The Legend of 1900

Read the description for this movie last Saturday: an orphan spends his entire life aboard an ocean liner as a piano prodigy.

Do what?

How did a baby wind up orphaned on an ocean liner in 1900? What a silly premise for a movie.

Then I watched it. Two and half hours later, with tears streaming down my face, I watched the retired ship burst into flames as it was imploded and sunk.

And I got it.

If you haven’t seen this movie, find it. If you love music, piano in particular, find it NOW. The score was written by Ennio Morricone, world-famous composer of movie scores for over 50 years, I suppose. If you’ve seen, or heard, “The Mission”, then you know his music.

The last movie that touched me musically in this way was “Somewhere in Time.” Yes, it’s a syrupy love story / time travel thing, but the music…..Rachmaninoff and Morricone. It doesn’t get better.

The first time I heard Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini it was by accident. I bought an LP of his works, looking for a piano concerto movement, but I didn’t which concerto it came from. So I put this album on the stereo and sort of half-way listened to the music. It was just ok at first, then the very “russian march” variation came out of the speakers and grabbed my attention, demanding to be heard. Next came the Deus Irae…how did that get in there? Then the music turned all misty, eerie, like it was wandering through fog-shrouded woods at sunset. The key shifted from minor to major, the sun came out, and there it was….the 18th variation. In all the world, I don’t believe there’s a single piece of music any more breathtaking than this one. It’s not very long, maybe a minute or two, but when it drew to a close I was on the floor of my parents’ living room sobbing. This is what I wanted.

But I knew I wouldn’t get there. It was out of my reach. Maybe I could have tried it then; certainly not now.

Then, last Saturday, I heard “Playing Love” from The Legend of 1900, music by Ennio Morricone.

And I sobbed again.

Immediately I came in here and started crawling all over the ‘net looking for it, and discovered that there were lots of  other pianists crawling around the ‘net looking for it too. But it was just out of my grasp. I’d find references to it, only to discover broken links.

Until I tripped over a website in China, dedicated to sharing Morricone’s muic. Yes, they had the piano score, free. But you had to e-mail them to get it.

E-mail someone I dont’ know in China, to get music I really wanted. How do I know this is really a site that supplies music? There were a couple of links to .pdf files of other pieces so I grabbed those. And they were good. There’s a very sultry rag (sounds incompatible, but it works) written by Jelly Roll Morton, a historical character who is instrumental to 1900’s plot.

But, do I dare e-mail them for the rest of the score? Most of the site is in Chinese, for heaven’s sake! Even after you hit the translate button. I debated over it with myself, and after several hours of negotiating, decided to give it a shot.

Obviously, my computer still works, so I didn’t get wormed or virused or anything. But, no music either. I figured, what the heck, it was a shot in the dark anyway, no harm no foul.

Monday I got an email from someone named HAN, in badly translated english, that said “Dear Lady…” and had a link to a site where I could download the score.

My computer still works, the score is in a new folder called music/legend of 1900, and two of the pieces are fresh of my printer.

Think I’ll go play.

 

making it up

Thanks to Amy I stumbled onto Quiescence Music and am, after all these years, learning to improvise.

I’ve always been afraid of improvisation. It took me ten years, from 1996 to 2006, to get comfortable with playing from a lead sheet. The first time I saw a lead sheet I was thirteen years old, at summer music camp at William and Mary, and was the only pianist interested in playing keyboard with a jazz ensemble. They gave me a lead sheet for “Watermelon Man” (and if anyone can tell me the TV show that used this as a theme I will be eternally grateful) I looked at it and said “where are the notes?” (It wasn’t the Flip Wilson show, was it?)

I think the scary thing about improv is that you are so vulnerable when you’re doing it. Whatever comes out is 100% you. It will reflect the influences of the “rhythm and rhyme of the poem of your life (Michael Card)”. It makes you look in the mirror and see who you really are, listen to yourself. No way would I do this as a teenager. It’s somewhat easier now.

Anyway, I’ve been sitting at my dusty piano, making up stuff on the black keys that sounds Celtic, happy as a pig in mud.

Thanks Amy!!!

 

Coming of Age

I started writing this post around January 7th. Then I got sidetracked by, well, January. I think I mentioned somewhere down there that I don’t really like January.

