever made, we won't entice anyone to listen simply by being good (although we aspire to be good in any case). We should be good, just like the rest, but we must give our listeners one more reason besides that to say, "I want you to do it."

I will perform a recital program at the Hayner Cultural Center in Troy, Ohio on Sunday afternoon the 29th of January 2012 at 2:00.

In 2011 the Musicians' Club of Troy presented Hayner with a new grand piano. This program will dedicate the new instrument and feature music of Schubert, Debussy, and Chopin. Phyllis Warner of the Musicians' Club will open with a few musical selections.

I like to participate in the piano technique forum at Alan Fraser's The Craft of Piano Playing. I recently shared a tip I learned from Steven De Groote for fingering parallel scales.
Steven liked to finger parallel scales so that the thumbs play together. The big problems in scales are to get them smooth, without bumps, and to keep the hands perfectly together. The turn over/turn under in scale playing is hard. If you align the fingering to play both thumbs together, it gives you a little more of a fighting chance to smooth that out.

In the traditional fingering of a B-flat major scale there is no meeting point of the thumbs. However, you can make the thumbs meet if you wish to. In a parallel B-flat major scale, Steven would put his left thumb on C and F. 

C major would have the left thumb on C and F, D major on D and G, etc. This isn't dogma. It's just a choice if you have a passage that has a long parallel scale or even a fragment that could benefit from getting the thumbs together. 

It's not traditional. I don't teach children, and I don't know when it would be appropriate to introduce them to such an idea. I learned that in college. 

It's another choice. Maybe someone else will like it, too. 

Louis Brown says that after opening his recording studio, L. Brown Recording, he began receiving calls from people who presumed he was Mexican. He wondered why. They asked, "Well, aren't you 'El Brown?'"

I recorded my first session at L. Brown Recording.  The piano is glorious. It's a rebuilt 1881 nine-foot Steinway D Centennial Edition concert grand, painstakingly maintained by Marc Weinert. And the studio is in the Film Center Building in Hell's Kitchen, steps away from my home.

Louis knows what he's doing. He doesn't merely "roll tape." He is a producer who collaborates in the creative process, and the results are better for it. We recorded Schubert's Op. 90 Impromptus. Next up, either the Sonata in A Major, D. 664, or Debussy's Images, Book 1. We're targeting a CD release for the middle of next year.

Here is an interesting formula. 30 minutes of recorded music equate to 3 hours of studio time. That allows for discussion, listening back where appropriate, and multiple takes.

I announced my free reading sessions with an ad directed towards violists on Craig's List.

I've hooked up with good instrumentalists and vocalists using conventional networking I'm more familiar with. Craig's List is my next foray into online tools.