Left-hand piano festival

Leftitude — This. Looks. AWESOME. Wish I could go.

It’s getting me thinking about left-hand-only piano work. I’ve already said that my stuff is probably recognizable as written by a left-handed musician. Nothing at all that I’ve written would be challenging for a conservatory-trained pianist at all, but there are parts of it where the melody ping-pongs between the hands, and where the bulk of expression is in the left hand, even parts (simple ones) where the left hand is the only one playing. Again, none of it would be considered hard by any well-trained pianist, but a left-handed one might at least feel some of my pieces to be a bit more comfy than others.

I might just give this a shot — left-hand only. Will be fun to see what happens.

And how lovely that there are no right-handed pianists freaking out and ranting at them to stop! “The Piano is a Right-Handed Instrument! The melody belongs in the right hand! It’s actually easier for left-handers to play the melody in the right hand! Stop that at once!” (It reads better if you imagine a violinist pursing their lips like a chicken’s butt while saying this.)

Ryan Thomson — a.k.a Captain Fiddle

4stringjoe on YouTube

You’ll find videos here of him playing on both sides; a natural right-hander, he came down with focal dystonia and could only manage by re-teaching himself to bow with his left hand. As a result of his experiences, he became a strong advocate for people bowing with their natural dominant hand, saying that after many years of playing left-handed, he was still nowhere near as good as he was as a righty. The videos showing him bowing right-handed are, of course, much older than the current lefty ones.

Left-handed string playing continues to bring me joy and make me smile just watching it. As a lefty, you sort of get resigned to seeing everything done bass-ackwards from how you’d like it because let’s face it, we have no choice. So seeing more left-handed bowing — and by a right-handed ally — means a lot to me. He’s a wonderful guy as well, and any left-hander who is interested in learning a string instrument and bowing with the proper hand for us is encouraged to check him out.

Clicking on “left hand” in my tag cloud will also take you to some of my various posts on the topic of left-handed music making as well.

Organ annoyances

Okay. I tend to ignore the parts of my body that are not my brain, hands, or mouth. I love languages, I love thinking, and I love making stuff. The rest of me I regard as necessary peripheral crap to cart the brain, hands, and mouth around, and keep them going. Organs don’t work so well that way — you need a broader awareness of your physical self to play this thing. Either I will settle out as one of many amateur organists who aren’t very good, or my awareness of my physical self will gradually expand.

I can see why Cameron Carpenter states that dancers make good organists and why he chugs down a gallon of whole milk a day to keep from becoming underweight. Playing just these simple little pedal studies (I’m talking simple here) reminded me of the very few times in my life when I’ve been on the back of a horse and had to use muscles that I didn’t realize I had. I can easily see why a good organist at that level would need 5k Calories a day to keep from going gaunt.

I’m also becoming irritated at the placement of the Great and Swell stops. I like using my right hand on the Great and my left on the Swell, and if this were a touch-screen VPO, I could probably reverse the stop banks and get this. Instead, I’m stuck adjusting to yet one more device built the total opposite of the way I want it built. Yes yes yes, it’s a right-handed world. No kidding. After 46 years, it’s beginning to grate.

This will never cease to delight me.

Left-handed violinist/fiddler Molly Kate Cherryholmes

Left-handed string playing makes me smile, every time.

And if the instrument in question is a beautiful rich cherry-brown color that look as if it were varnished with chianti and melted chocolate, well then.

“Surely, you can appreciate how unacceptable that is.”

Getting out of the Beltway

I’d love to be part of this conversation, but his goddamned comments are broken. Again.

So I’ll just opine here, and maybe he’ll get a pingback. I imagine what I have to say would make him rip his hair out anyway.

Part of his statement here is that, given that he is — to his own ears — redolent of his idols anyway, he experienced a significant amount of why-bother angst. He has settled some of this, if the post is any indication, but I think there’s something else at work here that reminds me of the phenomenon of Beltway Thinking.

That tendency to imagine that the rest of the world is locked in the bit of it that you inhabit, where everyone is soaked in the minutiae of whatever your passion is.

They aren’t.

When he says — paraphrased, “Why should I bother? I sound just like Famous Bassist X anyway,” I want to yell back:

“I’m not a bassist! I don’t even know who that other chucklehead is! When I hear a fretless bass, I think ‘hey, that’s like Jeff Schmidt!’”

It’s not just a matter of feeling free to be inspired by someone else. It’s also recognizing that just because you eat, sleep, and breathe your own inspirations doesn’t mean the rest of the world even knows who the hell those people are. (Although I must say that I was thrilled by his mention of my own personal font of inspiration, Gabriela Montero.)

As a pianist, I have no idea who this Jaco dude even is. Schmidt might scream like a little girl if he heard me say that, but it’s true. Meanwhile, I’m fearful of sounding too like the composer Mikhail Glinka, who lots of other people wouldn’t recognize but who is a major inspiration of mine. (George Winston, too — but most people do know who he is.)

At any rate, I found Schmidt’s music by going to YouTube, searching on “Bach prelude,” and clicking through the many and varied instruments on which the famous cello prelude was played. One was a fretless bass, which had a soft, cottony sound that entranced me. That caused me to search on “fretless bass,” and I clicked on Schmidt’s videos for one reason only: he’s left-handed, and I’d just come off of having been hung up on by some idiot chippie who advertised viola lessons because I told her I would play mirrored and she practically peed herself in fear over the phone.

And the first thing I clicked on was his jaw-dropping “Apotheosis.” I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve sent that link to. It still strikes me as one of the great genius-level pieces of music I’ve ever heard. I really could not believe what I was hearing the first time I listened to it.

