Introduction
“OWW!!!”
“What?”
“AAAAAAAaaaaaaarrrrgghhh!!!”
“WHAT!!???”
“Band-aid!!!”
… the latter yelled as I stuck my bleeding pinky in my mouth to prevent blood from running all over the counters, furniture, and carpet that lay between where I was (the kitchen) and the comparative safety of where I was now “perambulating with great haste” (the bathroom). After a few more yells, much rinsing, soaking with Betadine, and subsequent fitting of gauze and bandaids, the panic subsided, and I was able to look more objectively at the bulbous wadding around my now sixteenth of an inch shortened little finger.
“Hmm,” I muttered. “Well, I guess I’m not going to be practicing my piano for a couple of days….”
The Current Activity
Of course, the injured finger was of some concern – the result of keeping wicked-sharp knives in the kitchen and a moment of carelessness: the knife in question sliced off the end of my finger just as nonchalantly as it was slicing through the garlic I was holding in an obviously too delicate position.
But, of equal – if not more – concern, was how it would affect my recently-acquired activity: the piano. (More properly, the “piano-forte”, but we’ll get into that later…) You need that little finger to hit the octaves, to finish runs, to end arpeggios, to go up and down scales – you need it for a whole lot of things on the piano.
Things I’m not able to do with that little finger currently wrapped up in bandages.
As a compensatory exercise, I tried spanning an octave with my thumb and ring finger. I could do it, but many pieces, like the “Moonlight”, require you to span more than an octave (an octave and a half-step, to be precise), and the fourth finger wasn’t going to cut that.
Fortunately, the damage was minimal. As I write this, the massive packing has given way to a single finger band-aid, and that will be gone soon. I should be able to resume my playing, shortly. Again.
Which brings us to the point of the blog: In this more mature phase of my life, I’ve decided to take up the piano. Resume piano in earnest is probably the more correct phrasing, as I am not entirely unfamiliar with the instrument, but it has been out of my activity base for a long number of years. The reasons for the hiatus, and the reasons why I’m resuming will be the subject of further posts: Since this is a new direction and one that has some end goals, it seemed like a good thing to do would be to record and reflect the progress, here (since I’m out of commission for a bit, now also seems like a good time to set this [blog] up.)
There is pre-history and other musings on music that needs to be related, as well – the endeavor doesn’t just come out of a vacuum. A long series of events, thoughts, experiences, and decisions have led to where I am, now. I’ve thought about how I want to relate this – one way would be to provide backdated posts, to keep the chronology straight. The problem with that is they may seem live, when they’re really recollections. I think the better approach will be to add them and label them as such.
Notes, videos, links, interesting (to me, anyway) anecdotes on music and piano, and maybe a few other instruments as sidenotes – this is where I’ll be dumping my musical brain.
Mechanics/Implementation Notes:
I’m just getting this set up, so you’ll forgive me if the format looks a little bare, at the moment. I’ll be prettying things up as I go. Also, comments are currently disabled, because I have to put in spam protection mechanisms before I can enable them. But, I will definitely be soliciting commentary – good and bad. Just be reasonably polite and form complete sentences, please. (note – comments are now enabled)
Incidentally, the link between food preparation (which, in my case, led to the injury described in the introduction) and music is not new – Itzhak Perlman, for example, has a favorite snack he likes to prepare: thinly sliced onions, slow cooked for hours (presumably while practicing) until they get soft and sweet.
I’ll have to give that a try – but do watch those knives…
