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Play One Wrong Note and You Die

12/22/2013

Grand Piano, I have to see this movie. Recently, I was comparing recurring nightmares with friends on Twitter. One friend dreams that she has prepared the wrong piece for the performance. My nightmare is that I'm still practicing and the performance is about to start. (True story, although these nightmares have subsided in the last few years.)

The campy hyperbole of Grand Piano will surely cure my nightmares once and for all. The trailer bears no resemblance to professional music making. Maybe I will just be able to laugh at the whole thing and lighten up when it's time to play.

I think one should attend Grand Piano as if one were seeing Rocky Horror, in other words dressed up in character. White tie, black tails, slicked hair. Make it a party and go in a stretch limo. I can't wait til this comes to town.

Elijah Wood plays Tom Selznick, the most talented pianist of his generation, who has stopped performing in public because of his stage fright. Years after a catastrophic performance, he reappears in public for a long awaited concert in Chicago. In a packed theater, in front of an expectant audience, Tom finds a message written on the score: “Play one wrong note and you die.” In the sights of an anonymous sniper (Cusack), Tom must get through the most difficult performance of his life and look for help without being detected.

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Thayer's Beethoven

12/22/2013

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Thayer's Life of Beethoven has been sitting on my shelf of books to read since college. I finally pulled it out all these years later and dove in. It isn't easy. It's a scholarly research work. It reads like geneology research, which it is. There is no narrative or dramatic thrust.

As dry as the reading is, a picture forms and musical insights emerge. When he was a youth, Beethoven was an organist. In today's terms you would say that was his gig. He worked a lot as an organist to support his livelihood. That bears keeping in mind as his musical thinking develops.

At 17 he made a trip to Vienna and met and played for Mozart. His studies were soon interrupted by his mother's illness, but at some point he heard Mozart play.

Czerny later recounts Beethoven's impressions of Mozart at the piano: "he had a fine but choppy way of playing, no ligato." Czerny adds that Beethoven played this way at first, treating the pianoforte like an organ. (Thayer, p. 88)

So here we see a road to one of Beethoven's musical priorities. Formative years as an organist, a pianist role model, and the synthesis of his view of how piano tones should connect.

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Temporarily Out of Stock

12/17/2013

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When you go to Amazon and search for a title (say, Hayner Resounding by Jai Jeffryes!) and they say they're temporarily out of stock, there might actually be plenty of CDs, even hundreds. It could be just that the CDs are still all sitting in boxes in the hallway outside the publisher's apartment.

Okay, now for extra credit write a 20-word essay explaining how I know this.

;-)

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