Anyway, I met with a friend of mine this week who happens to be the music and arts minister at our church. If the term “arts minister” doesn’t register, that’s ok. Suffice it to say that he finds tangible ways to make worship more meaningful for those of us who are moved by music, visual and fine art, the spoken word, etc. I shared these next words with him: 

“If I can’t be the best <insert noun here> then I won’t <insert associated verb here> at all.”

I hear these words every week from twenty different kids between the ages of 13 and 18.

When I was 12 years old I decided that I was going to college and get a degree in music. There were people who tried to talk me out of it, even bribed me by saying they’d pay for my college education if I majored in anything other than music. But my mind was made up and there was no changing it. I auditioned at Brevard College in NC and received a small scholarship, but decided against going there because, back then, it was a 2-year program and I would have had to transfer somewhere else eventually. I also auditioned at James Madison University, was accepted into their program, and headed to Harrisonburg in August of 1979.

Turns out I didn’t like Harrisonburg all that much, and my piano professor was just plain weird. My boyfriend (husband now) was at Virginia Tech, so I went to Blacksburg and auditioned there, fell in love with the campus and the piano professor who heard me play (and questioned some of the techniques and interpretations my JMU professor espoused) so I headed to Blacksburg the following January.

I got that degree a little more than two years later, finishing college in just under 3 years, and starting teaching piano. Make that babysitting piano students. I had about 2 students, and about 20 kids who were dumped at the studio for an hour every week. Decided that I didn’t want to babysit, got a job at an AT&T assembly plant–factory, that is–, got married, took COBOL programming classes that were way easy, got a programming job, and began a life of working in corporate America. The pay was very good, and programming was fun. Maybe if I’d been allowed to just design, build, test, debug, etc. I could have remained happy. But that didn’t happen. Work became all about making this week’s boss look good and last week’s boss look bad, about training my managers to manage, about training fresh-out-of-college boys who were paid more than me to do my job, whatever it was this week. And on it goes.

All during those years the piano remained in the periphery of my life. I played a wedding, played for the choir at church occasionally, played keyboards when we went “contemporary” a decade or so back. If you’re into classical liturgical music you might be familiar with the Brahms Requiem. He wrote two versions of it: one for choir and orchestra, in German, and another for choir and two pianos, in English. I played one of the pianos once. It was good.

So what?? Well, way back in 1984 the hometown newspaper printed an article entitled “Giving up the Dream: Some musicians are happier when the music stops.” This article hit me where I lived then. It said that many serious musicians are happier when they come to grips with the fact that they will never go to Juliard, never play a concerto, never ‘make it’ in the music industry. “If I can’t be the best <insert noun here> then I won’t <insert associated verb here> at all.”

Here’s the thing: 20 years later, I still have this newspaper article in my Daytimer. I still read it on occasion. And it don’t believe it. I wasn’t happier when the music stopped, or slowed down, or whatever it did.

Back in college there was an Education professor who had been a piano major at the Cincinnati Conservatory. He went on to receive a Master’s degree in Education and never played the piano again. Ever. I couldn’t understand how he did that.

Twenty years later I realized that I had, for the most part, done the same thing. I did understand how, but not why.

So here I am, sliding into mid-life, back where I was at 12, coming of age. I want to play the piano, and sing, and dance and write and whatever. I’m not going to Juliard or Carnegie Hall. I’m not going to win a Pulitzer or make the NYT best-seller list. But I am going to do something that gives me pleasure.

Back to those kids, the ones that are saying “If I can’t be the best <insert noun here> then I won’t <insert associated verb here> at all.”

Listen up: it doesn’t matter if you aren’t the best whatever. If you love it, keep doing it!

And for those of us that aren’t exactly kids anymore, who may have bought into the “Giving up the Dream” philosophy: if that philosophy works for you, Great! But if it doesn’t, scrap it. Dust of the piano, break out the paintbrush, dance like no one is watching.

Come of age.

 

Via Dolorosa

Lent: from darkness, through death and into resurrected life.

It’s a common theme that takes many forms, a metaphor for the Christian life as well as a metaphor for many of us who’ve lived through brokenness and now walk the path of healing.

Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering. Literally, the path that Jesus walked through Jerusalem from his condemnation to the place of his execution. We all walk the path of suffering during seasons of life. They are difficult steps to take. We’ve all worn these shoes at one time or another. And sometimes we tend to think that our own brand of suffering is worse than everyone elses. But it’s not.

