Monthly Archives: March 2012

Got you, you bastard!

At least I’m fairly sure I broke through. Finally. I feel like — over a period of five months, mind you — I crapped an elephant an inch at a time. >_O

(Sorry, but sometimes a revolting scatological metaphor is all that works for a given situation.)

I have one more section to put in where I need some spackle and a little bit of smoothing, but I’ve got a damned bridge to that Koh-i-noor section that I came up with last October thank you, and I’m fairly certain that it’s at least going to be somewhat stable.

No wonder composers and artists go around cutting off ears and drinking themselves into Mutter Museum candidates. This is nuts-making. I swear I have stretch marks around my brain now, and the only reason I’m not getting completely piss-drunk is because I was smart enough to stop buying wine a few months ago.

I am never working in six flats again. It will never stop being disorienting as hell.

This kind of win can be hard on both sides.

Flyers crush the Leafs

You always have to score as much as you can, whenever you can, in hockey. The game is too fast to do otherwise. One bad bounce and your own goalie or leading scorer can be gone, so you can’t ever let up or “go easy.” (Bryz is out because of a bad bounce in a warmup, too. It’s just a less serious injury.) Besides, the other team knows if you’re doing it, and it’s insulting. But it can be tough to keep pounding in this sort of situation.

It’s obvious that this is a symptom of massive back-office churn and score-settling for the Leafs. Being that bad for one season is a problem with coaching and the players. Being that bad for seven seasons in a row, though? That’s a problem the root of which is considerably further upstream. It seems that everyone wants to “save” them, and everyone has their own idea of how to do it. And when a cluster of millionaire men each has their own idea of how to do something, all that results is fighting over the bones and taking the opportunity to settle personal scores.

And meanwhile, the team takes the hit. No hockey player wants to play golf in April. They want to win. But with a massive lack of back-office vision and leadership, it’s not going to happen.

More s-l-o-w p-r-a-c-t-i-c-e

GOD, it’s boring. But it really helps.

And at some point when I’ve written a decent enough amount of my own stuff, I’m going to have to do this to my own music, including the parts like those bouncing 6ths in “Moon of Memory” that I keep rolling, and the 16th note runs in “There All Along” that stymie me from time to time.

The viola has been gathering dust all this time, too. :-( I knew when I started writing my own music that that would happen. The second thing that popped into my head was, “I can’t do this and play viola.”

Clinch night :-)

Some lovely highlights, and Briere most definitely ends his drought! We’re in!

Spooky Psychic Goalie meets Happy Little Sharpshooter! I’m constantly amused at how pictures of the players celebrating after a goal will show all these shoulders and necks and the top of Briere’s head. :-) The team website says he’s 5’10″. The team website lies.

And here’s Maxime Talbot being all nice and stuff.

So does A equal B? Only time will tell …

Once again …

I avoided paying attention to this game after the Caps scored ten minutes before the puck drop, but why do they continue to DO stuff like this? Just take the damned lead and keep it!

This is why I bought one of those buckwheat-hull filled butt cushions and sit on it a half-hour a day. This. I am not kidding. I began meditating because I couldn’t follow Flyers hockey otherwise. Jesus.

Continuing with “Bethena” and poking at “Elite Syncopations”

… which is a real bear of a piece, especially the last theme. Very Liszt-ian with the melody framed with bouncing octaves. Gratified that Joplin wrote on top of it, as he wrote on everything he composed, “Not too fast.”

I’m still eternally amused at his tempo notes on his pieces. :-) You can almost chart out which pieces were written first based on how pissy the tempo markings are. “Not fast.” “Not too fast.” “Do not play this piece fast.” “DO NOT PLAY THIS PIECE FAST. It is NEVER right to play ragtime fast.” Seems like people have been cranking on his stuff ever since he wrote it. Makes the current trend of showing off How Good I Am by demolishing a composer’s preferred tempo a lot more obvious. In fact, I’ll have to keep that in mind the next time I hear someone opine about playing a piece of music according to the godlike composer’s intent when they are turbocharging it well past what the original composer would have wanted. It always bugs me when people do that to Vivaldi and other Baroque types. People ruin their music all for the sake of puffing themselves up, and then turn around and make noises about disappearing behind the composer’s intentions. o_O Sort of like patting oneself on the back for one’s awesome humility.

Anyhow, it feels good to be back to s-l-o-w p-r-a-c-t-i-c-e on “Bethena.” It’s sort of a nice recalibration, and it helps realign my technique. And I opted to get started on “Elite” as well, with some trepidation since it’s quite difficult at the end. I’ll be poking at that one only for a while since I’m enjoying myself back at “Bethena,” although I’d also like to chart out his chord changes as well. He does that bounce-between-dims thing a lot, but he also does a couple of very clever things like hopping into the relative minor of the dominant in some fun ways. His modulations are a veritable chocolate box of stack-popping fun.

Didn’t watch the game, didn’t want to. Still don’t want to know — aiming for some quiet mental space for the moment. :-)

Back to “Bethena” for the moment

I just got irked at myself for shedding so little, and I missed playing it. And I’m constantly staggered at the difference it makes in my ability to play my own music when I work hard at someone else’s. And I’ve said that I wanted to shake myself out of the new-age-easy-listening rut I can fall into too easily — best way to do that is to play and listen to something like that. Not that Joplin writes marches (a few), but his stuff is stronger and more lively and requires more nimbleness, and has more of those heavy, chunky chords that I like so much.

I want to start on “Elite Syncopations” next. The last theme in that one is a real bear, and I want to see how well I can do it.

And in orange-colored news … they have to stop snoozing for forty minutes and playing for twenty. I’m not sure what’s causing this or whether it’s a conscious decision on their part since they have injuries and are dressing so many kids, but it’s been a constant with the team, and it’s worrisome. I can only conclude that it’s a deliberate choice to save effort because there is no other reason on Earth why they play like this so predictably.

I love the Flyers style of hockey — that full-court press they tend to play. I adore that they play aggressively. But I’m no longer sure it’s a good idea to do so. They end up decimated by injuries and dressing too many rookies at the end of the season, when things really become demanding. As a result, I wonder if they don’t consciously choose to ratchet their effort back for the first period and a half to save energy at the end of the season.

The rookies are excellent, but they are still sort of excellent individual players and not a gelled team quite yet. By the next season, they start to gel … and then get knocked out by injuries because of their style of play. Like I said, I adore Flyers-style physical hockey; I love that they play the press. But I’m not sure it’s the winning strategy it once was; it makes for inconsistent play, and if there’s one thing that can be said about a cup-winning team, it’s that they are consistent. Any team that plays reliably at 80% will go further than a team that plays at 100% and 20% unpredictably. I suppose we’ll have to see.