Piano practice

I’m off on holiday next week, so things will go quiet here for a bit. I’m not travelling to any exotic destination, just back to the family home in Somerset. The advantage of going home rather than away on holiday is that I’ll be able to play the piano during my week off. Any habitual pianist will be familiar with the sensation of itchy fingers that comes from being separated from one’s piano when on holiday. Last year we made a point of booking a holiday cottage with a piano, specifically to avoid this deprivation. It turned out to be a pretty sorry specimen, but it was better than nothing.

I vowed to myself in a moment of folly that I would find a piano teacher this year. I haven’t made any progress (or effort, if I’m honest) on that front yet, but I have at least resolved that if I’m going to start piano lessons for the first time in ten years then I’d better learn some music first. I’ve made a start on this, and I hope to consolidate things a bit during my week off.

As I always enjoy reading about what the Cross-Eyed Pianist is practising, I will sign off for the moment with a quick look at the music I’m hoping to teach myself.

Bach – Courante from Partita no. 4 in D, BWV828
Spotify (Vladimir Ashkenazy)
I can play the first half of this but not the second, so I’ll try and make some headway there. It’s not up to speed at the moment. I’ve been playing it at sarabande tempo until now – I feel it works just as well if not better when played slowly – but I suppose Bach knows best. In one respect I may already be Gould’s superior – I’ve conquered entirely the urge to sing while playing.

Brahms – Intermezzo in B-flat minor, op. 117 no. 2
Spotify (Artur Rubinstein) / YouTube (Guiomar Novaes)
I’ve been playing this a lot over the past couple of months and have got the notes under my fingers now, but it still sounds different each time I play it – different emphases, dynamics, speeds and so on. I’m not entirely sure that’s a bad thing, but I’d like it to have a bit more shape and uniformity. With this and op. 117 no. 1, I’ve been inclined to play the first bit and give up when I reach the more challenging middle section, but I am now gradually reaping the rewards of the effort I’ve put in. One of the most beautiful piano pieces of all.

Chopin – Prelude in C-sharp minor, op. 45
Spotify (Edna Stern, 1842 Pleyel) / YouTube (Ivo Pogorelich)
It would be nice to be able to play a Chopin piece that is important enough to have an opus number all of its own. This has been in my repertoire, more or less, for quite some time, but I’ve never got the hang of the tricky little cadenza towards the end. It’s nothing more than a protracted downward harmonic sequence, so in theory it should be easy, but the chromaticism makes things awkward and so it needs some concerted effort to make it work.

Poulenc – Novelette no. 1 in C
Spotify (Eric Le Sage)
I was given a volume of the three Novelettes as a present by my piano teacher when I stopped lessons after Grade 8, and have toyed with them in the years since but never mastered them. The first and third are both exquisite, and not absolutely formidable, though Poulenc’s music is considerably less easy to play than it is to listen to. Lots of inner voices to pay attention to.

Ibert – ‘A giddy girl’ from Histoires
Spotify (Ginette Doyen)
This is a sweet little piece which it should be easy to get to performance standard. I remember waiting for my piano lessons when I was about 14 and hearing the pupil before me learning it very slowly. I was given the score of the Histoires as a present by my grandparents when I was only nine or ten, as my school music teacher, who was a good pianist, had played ‘Le petit âne blanc’ in class and I had loved it and wanted to learn it (and did teach myself to play it, probably before I was ready). I didn’t realise until later that this piece was one of the same collection.

Alkan – Preludes from op. 31
Spotify – No. 7. Librement mais sans secousses (Laurent Martin) / YouTube – No. 3. Dans le genre ancien (Olli Mustonen)
I may have a look through this volume of 25 preludes for my own amusement, which I have just borrowed from the library. I have known Olli Mustonen’s recording of the set for ages, and it contains some beautiful pieces, not all of them beyond my capabilities despite the rather daunting shadow Alkan casts over the world of pianism.

Charles-Valentin Alkan - watching over pianists everywhere

Anyway, I’ll see you on the other side. I doubt I’ll get through all or even most of this, but thought I’d make a sort of plan (and a public one, at that) to see how much I can get done in a week. Time will tell.

30 songs

This meme is known as The 30-Day Song Challenge or something like that. The idea is to post one song each day for thirty days via your electronic medium of choice to fit the specifications below. Everyone’s doing it. I recommend the list at Useless Chamber as an exemplar. However, because of my horror of wasting your time, I’m doing it in one go. I take ‘song’ to mean ‘piece of music’, but have made a point of choosing vocal (and popular) music where possible. I don’t have absolute favourite songs, bands or albums. Links to songs on Spotify and/or YouTube are included where possible or desirable. Enjoy/comment!

