Monday, June 30. 2008A Summary So Far...
It is the end of the financial year and once again my family has to go through the tedious process of sorting out our income tax returns for the last year. It is also an opportunity for me to reflect on the past twelve months and assess where I am at musically and where I might go from here.
The major hiccup of course has been the last five weeks where I’ve basically been sedentary at home due to my eye operation. The good news is that I saw my surgeon last Friday and he was very pleased with the recovery. The gas bubble in my eye is going down and my left eye-sight is getting better all the time. So it pretty much looks as though I will have close to a text-book recovery, for which of course I am very grateful as can well be imagined. Apart from this, over the past six months I’ve had more time to spend musically and I think the work that I’ve put in has been reflected in the results and the overall improvement in my playing. I’m now, of course, fully acclimatised to the Stuart piano and it, in turn, is fully acclimatised to its environment. Whilst my technique is nowhere near what it should be I’m very pleased with the overall musicality than I can get out of the piano and whilst initially very nervous about giving a fully-fledged recital, even to friends and relatives, my recital at the end of May felt good to the fingers and was certainly received very well, even by people just as experienced as I am if not more so in the art of piano playing. At this current time the piano feels quite superb to the touch and my brain, fingers and feet appear to be combining better and better. As I’ve intimated several times in this blog, once you get used to this kind of piano it’s very difficult to go back. I’m not quite at the stage yet where I feel comfortable recording, even though I’m playing the pieces I intend to record reasonably well. I suspect this is just a confidence factor in me, and once my eye totally clears up in about three weeks that shouldn’t be a problem. My church organ activities will take a hiatus until December whilst the church is being totally refurbished but I’m back playing with my son most weekends whichever church his group is playing at at the time, and after an initial hiccup or two where my eyesight (or lack of it) played tricks on me it has worked out quite well. David is a fully mature musician these days, at home on a number of different instruments, and he has everything organised down to the last detail. I don’t think he gets that from me. So what do I want to achieve over the coming months? 1) Finish off two CDs – each of which has a different focus and aim 2) Continue an exploration of different kinds of music by mostly modern composers from different countries and styles. There is a huge amount of good stuff out there (and I’m picking more of it up each day) 3) Continue to try to develop my skills overall but especially in terms of understanding the Stuart piano and when best to apply its unique characteristics I plan to spend less time working (hopefully!) and more time being musically productive in as many ways as I can. I must admit I’m enjoying my music now much more than I’ve ever done, and for that I have to thank family, friends (and neighbours) for their support. Life goes on, as it should and must. Monday, June 23. 2008It's been a quiet week...
Except for my making more noise than is usual for me on the Stuart piano.
Overall my eye is much better and I’m now pretty confident that when the bubble finally goes my vision will be very close to what it was, which I must say is rather a relief. It still amazes me that such a complex and delicate operation can be performed so successfully. Apart from my enforced time at home, there have really been no side effects or post-operative issues whatsoever. I’ve been playing all sorts of music, including Gottschalk, Tan Dun, Granados, Chopin etc plus a whole swag of composers that I haven’t really had time in the past to investigate in any detail, for example the Mexican composer Manuel Ponce, whose 1st Intermezzo is a really gorgeous piece of music, and the Irish composer and scholar Howard Ferguson. What I’ve found is that my use of the piano’s sonority characteristics is getting better all of the time. As I’ve mentioned in previous postings, you can’t really play any kind of music on this piano in the same way as you would on a ‘traditional’ piano. I’m using less damper pedal (although I’m still using the two soft pedals quite extensively) and in many cases (although not all) I’m not playing these pieces as fast as perhaps I would have done in the past or else as I can remember from my student days. Some pieces I’m actually playing faster – the Granados Spanish Dance no 2 and the Ravel Pavane pour une Infante Defunte are two such pieces. Whilst obviously my technique (or, rather, lack of it) is a contributing factor here, nonetheless the amazing clarity of this piano allows for much more flexibility in the way these pieces come out – and this suits me down to the ground since by nature I am something of an ‘impulsive’ interpreter and will very rarely play a piece twice in the same way and almost invariably not according to the edition’s editorial idiosyncracies. I’m reinventing all the time and so far the results are pretty good. The journey continues. Monday, June 16. 2008
The best laid plans (encore) ... Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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21:04
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I saw my eye surgeon late last week and everything about my eye is looking good, pun intended. The gas bubble is going down very slowly, but I am getting much better vision in the eye and am getting more confident by the day that my vision will be OK. I’ve cut down on the antibiotics and I’ve also noticed that the pupil in the eye is beginning to return to normal. But it will still take another six weeks or so for the bubble to disappear and in the meantime I’m pretty much sedentary since of course I cannot drive until I’m medically cleared to so do.
So piano practice has recommenced and I’m adjusting much better to looking out of my right eye rather than my left. As well as various technical exercises (yawn…) I’m looking at music by Gottschalk, Granados, Tan Dun, Chopin and Schubert, not necessarily in that order. Once I get more confident I’ll resume the practice on my CD pieces and hopefully by the time my eye is OK (or even before if things go well in that regard) I’ll start some recording. I plan to resume my organist duties towards the end of the month, and I’m pleased that I was able to play keyboard for a couple of masses with my son over the weekend without any ill effects. In fact, it seems as though looking through my right eye and being able to see the right hand side of the keyboard better may well be an advantage. This begs the question as to whether I should have an operation to correct my strabismus, but my retinal surgeon was quite understandably very cautious about this, and I’ll certainly need his clearance before I even take the suggestion seriously. All in all, I am undoubtedly very fortunate indeed. Like most things of a serious medical nature, this is a definite wakeup call, and I need to take all the advantage I can whilst I still can. My fingers are feeling good, and the brain seems to be OK so lets get stuck into it… Monday, June 9. 2008The best laid plans (cont) …
My eyesight is getting better, slowly but surely. I’m back to a reasonable (i.e. not excessive) regimen of piano practice but what is apparent is that I won’t be back to any real performance standard for a while yet. Having to look out of my right eye means that I can see the right side of the keyboard much better than I used to but of course the corollary to that is that my left hand vision is not good and my left hand accuracy has diminished somewhat.
