About Fire & Air

I was raised in an Italian-American household, so my youth was soaked in opera and classical music. Subsequent to entering young teen-hood, my youth became equally soaked in stadium rock. I consider all of the aforementioned genres of music to be personal vernaculars and place them on an equal footing in terms of merit.

My favorite music is by Haendel, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Jeff Lynne, and Steve Perry. Yes, I like unsnobby, beautiful, melodically rich, and unrepentantly sincere music. If I like it, it’s a guarantee that a klatsch of art-music devotees having a roundtable over lattes and clove cigarettes at the local coffeehouse someplace rolled their eyes at it.

I have an unusual ability in languages and mathematics, two topics that I consider equivalent but that most people seem to feel are quite separate. I feel strongly that music results from the mixture of the human abilities to speak and to count, and hence is an emergent property and one of the most wonderful freebies nature has given us.

I enjoy languages, orthographies, mathematics, handcrafts, really good food, and music. And cats. Of course, cats. And hockey, which only recently has been showing up on the blog. I’ll try to keep it to a dull roar.

I play piano and have since I was very wee. I spent some time on viola, but had to press the “pause” button on lessons when composing reared its entirely unanticipated head. I still work at it according to the Cheap Housepaint Principle: three passes gives full coverage.

General advice for studying music — or anything else really:

1. There are no shortcuts. Stop wasting time looking for them and get to work.
2. Play now, pay now. There is no later.
3. Small changes consistently made add up. Those changes can be improvements if you want them to be.
4. Don’t wait until you’re at your instrument before you expect inspiration to arrive. You need to look for it 24/7, which means that it may strike while you’re stuck in traffic. Oh, well. Inspiration isn’t accommodating. It comes when it comes, and if you expect it only to show up of its own accord when it’s convenient for you, it won’t come at all. Get used to it.

Advice on improvisation and playing by ear:

1. Get the sheet music off the desk.
2. Relax.
3. Take a popular song melody you like and work it out.
4. Listen to it a few dozen times until a left hand suggests itself.
5. If you stumble upon something good, write it down.
6. Eventually, you will have started to wander around and improv. Now, pick a key and start noodling.
7. Rinse and repeat for a couple weeks/months/years. See #5.

All of this was made easier for me with the acquisition of a digital piano with headphones, where my noodling could be kept to myself.

And honestly, I left out Step Zero:

0) Hum to yourself constantly, even just in your own mind.

I can be contacted at firexandxair at gmail dot com.