 I have fibromyalgia, which means I have pain, almost daily. Research suggests that people with fibro experience pain differently, such that what feels like intense pain to me would more than likely go unnoticed to you. If I could magically hand my pain over to someone else for a moment, that person would probably want to know what all the fuss is about because, for him, there would be no pain. For this reason, many people, many medical professionals, deny the reality of fibromyalgia. I’ve dealt with doctors in the past who denied my pain, who told me that I didn’t hurt, as I sat there looking at them in tears from the pain of physical examination. I don’t care if you don’t understand my pain, or don’t believe I have pain. But please don’t tell me that I’m not feeling what I feel, because you, whoever you are, have no idea how I feel. You are not me.

Fibromyalgia has a red-headed stepchild called depression. Think about it. If you hurt all the time, you might possibly become depressed. It’s also possible that a person can be susceptible to depression and, as a result of the effects of depression, have pain. You want to know something? It doesn’t really matter which one came first, the depression or the chronic pain, when you’re living with both. However, it does matter which comes first if you are trying to prove disability to a judge. Depression is considered to be more disabilitating than chronic pain.

This is fascinating to me for the simple reason that our society tends to take a dim view of mental illness. Look at medical insurance coverage for mental illness compared to physical illness and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Try telling someone that you have a mental illness, like depression, and watch the reaction. There’s a stigma around mental illness that is unmistakable. It’s OK to take medication for pain if you need it, but anti-depressants? Aren’t they “mood enhancing” or “mood altering” drugs?? Sounds like LSD, doesn’t it?

Why am I ranting about this? Because it’s Lent. It’s time to take some of the stones off my back and lay them by the side of the road, build an Ebeneezer from them and make room to pick up some pebbles that are easier to carry.

I’m playing the piano again Sunday, a piece entitled, you guessed it, Via Dolorosa. My daddy loved this particular piece and I don’t believe he ever heard me play it before, but there’s a first time for everything and I know he’ll be listening.

And I’ll still be walking my path.

 

Dizzy Fingers

Well looky here.

It’s 3:45 AM Sunday morning and I’m wide awake. Blame some of it on the darn cat, who is now sleeping peacefully on the back of the loveseat about two feet from me. He’s a crumudgeon, however you spell it. Eleven, no, twelve years old. My kids named him Simba as in ‘The Lion King’. He’s more of a lion buddha, though. Fat and darned proud of it. He’s had surgery on his ears and they’re sort of wrinkled now. And he smirks. A lot. He’s smirking at me now, matter of fact. He likes to hide in our bedroom and then jump onto the bed after we settle in for the night, which means that he wakes me up. He also likes to sleep on my pillow when I’m using it. No manners at all, this cat.

So he does his thing around midnight, jumps onto the bed and starts wandering around looking for somewhere to get comfortable. He tries my pillow, hubby’s pillow, winds up between us. I’m already having trouble getting to sleep, and now there’s 20 pounds of cat trying to squeeze between my head and the wall, between hubby and me, wherever. Around 2:00 I hit my limit and pushed him off the bed. He proceeded to hack something up on the floor next to me. It was on purpose, too. He woke up hubby, we chased him out of the bedroom, hubby went right back to sleep. Not me.

I squirmed. I tried to think sleepy thoughts. Nothing.

Right after New Year’s I stayed up for 30-some hours. Couldn’t sleep at all. It’s probably hormones. I’m starting to understand the jokes about being post-menopausal and going without sleep for 3 year stretches. Only it’s not funny. It’s annoying. Sort of like the cat, who is now somewhere behind me huffing and puffing, either getting ready to demand that I let him out, or trying to settle his girth on the dog pillow. Nope, scratch that…he’s tippy-tippy-ing around looking for somewhere else to land. I may have to encourage him to go outside for a while, just so I can drink some tea in peace and at least try to settle down mentally for a few minutes. Yep, he’s going out. Now.

Where was I? Oh yeah, trying to calm down. I’m playing the piano this morning. It’s no big deal, a Schubert thing I learned in high school about 30 years ago. It’s nice to have things in the repertoire to fall back on when I have to play on short notice, and occasionally without sleep.

Maybe the opportunity will arise to play ‘Dizzy Fingers’ or ‘Kitten on the Keys’…..but not at church.

Hmmmm…..’Dizzy Fingers’.

That’s me!

 

Losing track

So I’m looking at my little blogs and wondering where on earth I’ve been for the past 2 weeks. Well, let me think.

