Saturday 19th August - Moonshine

 

I find the unpredictable nature of the moon very disconcerting. It has all been explained to me, and I understand it when I see the diagrams, but it still unnerves me to find the full moon staring in through the back door as we lock up at night one time, and then another time peering in through the front bedroom windows as we shut the curtains. 

One month it is tangled in the oak tree at the bottom of the garden, another time hiding in the trees between the bungalows opposite us. Other times it is palely loitering in the morning sky, almost hiding in plain sight.

I have decided to keep a closer eye on it. It still all looks very suspicious, or at the very  least mysterious, to me.

A shallow dive into the internet has informed me of two useful facts;

There are two full moons this month

A full moon rises directly opposite the setting sun; 'if you watch the sun setting, and then turn and face the opposite way you can see the moon rising'. That's always assuming that you can actually see the sun set and the moon rise - trees, houses and so forth are inclined to get in the way, not to mention weather. The link for this picture is below.

https://moonphases.co.uk/moon-calendar

Sunday 18th January - It ain't time to worry yet

I've been rather flattened by another chest infection this past week. I've been keeping a close watch on how I've been getting on, and on Thursday I decided that it was time to clock off for a couple of days. Unfortunately I have no way of cancelling my first class on Thursday mornings, as it is a music club that runs before the school day starts at a local infant school. So I weebled round to the school (it's only a couple of streets away) and did the club, and then weebled home and settled down for a day of sloth on the settee.



The advantage of this enforced inactivity is that I have been able to continue listening to Sissy Spacek reading 'To Kill A Mockingbird', in her lovely, lovely American accent. She's been keeping me company when I've been lying awake at nights propped up on three pillows. I was feeling slightly guilty when I treated myself to the CD set a couple of months ago, but I'm so glad that I did.
(I hadn't realized that it only became available as an ebook and audiobook in July 2014

 My word, what a book. what writing. I love the sound of

'Dr Reynold's step was young and brisk. Mr Heck Tate's was not. His heavy boots punished the porch and he opened the door awkwardly....'

The phrase 'It ain't time to worry yet' is repeated eight times through the book, read in a gentle, soothing drawl. Here are a few of them; you need to say them in your head in that slow, sing-song, almost sleepy Southern sound;

'Don't worry, Scout, it ain't time to worry yet,' said Jem. He pointed. 'Looka yonder....' Atticus was standing with his hands in his pockets.

... it was not time to worry yet. I waited until it was time to worry and listened for Mr Radley's shotgun.

'Hush, Scout,' he said. 'It ain't time to worry yet. I'll let you know when.'  

'Don't you worry about anything,' he said. 'It's not time to worry.'

(That's the advantage of reading it on a Kindle; you can choose 'search this book' from the menu to find a particular phrase.)

I've enjoyed hearing the book read to me so much, that I've downloaded it onto my Kindle to read it again for myself. The words are somehow multidimensional. This could be because I have a memory of the film (must try and watch it again somehow) and now the sound of Sissy Spacek's voice. But I think it is mainly because of the strength of Harper Lee's powerful writing, and the way the story builds.

I've also taken that phrase 'It ain't time to worry yet. I'll let you know when' to heart. Along with Julian of Norwich's famous saying '...All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well'.

And so shall I be, soon. Well, that is. Another couple of days of 'containing myself in patience' and I'll be beating out 'Samba, samba, we love to samba' on my drum again. 

Wednesday 6th June - Rhythm! Pulse! Count! Use your brains!

I'll be blaring about this in www.themusicjungle.co.uk in due course. It's just that I have spent a tough hour learning some piano accompaniments and I need to stop for a rant.

It's exam season. The music exams are scheduled for middle of June through to the first week of July, which means any time soon, and I have been asked to accompany various instrumental candidates.

I will have one, maybe two run-throughs with the various candidates before their exam (apart from one enterprising junior school which pays for their candidates to have up to four weekly rehearsals where we practise playing together, and also go through the aural test requirements. They don't know how lucky they are to have all this extra time!)

In the past I have accompanied students at fairly early grades who play pieces entirely devoid of any attempt to use any other note value than crotchets; like singing

TwinkleTwinklelittlestarhowIwonderwhatyouarelikeadiamondintheskyupabovetheworldsohighTwinkletwinkleslittlestarhowIwonderwhatyouare

all in one go, leaving out the "gaps after "star", "are", "sky" and "high". It sounds silly enough with good old Twinkle - it's a total disaster if you are playing something by Gershwin. I shall never forget the stunned look on the examiner's face a couple of years ago at the end of of candidate's rendition of "I got rhythm" all in crotchets;

I-got-rhy-thm-I-got-mu-sic-I-got-my-man-Who-could-ask-for-an-y-thing-more

So now, two weeks before the exams, I am faced with a young person who has ducked the issues of pulse, note value, syncopation, and triplets. I'm sure the instrumental teacher has gone over this in detail, over and over again. I know the student is clever enough, talented enough, experienced enough, to be able to deal with the complex rhythms. It's just that they haven't knuckled down to the detailed, hard, brain-aching work of getting to grips with the music. Which, at their grade, they should have.

