Piano drills

When I was a kid I used to wonder how on earth people managed to practice three hours a day. Now I am an adult with few calls on my time I find it quite easy. I like to begin by sight reading a few folk songs just to warm myself up. Then I launch myself on my scales and arpeggios. I'm trying to persuade myself to play them at the specified speed without sacrificing accuracy. B flat harmonic minor and F sharp harmonic minor are particular problems. The spacing of the black notes is awkward. My chromatic contrary motion scales are accurate but slow. If I make a mistake I make myself repeat the scale or arpeggio three times correctly. Sometimes I get cross when I make mistakes. Then I make myself take a few deep breaths and I return calm to the keyboard. My pieces require a different approach. Just running through each piece isn't really a lot of help. I have to have some goal in mind. For example today I had picked a few problem bars. I played them again and again and again and studied the way my fingers moved until I was satisfied with my progress. It is often hard to hear any improvement in a single day. I can only see the dividends of my endeavour the next day when my fingers move automatically to the right position. Like today I found it much easier to play the chordal semiquaver passage in Grieg's Butterfly. That improvement has only come about thanks to hours of diligent practice.

The end result of all this effort? A certificate I hope. Something to frame and put on my wall. I set myself the goal of getting to grade 8 when I was a kid. I really want to fulfill that ambition.

Test Ride

As I've said before my bike got nicked from my garden shed. For that reason I went to Cambridge to buy a replacement. Having handed over my bank card as surety I took out two bikes for test rides. I finally settled on a Marin Fairfax. It has an aluminum frame and it is built for commuters. My previous bike was a mountain bike but it is some years since I encountered any mountains so I don't nowadays need granny gears or knobbly tyres. Instead I need slick tyres for road use, a rack for paniers and mud guards. That'll do me for regular use and the Marin Fairfax won't disgrace me at all on club rides.

I couldn't take a bike home with me today. The bike is on order and won't be delivered until next month. However I did treat myself to a couple of collections of folk songs. Boosey and Hawkes do these nice volumes of songs from England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the Americas. I use them for sight reading practice and harmony study. By the by I think I will get quite an education in history as well as in music as many of these songs reflect the news of the day. Any one know of good sites on folk music?

Favourite hymns

I'm not a church goer. As a child I did attend with my parents but I rebelled young. This means that my knowledge of hymn tunes is not what it could be and that is a disadvantage when it comes to learning classical harmony. Come March I will have to sit my grade 5 theory and in June I sit my grade 7 piano so I need to mug up fast. My teacher Aubrey would much rather concentrate on the pieces than bother with aural tests and theory. So to compensate for this oversight I have bought a CD of favourite hymns. It will provide excellent fodder for harmony training. I found I knew many of them and I could instinctively recognise the chords. This bodes well. What I intend to do is to transcribe each hymn together with the harmony. If I can do that grade 5 theory which be easy and grade 7 aural tests should be fine.

Home Movies

Did anyone else here grow up with cine films? My mother and I were talking about how family holidays were choreographed specially so that she could shoot the perfect picture of holiday bliss. Never mind the fact that it took twice as long to accomplish any given task. Allowances had to be made so that camera angles could be changed. Acts had to be reenacted since the camera woman missed the action the first time. My sisters' attitudes varied from lukewarm cooperation to outright hostility but I quite liked the palaver. I tended to act up to the camera. My mother did not like that. She disapproved of me sticking out my tongue at the camera. What she wanted was naturalistic scenes of children playing. Never mind the fact these scenes were mostly staged whereas us kids wanted to treat it as pantomime.

Dog sitting

I'm away from home, down at my mother's in Linton, a village near Cambridge. I am house sitting and dog sitting for my mother while she goes off to a conference on Africa for the weekend. For the conference she has prepared a colour newsletter detailing the group's activities on their visit to Uganda. She was having kittens over it because her printer was playing up but the end result is impressive, far more so than the original brief I suspect. By instinct I tend to be a bit sceptical of the activities of these Christian groups. I am not religious at all but the kind of projects my mother saw seemed to be helpful rather than ideological.

Never too late

I should have done this ages ago but I am compiling a ring binder filled with manuals for the various key bits of hardware and software on which I rely. I think I am like many computer users. I read manuals only when I hit a problem. I prefer to work intuitively but sometimes that approach does not work. It definitely has not worked with my removable hard disk.

The drive says it is full. It certainly is but I want to record fresh data over existing data and I don't know how to do that. The manual is 154 pages long and I feel daunted by its size. Even before I've tried to read the manual I feel I won't understand it. Retrospect isn't the most user-friendly piece of software on the market. I used to use Zip cartridges and they were straightforward but Retrospect isn't like that. It gives error messages without telling you how to get out of that particular fix and I don't like that but I am going to have to persist with this bit of kit since I am too broke to buy a friendlier alternative and I need to back up my system. Somehow!

Restoration

I don't know whether I dare trust my computer. It crashed over the festive period and teasingly invited me to restore the system thus obliterating all my data. I tried doing this not just once but three times and each time it told me there was a boot failure and that I would have to restore the system yet again. In despair I decided to take it back to the supplier and, just to check the error message, I tried switching it on again. It worked. For how long I wonder?

Bret Easton Ellis

My nephew Simon gave me Ellis's new novel Lunar Park. Financially it was a generous gift. The book is only available in hardback at the moment and Simon is just a student. Emotionally it is a hard read. There is so much drink and drug abuse that I wonder any one is still living by the end of the party in the first part of the book but then I am a bit of an innocent in these things. But the novel is not straight autobiography even though Ellis encourages readers to think it is. The story is written in the style of a confession but the detail becomes more and more exaggerated as the book goes on. I scarcely know what to believe. Are Jeb and George Bush really fans of Less Than Zero, Ellis's first novel, as Ellis claims in Lunar Park or is that just another pretend? The thing is Ellis is such an extravagant writer. He just slops on layer after layer of detail. The sheer volume convinces even if common sense may query the excess. I just wonder how much my nephew knew about the book before he bought it for me and what this gift says about the nature of my relationship with my nephew.