sndrstnn: “I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” - Pablo Picasso
Why is Bach boss? leadingtone: Suddenly I had to stop—I had screwed up a turn in the harmony and wasn’t moving toward the goal of G minor anymore. I had embarked upon a Neapolitan odyssey which was now gone quite awry. “Why do you suppose,” my teacher asked, breaking the extremely uncomfortable silence, “that Bach can be so difficult to memorize?” We were working on the C minor keyboard partita, BWV 826.  “It’s because nothing can be moved out of place,” he continued. “Not one thing—not one note in a sequence, not one chord in a progression may be disturbed without shattering the whole, nor can one element in any vertical texture be shifted by the slightest degree. Everything is exactly where it should be, and you will never find a way to improve upon it while continually discovering new means such as this by which to destroy it.” A short time later I would play that particular work for the great Rubinstein pupil Dubravka Tomsic, who spent the first fifteen minutes of our very public time together fussing over voicing and timing in the opening French flourish and the other fifteen minutes repeatedly demanding that I play the first phrase of the ensuing andante with absolutely perfect evenness in front of God and everybody. It was delightful. Read More

Why is Bach boss?

leadingtone:

Suddenly I had to stop—I had screwed up a turn in the harmony and wasn’t moving toward the goal of G minor anymore. I had embarked upon a Neapolitan odyssey which was now gone quite awry.

“Why do you suppose,” my teacher asked, breaking the extremely uncomfortable silence, “that Bach can be so difficult to memorize?” We were working on the C minor keyboard partita, BWV 826. 

“It’s because nothing can be moved out of place,” he continued. “Not one thing—not one note in a sequence, not one chord in a progression may be disturbed without shattering the whole, nor can one element in any vertical texture be shifted by the slightest degree. Everything is exactly where it should be, and you will never find a way to improve upon it while continually discovering new means such as this by which to destroy it.”

A short time later I would play that particular work for the great Rubinstein pupil Dubravka Tomsic, who spent the first fifteen minutes of our very public time together fussing over voicing and timing in the opening French flourish and the other fifteen minutes repeatedly demanding that I play the first phrase of the ensuing andante with absolutely perfect evenness in front of God and everybody. It was delightful.

Read More

Harpoow, ahah :) oldhollywood: Harpo Marx, with his bewigged children Alec, Jimmy, & Minnie (1954) “In the house in Beverly Hills where our four children grew up, living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the old tenement on New York’s East 93rd Street we Marx Brothers called home. But my mother and father would have approved of the way my wife, Susan, and I ran the place in California.  Like the East Side tenement, our house was seldom without the sound of music or laughter or questions being asked or stories being told. One of our kids’ favorite stories was about how they came to be adopted.  They used to sit around Susan and me on the bedroom floor in their bunny-type pajamas while we told ‘The Story’, as we came to call it.  We played it for suspense, like an old-fashioned cliff-hanger, and how they loved it! Susan, an only child who never had any roots, & I, a lone wolf who got married 20 years too late, were adopted by the kids as much as they were by us. We decided we would tell them they were adopted as soon as they could understand speech. We’d seen some pretty sad cases where parents kept putting off telling their adopted children the truth; & the kids, told too late, were full of resentment and a feeling of being unwanted.  In our case, since we were all an adopted family, we had equal amounts of gratitude and respect mixed in with our love for one another. We started telling the kids where they had come from in the form of a true-adventure bedtime story when Alex was two, and Jimmy and Minnie were scarcely a year old.  By the time they were four and three they couldn’t go to bed without hearing ‘The Story’.” -excerpted from Harpo Tells a Story, Reader’s Digest, 1962    
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