1. Your favourite song
Queen – ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’
Spotify / YouTube

2. Your least favourite song
Rossini – Cat Duet. (Every time I accidentally hear it I have the urge to commit murder. The idea alone is hateful, the actuality despicable. I don’t care for Rossini, but in his defence he doesn’t appear to have been its genuine composer.)

3. A song that makes you happy
NRBQ – ‘Always Safety First’
YouTube

4. A song that makes you sad
Television Personalities – ‘World of Pauline Lewis’
Spotify / YouTube

5. A song that reminds you of someone
Ash – ‘Lost In You’
Spotify

6. A song that reminds of you of somewhere
Blur – ‘Girls and Boys’ (Every song reminds me of somewhere, but this one reminds me of going to Normandy in Year 7.)
Spotify / YouTube

7. A song that reminds you of a certain event
Debussy – ‘Beau Soir’ (the song set for transposition in my Year 2 Advanced Keyboard Skills paper. I performed abysmally.)
Spotify / YouTube

8. A song that you know all the words to
Belle and Sebastian – ‘Lazy Line Painter Jane’
Spotify

9. A song that you can dance to
Frank Zappa – ‘Catholic Girls’
YouTube

10. A song that makes you fall asleep
Morton Feldman – Piano and String Quartet
Spotify / YouTube

11. A song from your favourite band
Ben Folds Five – ‘Battle Of Who Could Care Less’
Spotify / YouTube

12. A song from a band you hate
I entirely ignore bands I expect to hate, but presumably anything by N-Dubz would fit the bill.

13. A song that is a guilty pleasure
Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel – ‘What I’ve Been Looking For’ (from High School Musical)
Spotify / YouTube

14. A song that no one would expect you to love
Prince Far I – ‘I And I Are The Chosen One’
Spotify / YouTube

15. A song that describes you
The Kinks – ‘Art Lover’ (The title describes me, not the lyrics, er, obviously.)
Spotify / YouTube (live)

16. A song that you used to love but now hate
I can’t think of any instance where my opinion has been so totally reversed. I suppose I used to be able to tolerate the Rossini.

17. A song that you hear often on the radio
Hubert Bath – ‘Out of the Blue’ (I haven’t listened regularly to music radio for years, but I hear this quite often on Radio 5.)

18. A song that you wish you heard on the radio
Television – ‘Marquee Moon’ (Actually I’m sure this must pop up on BBC 6 Music quite a bit.)
Spotify / YouTube

19. A song from your favourite album
Radiohead – ‘Planet Telex’
Spotify / YouTube (live)

20. A song that you listen to when you’re angry
Eels – ‘Dog Faced Boy’
Spotify / YouTube

21. A song that you listen to when you’re happy
Prefab Sprout – ‘Hey Manhattan!’
Spotify / YouTube

22. A song that you listen to when you’re sad
Tom Waits – ‘Invitation To The Blues’
YouTube (live)

23. A song that you want to play at your wedding
Karg-Elert – ‘Nun danket alle Gott’, op. 65 no. 59 (Though it’s not a song, and I’m not getting married.)
Spotify

24. A song that you want to play at your funeral
Karg-Elert – ‘O Gott, du frommer Gott’, op. 65 no. 50 (Though it’s not a song, and I’m not going to die.)
Spotify

25. A song that makes you laugh
Gunther Erdmann – ‘Vier Ecken hat das Zeitungsblatt’
Spotify

26. A song that you can play on an instrument
Madeleine Dring – ‘Upper Lambourne’
Spotify

27. A song that you wish you could play
Schumann – ‘Frühlingsnacht’ (I can bluff my way through it, but it would be nice to be able to play it well – then I would be more or less capable of playing the whole Eichendorff Liederkreis, which would feel like an achievement.)
Spotify / YouTube

28. A song that makes you feel guilty
Toby Slater – ‘Consumption’

29. A song from your childhood
Madness – ‘Shut Up’
Spotify / YouTube

30. Your favourite song at this time last year
Flanders & Swann – ‘Slow Train’
Spotify / YouTube

Yesterday’s world

I pondered in passing, when writing a year ago about the Beeching cuts, the subject of feeling nostalgia for something that existed before one’s birth. It’s a strange idea, albeit not an unnatural one, and perhaps I feel it more than most people because of being anachronistic myself, out of step with a lot of modern culture and so on. I just wasn’t made for these times, as one of those noisy beat combos young people seem to appreciate sang recently.

