Playing Beethoven again

Some months ago a friend gave me the three volumes of Beethoven piano sonatas in hardcover. They'd never been used, and though they were fairly elderly, they were in pristine condition.

I hadn't played the sonatas for some time, although I've had the books since I was a teenager, and learned them most of them (with a few exceptions) as a young man. During the years I've come back to them a number of times, but had found myself less and less enamoured of them for some reason.

Over the summer holidays I didn't play the piano much, and of course, at my age, that's not a good idea. Your fingers quickly lose their suppleness and agility - that is, what suppleness and agility they still retain. So it was quite a workout to get back to playing at all well again.

I decided to tackle the Beethoven sonatas one by one, remembering that at some point in my life I'd read that Beethoven had supposedly said he never practised scales and arpeggios: learning a piece (he was probably talking about one of his pieces!) was in itself sufficient to make his fingers work. And with that in mind, I began with Sonata I and worked my way through the first book.

It was a terrible effort at first, and I felt as though I could barely play at all. But then gradually, as I worked my way from the front of the book to the back and then back again to the front, the fingers decided that they could get up and going, and now they're doing very well.

I can't say I'm playing the fast sections up to speed, and there are still innumerable moments when I have to stop and check if I'm really playing what's written (I've found a few spots where I've been playing things wrong since I was a youth!), but I'm enjoying these sonatas all over again, and have now started on the second volume. Just played through the 'Moonlight' Sonata which of course was never named that by Beethoven. In fact the last movement of it is anything but romantic moonlight. It's a major workout, and is riddled with arpeggios.

Beethoven, for the most part, wrote piano music that most people could play. Occasionally he goes crazy and writes things that are almost impossible and sometimes writes things that require a huge amount of work just to achieve something relatively simple. But surprisingly, as I play these pieces again, I find they're more straightforward than I thought. It helps that I know where most of them are going and that they're familiar, but in general he uses relatively simple means to achieve his effects.

And the slow movements are something that you're much more in tune with as you get older. I can remember as a teenager wondering what the great gaps were in one slow movement and wondering why I had to count so carefully when nothing was happening. That's something youth doesn't appreciate so readily. At my age the wondrous slowness is something you fall in love with again and again.

Accompanying

The poem in the Writer's Almanac for the 17th January this year was The Accompanist, by William Matthews.

The title naturally caught my attention, since I've spent a good deal of my life accompanying singers on the piano, and though Matthews is talking about a jazz situation, the elements are similar:

Don't play too much, don't play
too loud, don't play the melody.
You have to anticipate her
and to subdue yourself.

Wow, that's so familiar! Matthews puts those who suggest that the accompanist and the singer have a 'partly sexual' relationship in their place with the line:

it's partly
sexual but it's mostly practice
and music.

There's a similar thing goes on in playing for 'worship' times at church. Both the Assembly of God (which we used to attend) and the Baptist church (where we still are) lean towards an element of improvisation in the music. Some of the song leaders (often ones that don't play an instrument) think that worship doesn't really require attention to the details of the music. They think that even though we'll have a 'practice' this practice should also be a worship time. Nope, it's a time to practise. I could paraphrase Matthews on this point:

it's partly
worship but it's mostly practice
and music.

There's no worship without the fingers knowing where they're going to go. Musicians in worship bands have a difficult role to play. They're leading the congregation into a place of worship, but they often don't get there themselves, because they have to use a good deal of their brain to keep track of what the rest of their body is doing: keeping to the chord structure, playing the right rhythms for the particular moment, hitting the right notes (or turning wrong ones into right ones). It's a servant role: the guests enjoy the food, the servant brings the dishes in and clears them away again.

Updating the HitTail Top Ten

18 more posts to go before I hit the big 1000. The aim, as I said in an earlier post, is to do this before the end of 2008. I guess I could write a lot of idiotic, meaningless posts - one-liner posts, even - but I'm going to play fair and aim to keep up the extraordinarily high quality of my posts. (Did I hear someone say, Phooey?)
Anyway, it's a while since I checked out HitTail. For various reasons it's gone on the backburner in the last month, along with a few other things. (Partly because I've been more busy musically than I have through most of the year, and partly because of the prostate stuff which I've discussed in several posts on Workreport.net.)
I thought I'd see if there's been any change in the top ten search items that pick up on my site. And nope! They're pretty much the same as they've been in a long while. Here they are again:
1. Athlete's hand - the all time favourite; currently running at over 152 searches, but if we count all the variations on the theme, there'll be far more than that.
2. Mike Crowl. Well, there's a turn up for the books.
3. James Berardinelli. This film critic has been amongst the top for some time. Don't ask me why: I don't talk about him that much.
4. Brent Stavig. Another top name on the list. Extraordinary.
5. The Great Divorce notes. I have never listed any notes about C S Lewis' The Great Divorce. It's only the combination of having mentioned the book and having 'notes' in the title of my blog that brings this one up so regularly. Other books get the same treatment, but obviously not as often.
6. Shrinking shirts. Another one of those items that got mentioned in a post once and have kept this blog in the public eye ever since.
7. Nintendo jewellery. I sometimes suspect that I'm the only blogger to have ever mentioned Nintendo jewellery. I still have no idea what it is.
8. Karl Maugham. Due to my inability to spell Mr Maughan's name correctly, anyone else who spells it incorrectly finds my site.
9. Athlete's fingers. One of the other variations on number one in the list.
10. Chrissy Popadics. I mentioned Chrissy once many moons again - maybe mentioned her again briefly in a later post, and ever since then she's turned up trumps. Wierd.

Comparing this list with the previous one I did in August, there's only one change: The Great Divorce Notes don't appear there. Instead, my name comes up twice, the second time as Michael Crowl. Scary.

Book of the Week

Okay, book of the week: The Encyclopedia of Nutritional Supplements by Michael Murray. 576 pages of information on improving your health naturally. I thought it was only sports people who took nutritional supplements, but seems like everyone and his brother/sister is into it.
I find it hard to imagine anyone working their way through nearly 600 pages of stuff on such a topic, but plainly I’m lacking in imagination. As one reviewer on Amazon.com puts it: This is an excellent reference book on vitamins and other nutritional supplements and a "must have" for those interested in learning more about improving their health naturally. It is very well laid out and chock-a-block full of useful information on the dosage, available forms and reasons why each supplement is beneficial. It makes me more confident when I'm shopping for supplements and I'm able to avoid making mistakes buying "snake oil" or empty supplements that have little nutritional value. Thank you Dr. Murray.
I just had a thought. Maybe this is the book to check up on when you’re trying to find out about athlete’s foot and athlete’s fingers, as so many people on Google seem to be doing. And since sportspeople are amongst the highest users of nutritional supplements, the book must surely contain something about this topic.