Nonetheless it is good to be able to sit down and play a bit – makes me feel much better overall. So what I’m starting to do is something that I should have been doing for a while now and that is to focus on my technique and in particular learn to play exercises with my eyes closed to get a better feel of the keyboard and to train my brain to ‘feel’ positions much better. I have a number of books of suitable stuff for this and hopefully over the next weeks when I have more time to spend on this there will be some positive results. Of course, there are other things to be done as well – I’m arranging a number of songs for my son to play on the saxophone and I really must sort out my digital score collection which is getting rather big and unwieldy. I also have to plan the next six months for my students and try to select music which will be beneficial to them both for their learning needs and enjoyment as well as challenging them musically and technically. Unfortunately, my recordings have had to be postponed but hopefully the work I do over the next few weeks will improve the final result. Thursday, June 5. 2008
What is more important to a composer? Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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09:16
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Making money, or having your music played? It’s a very serious questions, and of course the answer is not black or white, but somewhere in between.
In days gone by, if you wanted a piece of music, you went out to find it and then buy it. The retailer, publisher and composer all got their cut, as it were, and in many cases made quite a deal of money in doing so. But technology changes everything sooner or later and for the sheet music industry changes have created both opportunity and problems. Firstly, the ability to photocopy music and secondly the ability to download sheet music off the internet. After two of my students took performance exams last year I received a note from the AMEB advising me of copyright and that my students were using photocopies of sheet music. They obviously had no clue that the music I gave them was freely available on the Internet, and that the copyright for those editions expired many moons ago. I’m not that stupid, I don’t think. Not many people realise that much classical music printed before around 1930 is now out of copyright and therefore can be copied legally without restriction. Additionally, there are sites on the internet which allow downloads of first editions of the music of Beethoven and Chopin, and the complete works of Mozart (and I do mean complete) can be downloaded free of charge for personal use. In addition, copyright laws in many countries are either vague or non-existent and much music has been printed with little or no restrictions in that regard. There are multitudinous sites which offer vast collections of sheet music, either free or for a small charge, and of course there the ubiquitous file sharing networks to consider as well. What this has enabled me, in particular, to do is to become familiar with a large number of composers’ music which, until the advent of the internet, I’d never even heard of, let alone had a chance to play and explore. What the internet has done has made classical sheet music available to many more people and this has had a dual effect. Firstly, much music has been preserved which has little or no intrinsic commercial value either do to the obscurity of the composer concerned or else the edition is out of copyright. Secondly, it means that much of this music is now much better known and appreciated by a growing number of people simply because there was no other way of acquiring it up to this point in time. One would like to think that composers would like to make a lot of money from their sheet music, and that is not in dispute. But if that means that less people see that music – particularly over a period of the composer’s lifetime, is that really what the composer would want long term? At my recital much of the music I played came quite legitimately from out of copyright editions obtained, once again, quite legitimately. I was able to play much unusual music and this definitely added to the quality of the recital. There should always be a balance between cost and availability. The internet supplies the availability – we simply have to get the cost right. Wednesday, June 4. 2008The best laid plans …
Yesterday, June 3rd, would have been my father’s ninetieth birthday. An important milestone for the family, of course, but one which brought into sharp relief the fact that we are not here for eternity, but have a limited time in which to do the things we are able to on this earth. Not only that, but the tools which we have to do this with are not without their ups and downs, physical and mental.
Last week, a couple of days after my fundraising barbecue mentioned in the last posting, I suddenly lost focus in my left eye. Considering I have a strabismus, and my brain cuts out as it were the signals from my right eye (I normally only see out of my left eye and in fact I doubt that I’ve ever had binocular vision) this was obviously an extraordinarily serious turn of events. My ever reliable GP diagnosed what had happened very quickly, and sent me off to the Sydney Eye Hospital as a matter of urgency. I saw them on Wednesday afternoon, came back the next day to the Sydney Retina Centre and by lunchtime had had a significant retinal detachment in the eye repaired by the best surgeon in the business. I then had to spend 22 out of each 24 hour period for the next five days looking down since the detachment was at the bottom of the eye. I can assure you sleeping on my stomach with a special attachment designed to keep my head pointing down when I sleep is not something I found easy at all. My eye will not return to anything near normalcy for the next few weeks but it is improving and the portents are good at this stage that longer term my vision will be OK. At the moment, my brain has done the right thing and I’m now looking at the world through my right eye … a bit dizzying at the moment but it will get better. I’ve been very lucky. For a pianist, ears, eyes and fingers are the lifeblood of the experience. Without treatment I would have quickly lost vision from the eye and eventually the eye itself. It struck home just how fragile the human body can be, but also just how advanced medicine can be. The operation I had would have been much more complex even only a few years ago. Delicate it certainly was, but this operation now has a 98% success rate. How it will affect my piano playing I don’t know. This afternoon, I will try to find out. |
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