Michael Manring? Other than the fact that Schmidt plainly idolizes him and in fact dedicated the piece to him (I believe, anyway), I’ve never heard of him. I’ve never heard him, either. Nor whoever this Jaco person is. Like I said, it might make him cringe to hear me go, “Whoozat?” in response to a comment about someone he thinks walks on water, but there you go.

I’m outside the Bass Beltway. Bass weenies are not the only person Schmidt appeals to, but he still seems to feel that the majority of his appeal lies there. There’s a distinct possibility that music weenies in general are his home habitat, but that’s a much bigger space than just bass weenies. I’m not sure he realizes that some classically trained pianist who listens to Journey and Styx, arranges operatic arias meant for guys with no balls for piano, and who has never touched a bass could possibly be enamored of his music, or could even have found it.

I mean, the path by which I found his stuff was random and completely unrelated to the geeked-out details of bass guitars. I simply liked the sound, searched on it, and clicked on his video for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with bass guitars.

I still haven’t searched on Michael Manring, mind you. Again, while I am a music weenie, I’m not a bass weenie.

But I’m still a Jeff Schmidt fan.

And that’s what happens with inspiration. These other people’s inspirations have gone into the past, and they are here in the present. Schmidt found inspiration from them, someone will find it from him, and so on. There’s no single root inspiration from whom we all spring — it’s just a constant wave that absorbs people as it move forward, and then lets them go when it’s finished, and it heads in all directions, and everyone sees it from a different vantage point.

Anyway. I wish his goddamned comments would get straightened out. I got thinky on something else he said a while back, too. That’ll be a post for tomorrow, maybe.

Another lefty violist

Jürgen Kussmaul — there’s a photo of him floating around that’s been flopped, but he plays left.

Left-handed child-size instruments

This does my heart good!

You know they wouldn’t be making these things if there were no demand for them! I am so happy to see this! Despite urban myth, there is no left-handed “advantage” to playing an instrument designed for right-handers (not even pianos, which are probably the least biased of all due to how they are played. And yet, even they are slightly biased against us.)

But with these fractional lefties, there would be absolutely no disadvantage to playing left-handed whatsoever. None. No bias in the slightest. At last, we would be on a completely equal footing. How wonderful to see these!

I can’t shake the feeling that back in the Baroque days when flutes and recorders were made for use on either side, with the unused holes meant to be plugged with wax and ignored, Amati, Stradivari, Guarneri, Testore, and the rest all made their small share of left-handed instruments. They were probably all converted over until nowdays some few of the classical string players in the world, bowing with their right hands either by nature or force, have fiddles with light shadows inside their bellies, attesting to the fact that they originally came with their bass bars mounted on the other side. I’d love to see MRIs of the extant Strads to determine whether this can be ascertained.

The sad thing is that this unhinged and completely baffling attitude toward left-handed play would probably be so strong (most unfounded prejudices are) that the information would probably be suppressed. It’s crazy, but I wouldn’t put it past people. They’re so strange about this.

Attention String Teachers

We are not evil and do not need to be repaired. You need to chill out and stop damaging your left-handed students.

And for any successfully suborned left-handed string players, you need to stop measuring your human worth by your ability to successfully repress your disgusting deviance from Normal Folks. Have you nothing more worthy to be proud of than the fact that a mere culturally defined deformity of yours was properly stamped out? How pathetic.

Just a little reminder that forcing oneself to conform to mindless, completely arbitrary societal prejudices does not warrant celebration:

Piano for the left hand

Nicholas McCarthy

It’s interesting how I rarely hear about pianists who perform as soloists with the right hand only, but lefties pop up from time to time. I do think that mechanically, there are no advantages to being a lefthander when it comes to manipulating any musical device. The piano was built to put the more intrusive part of the music under most pianist’s stronger hand (the right-side one), allowing it to sing out over the accomp. I’ve said before that as a lefthander, I need to work hard to keep my left hand from swamping my right. The right has more nimbleness, but the left has far more power, and that power often gets in the way. I’ve even had some fun writing music where entire chunks of the piece are carried by the left hand alone.

However.

The left hand, to be blunt, is where everything interesting is happening on a piano. The right hand usually only carries the melody. If a pianist with only a right hand were playing, they would probably just be playing the melody, and a violin or flute would do as well or better. The left hand is where the theory, the structure, the timing and rhythm all reside, so a pianist with only a left hand can function a bit better as a pianist per se, either soloist or accompanist.

McCarthy though should think about composing and arranging. Aside from Ravel and Britten, there aren’t many pieces for left hand alone; it’s a completely unplowed field. He could own it entirely if he chose. And I don’t really respect the attitude that he “can’t” play the other things he loves, like Mozart and Mendelssohn. Arrange them for left hand, for chrissakes. It’s not like Mozart’s lawyers will come after him, and he could open up the standard rep for other single-handed pianists. That Vivaldi 443/2 I love wasn’t written for piano — it’s a Baroque dog whistle playing one note at a time while the strings all play whole note after whole note underneath. None of what I did with it is “right,” but I wanted it within my universe, so I brought it there. And Vivaldi hasn’t clawed himself out of his grave to come remonstrate with me.

This guy could do the same. Even in the staid “play the notes as written” world of classical piano, where there is a velvet rope between musician/audience and music, he could probably get away with it. All he needs to do, to be cynical, is play the pity card. He’s only got one hand, and he wants to bring the standard rep into his sphere of ability. What’s someone else going to do, tell the one-handed guy not to? Seriously. He should grab the standard pieces he likes and give it a go arranging them for a bang-up dense left hand and a note at a time in the right. If anyone doesn’t like it, let them deal with the social consequences of yelling at the “cripple” and see how far they get.