I am frankly terrified - my own piano part has enough going on to keep me busy - and I have no chance, at the moment, of staying together with the student unless they get their act together and learn the rhythm. In two weeks. The big challenge is to get the student to a place where they can face up to the mountain they have to climb, provide them with a way of climbing it, and all without panicking them into a state of total funk.

(Time for some primal screaming and a cup of tea before I go back to the piano)

Sunday 27th May - Form - the light goes on (at last)

Two events over the past few days have caused a Big Light to Switch On...

On Saturday I speed-read my way (that combination of words looks and sounds so wrong - speed-readed? speed-red? English is a crazy distortion of the way a decent, well-ordered alphabet should be used. No wonder reading has become an elitist activity. Anyway, back on track...) through "The Beach cafe" by Lucy Diamond - a pleasant, "chick-lit" novel.

On Friday I attended a music conference for Primary School Music Teachers. One of the workshops I took part in was run by someone called Sarah Hennessy, from the Exeter University PGCE course. Her workshop was inspirational for many reasons; as full of plums as a Christmas Pudding.

One of the things we did was create a "soundscape" (in the style of 4-7 year old children, as it was an "Early-Years" - (here we go again - why don't those two words rhyme?) workshop. This type of music teaching isn't new to me now, as a teacher, but we never, ever, did anything like this when I was at school. Standing in rows and singing nursery rhymes and folk songs, and occasionally getting a rusty triangle was about the height of it in my day.

Sarah Hennessy got us going by asking a series of questions;
"We need to choose somewhere that we don't know much about - where are travelling?" From the offerings made by the group of teachers, (space, the moon etc) we chose "Under the sea"

"Who are we? what sort of beings are dong the travelling?" Eventually we agreed on "sharks", much quicker than we would have done if we were actually 7-year-olds.

"What is the destination?" A "magical kingdom/castle under the sea"

"Now we need to have some contrasting adventures along the way." As mature adults, we quickly settled on "swimming through the nursery where the baby sharks are sleeping", "getting sucked into a whirlpool" and "swimming past some lobsters".

One of these was my suggestion - I'll reveal it at the end of the post.

We were put into groups - sharks, nursery, whirlpool, lobsters and magic kingdom, given a few minutes to create our "music" and then we were off. (Guess which group I was in!) Sarah had drawn a rough sketch of our journey on the white board - a graphic score - and - watching carefully as she mapped out the route with a beater, we bonged and tinkled and scrapped and tapped at exactly the right moments; sharks, nursery,sharks again, whirlpool, sharks again, lobsters, sharks once again and the magic kingdom. I notice that the sharks played slightly differently, within the same kind of idea, every time it was their turn; faster, or louder, or faster and louder. It was a perfect example of Rondo form.

So what has the light bulb got to do with this?

Back to The Beach Cafe; (SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE PLOT OF THE BOOK!

the heroine and the family are introduced; an event precipitates the journey; the family react; something else happens; someone from the family reacts; there is another event; some one else from the family reacts; etc etc until we arrive at the magical conclusion to the story; in other words - Rondo Form! - Don't get me wrong - I'm not knocking the book - I enjoyed it as a "Beach Read".

Well, I expect all you literary buffs knew all this before. I've only been reading books and playing the piano for over 50 years and never really thought about it before. It just goes to show the difference that a little learning can make. I'm now planning my first novel. If you are really, really, unlucky, I may post it here in instalments first. Or maybe it will join my huge and growing heap of unfinished projects...

(I suggested the nursery - bet you thought it was the whirlpool!)
(I was in the magical kingdom group and got to play the Really Big Glockenspiel - Yay!)

Wednesday 25th April - Seeing, Looking, Knowing,

Seeing is not enough.
Reading a passage is only the first step.
If you don't see past the words and look attentively at the meaning, then there is no knowing.
If you don't know what it is you are looking at, then you can't learn it.

I know what it is I am trying to say, but don't quite know how to say it.

Teaching piano is an exercise in decoding a complex set of symbols, understanding the meanings hidden in each one and then learning all the implications of the symbols.

You can hack your way through a piece of music, roughly interpreting the blobs and squiggles as you wend your way along the lines, and at the end have no more knowledge of the piece that when you started.

Just letting the symbols pass before your eyes won't be enough to learn how to play the music.

It's a bit like reading a complicated bit of text, like a report, or a contract, or instructions, for example. If you don't take the time to stop and assimilate each paragraph, or sentence, or clause, you will be as ignorant of the content as when you started.

In our rush for progress, our target obsessed environment, our frenetic schedules, we risk losing the  art of deep looking, seeing through to "the heart of the matter", gazing, peering, until we properly know grasp form, structure, pattern, rhythm, meaning, and are able to understand, and therefore learn it properly, deeply, thoroughly.

How about a bit of Gray's Elegy...

Thank you for taking the time to read this - I hope I have managed to communicate what it is I am trying to say....