On December 2 I re-entered the world of playing the piano in “big church”. I suppose it went well, w/ no major foul-ups, because I don’t remember playing it. I remember granny-walking up the steps to get to the piano. Still can’t do steps that well since the knee surgery. I remember granny-walking back down them again. And that’s it. Hubby said it sounded really good, and he’s usually honest w/ me when I mess something up. Plus, I’ve noticed that the times I play something really well–that should read “from the heart” as opposed to “from the head”–I don’t remember the event at all. When I was in high school my knees would shake so badly during recitals; I could hardly do the necessary pedaling. Now I just don’t think about it. I remember every mistake I made in every high school recital. Don’t remember much past that. I know I knocked my college senior recital out of the park, because I don’t remember a darn thing about it. Except for being backstage before and after.

Then Sunday night came, and things went downhill very fast. About 9:00 PM my chest, neck and left arm started hurting and the pain grew progressively worse. About 10 I started having trouble breathing. This has happened before and I’ve always chalked it up to “fibromyalgia flare-up, super-sized”, but it was worse. I called my mom, I called my nurse friend, I called my next-door neighbor. She’s a cardiac patient. My dad had so many cardiac problems that it’s still hard to keep them all straight in my head. Neighbor came over. At some point between midnight and 2:00 AM she called 911 and I went off to the hospital. No cardiac problems, JUST fibromyalgia, extra-strength. I’ve had some really bad flare-ups over the years, but this one was probably the worst. I couldn’t turn my head until about Wednesday afternoon. I already had an appointment Friday w/ a new doctor who specializes in fibro. So, I’ve lost an entire week to the monster. New doctor said that calling 911 was indeed the right thing to do given the situation. Thanks.

Today I’m learning to give my self permission to rest when I’m tired, to say “No” when I need to, like when the kids want all their friends to come over here, to be angry at things that make me angry, instead of pushing them away or inside or whatever. And then to let them go. I have to constantly pry my fingers open, to accept whatever comes, examine it, feel it, and then let it go. Hard medicine when you’re a control freak.

I’m knitting socks. I think I’m addicted to knitting socks. It looks so hard, but is really quite easy once you get the hang of the double-pointed needles. You just keep going around and around, no thought required, which is a good thing during fibro flares because thinking becomes next-to-impossible to do.

As a matter of fact, I’m having trouble concentrating on what I’m writing here now.

I think I’ll go knit.

 

Learning to walk again

Pain has been a constant companion of mine for at least fifteen years. It’s not excruciating as a rule, but it can be. It is constant though, except for an occasional rare moment when the planets are in perfect alignment or something. I’m pretty sure it’s something I did to myself; the professional opinion is that is was triggered by a minor car accident. Wherever it came from, however it descended upon me, it’s here. The weird thing about it is that, if by some miracle it were to just disappear, I think I’d miss it. Isn’t that bizarre? There’s a saying, something about the devil we know being preferable to the one we don’t.

I’m not sure how it happened. One day I was teaching piano in a studio, glorified babysitting for the most part. The next I was married, working a blue collar job in an AT&T factory, then taking a programming class, and then working as a programmer. All the while, still playing the piano for the small church where my husband and I were married. Then we moved, I took a better paying position, sold my baby grand to buy a house because our first child was on the way. And the music started to fade into the background. The harder I worked, the better I became at my new chosen professional, the more the music faded until, one day, it just left. And the pain started. Actually I think the music just moved into a spare room and decided to wait until I found my way back to it.

Last October I played in a recital for the first time since college. One piece. Rachmaninoff Prelude in C# minor, “The Bells of Moscow”. It’s a chestnut, a war horse, everyone plays it at one time or another, and I’d been scared of it since forever. But the two of us, the music and me, sat down together and started listening to each other. And we came to an understanding.

There were plans to put an entire recital together, from Baroque to Billy Joel, but the pain got in the way. And now, I’m learning to walk again, with my fingers on a keyboard, with my crutches and stiff, swollen knee. I’m going to fall down, more than once, but I have to get back up. I don’t have a choice.

During my freshman year of college I had a music theory professor who broke his leg. He came into class on a Monday morning, in a cast, on crutches, and began to lecture on intervals and ear training, learning to recognize intervals by listening to them and not by playing them on a piano. And he said, as he leaned on the old grand piano in the theory classroom, “Do not use the piano as a crutch.” The room burst into laughter as he realized what he’d said and the context surrounding his comment.

My piano will be my crutch, and I will not be convinced otherwise.