Last month I catalogued a book from 1951 catchily titled A Concise Guide to the Town and University of Cambridge in an Introduction and Four Walks. Here it is:

The book was published by Bowes & Bowes, a bookseller based at 1 Trinity Street, the current site of the Cambridge University Press Bookshop. It seems a world away, the independent bookshop selling its own publications and stationery, wrapping purchases up with brown paper and string, but of course that’s essentially what the CUP Bookshop is today, only without the brown paper. What this particular bookshop no longer possesses, though, is the sense of identity that comes from being named after its proprietor. Other Cambridge bookshops still retain this feature – Galloway & Porter (though as of last year this establishment is sadly no more, and it disposes of its old shelving next week), G. David, Brian Jordan, and Heffers – though even Heffers has lost something since the possessive apostrophe disappeared from its name, and as part of the Blackwell chain is more impersonal now than ever before – or at least seems that way until you meet its charming and helpful staff.

I wasn’t interested so much in the content of the guide – Cambridge, after all, has presumably changed less in the past 60 years than many other British cities – as I was in the advertisements at the front and back. I remember looking through old concert programmes as a child and being attracted by what we would now call the minimalism of the advertisements – black and white, print but few pictures, and all in Gill Sans, it seemed at the time. The adverts in the guide tend to follow this model (though with more serifs on show), and give a glimpse into a Cambridge that has disappeared, almost but not quite tangible.

I’d love to have visited this place, though one hopes they kept the chocolate and tobacco separate.

Wilson’s are still going, though they’ve moved out of the centre of Cambridge and now specialise in bookbinding. I shouldn’t think you’d be able to get a viewcard from them, whatever that is.

Interesting that the printer’s advert should be the least cluttered. It’s laid out like a book’s title page. Very effective.

Not only is there a branch of Miller’s still in existence today, but it even uses the same pianistic logo. A triumph in this age of rebranding.

Benskins! There’s a name of bygone days. It recalls Alan Bennett’s lovely Betjeman pastiche about the sewage system:

Lady typist — office party –
Golly! All that gassy beer!
Tripping home down Hendon Parkway
To her improved Windermere.

Chelsea buns and lounge bar pasties,
All swilled down with Benskins Pale,
Purified and cleansed by charcoal,
Fill the taps in Colindale.

Benskin is also the name of Donald Sinden’s character in Doctor in the House. Plenty of bookshops and brown paper in that film.

All Those Things You Would Expect To Find At “THE CHEMISTS”… Could it be any more suggestive? Perhaps Eric Idle was their copywriter. I can understand the pestle and mortar, but the presence of the owl holding a test tube baffles me slightly. I may be missing something.

A cruel reminder of the transience of things. There’s still that pointy bit in the Aviva logo, but nobody ever thinks of Norwich Cathedral nowadays.

Most poignantly of all, an advert for Fitzbillies, the Cambridge institution that fell victim to the recession last month. The stickiest Chelsea buns in the world, it was claimed. I refuse to believe they’ve gone for good.

Fragility/Maltesers

In a Christmas Day broadcast in 1947, he recalled how his nanny, Hannah Wallis, a simple and loving soul, had bought him a toy for a present, a toy which he wanted and for which she’d had to save up. In the excitement of unpacking his stocking, he trod on it and broke it. He didn’t let on, hiding the debris in his room, saying nothing to her lest he should hurt her feelings. Later, [after] Hannah tidied his room, he found the broken pieces put in the waste paper basket. Neither of them ever mentioned it. It’s a good job childhood is at the beginning of our lives; we’d never survive it if it were in the middle.

This is an episode from the childhood of John Betjeman, recounted in Alan Bennett’s Poetry in Motion. The sentiment of his last sentence is absolutely spot-on. I am accustomed to think of myself as having been a sensitive child, but as an adult there are so many more tiny details I notice which, if I were more emotionally demonstrative, would make me collapse in tears.

A case in point: last week I took delivery of an order of four toner cartridges for a printer at work. On unpacking them, my colleague discovered a bag of Maltesers at the bottom of the box. How kind of them, was my first reaction. Then she suggested that they had probably been left behind accidentally by the driver. Yes, that’s it, I thought. Some poor man somewhere, having completed his morning round of deliveries, has just turned to his passenger seat to look for the snack he bought from the newsagent that morning, and has found nothing there. Why should I feel such a melancholic sadness at this (on the face of it) inconsequential separation? It’s not as if the man’s lost his son or daughter. And it’s not just because I hold chocolate in such high esteem either, though if the story has a moral it’s clearly that one should eat all chocolate immediately, preferably before leaving the shop. I think my consciousness that the smallest thing can have the greatest effect may be relevant.

Later, I catalogued a book we had bought. This one was unusual in that it had been dedicated by the author:

Rebecca,
On your birthday, with
best wishes and the encouragement
to pursue your interests in Middle
East studies.

[name redacted]
31 March 2004

Silly to get worked up about it, really. Maybe the author wouldn’t care that this book had ended up in a library. How can one be sure? But 2004 isn’t so long ago, and I wondered what had happened in the meantime to make the book surplus to requirements. Perhaps Rebecca died – or her interest in the Middle East did. Or maybe all she wanted for her birthday was a packet of Maltesers.