Change of plans, again

Just like my attempted square grand piano renovation, our house renovation that is being undertaken in the interest of providing us a conducive space for placing a baby grand piano and using it to make music is fraught with too many steps in the opposite direction. With the square grand refurb, most of the time the problem lie with the piano itself and not with the restorer (me). With the house renovation, most of the “setbacks” are due to myself and Mrs. S, mostly because as we are pushing ahead with the projects, we are also coming to grips with our aging sensibilities and changes in taste. Of course, sometimes, the house (or the things in it) is the culprit, just as with the piano.

Roosevelt contemplates becoming a "curio", during phase two of "how would this look over there?" furniture move.

The latest problem, the rug we selected for the music room, is a case in point. It’s a nice rug. It wasn't cheap. It’s 100% wool, “hand-tufted” (whatever that means), and is a perfect color scheme for a music room. So much so, we painted the music room (our converted dining room) to match it. Imagine my dismay then when I realized that the rug is shedding uncontrollably, enough so that when I sit down at my digital piano placed at one end of the room, I can notice little tiny black wool hairs accumulating on the keys. That’s fine as far as my six year old, couple-a-hundred digital piano goes. It’s not viable for when I get my grand. We did, however, paint the room to compliment the rug.

The Music Room, essentially finished ... until we decided it wasn't.

What to do?

Well, we've decided to move the rug to my study. That means painting yet another room that we had not planned on painting. It also means we have to find another rug to match the music room paint color (because we sure as hell aren't painting that room again). Fortunately, the rug that was originally our “dining room” rug more or less fits that color scheme, so we can actually get away with putting it back in place. The grand piano will make permanent impressions in it once it is put down, and we were trying to avoid that, but then I thought, Why? What’s the point of having stuff if you can’t enjoy it? And besides, ten or twenty years from now, are we going to even care? (Again, coming to grips with aging sensibilities here.)

The Composer's Study, pre-paint job and furniture re-install.

That means, however, we have to find a nice living room rug. No small task that, as it is no small room. In the meantime, chores continue to get knocked out, but new ones keep piling on. Knocked out: Painting the music room. Added on: Painting the study. Knocked out, painting the study. Added on: painting the small study. Knocked out, painting the small study closet. Added on: moving the book cases. Knocked out: moving the book cases. Added on: moving the CD rack. Knocked out: moving the CD rack. Added on: installing bookcases in the study closet, including removing the closet doors and fascia. Knocked out, removing doors and fascia. Added on: installing bookcases in that closet.

You get the idea.

And, we are tossing so much stuff, our recycling and garbage guys are probably plotting something for us by now. If they saw the quantity of stuff we have lined up for donation, they wouldn't complain about the garbage (especially since most of the donation stuff is books, i.e. heavy).

When my square grand piano renovation went too far south on me, I gave up and turned it into a more than serviceable decorative bar, which I still consider as a success.  

I declare this as the booziest piano in the world.

With all the changes of plans in this current project, although I know I’ll still be left with a house and (probably) a grand piano, just like the square grand project, I don’t know what’s in store for me along the way. We’ll just have to keep pressing on and see where it gets me.

Why I'm not practicing (or blogging) much

Because our house has been turned upside down to install hardwood floors in the last four rooms covered in crappy carpet.

Tyler takes one last look at the carpet.

This is all part of the process to buy a piano, too (believe it or not). After we turned our dining room in a music room, Mrs. S wanted to paint her study. And since we were putting in flooring in the master bedroom, might as well go all the way. Which meant emptying four rooms into two. I could hardly get to my piano, much less play it while all the painting, furniture rearranging, junk dumping, and everything else was going on. (The list of everything we did is too long to even think about, much less write.)

This is about half the wood. And, there wasn't enough to finish the job!

I thought, however, that during the install, I might be able to play the piano a little bit, since I would take off work for two whole days. And, even though I've only ever been around one flooring install (upstairs in our current home), I knew there was no quiet way to install flooring. What I didn't realize is exactly how loud five guys, a power saw, an air compressor, a hammer driven nail gun, a bunch of regular hammers, and nine hundred square feet of hardwood flooring can be. And, how, as the project progresses, the echoes throughout the home build and build as there are less and less soft surfaces to absorb the sound. In short, the installation is downright deafening. Then there are the “contingency” sounds of the install, like the door constantly being opening and closed as they go outside to cut the boards to size. And they had to move that outside, because when they cut a board sideways and caused it to smoke, they set off the smoke alarm. No wonder I can’t practice the piano.

Look, ma! No carpet!

The floors, however, look great. The music room, which looked great for one day after we finished it and moved a bunch of furniture into it, looks like a garage sale gone awry, as it still holds the bulk of three rooms worth of stuff so that the flooring could be installed.

The chaos of the "music room". (The piano bench is just visible at the left.)

This weekend, we have slowly begun to reclaim our house. The guest bedroom has been cleaned and dusted, including the bed linens. Some books have been put back on various shelves. Furniture was rearranged in the living room. Clothes have mostly been put back in the closets.

Mrs. S's study, newly painted, oldly carpeted

I still have a couple of pictures to put up and out of the way, and a deer head as well.We need to buy some more area rugs to absorb some of the sound. And although it isn't much of a space, there is a path leading to my piano, so I might play some today if Mrs. S isn't making too much noise moving stuff around.

Mrs. S's study, flooring and rug in place, desk about to be.

And that's why I'm not practicing (or blogging) much.

Now comes the boring part

This is a brief story of what happens when you skip establishing the proper foundation right at the beginning.

Scales

Having learned to play the organ when I was young, I never had any formal piano instruction until I began taking lessons six years ago. At the time, because I was an adult, and not very savvy about these things, I basically told my instructor, I don’t care how I play, I just want to sound good. Recognizing that he was half my age and he had to do what I said if he wanted me to pay him, he diligently taught me what I thought I wanted to learn. If I asked about technique and skill improvement, he helped me, but he never force fed me what I didn't want to eat. Not so my new instructor.

Scales

He said, before I really said much of anything about why I wanted to take lessons this time around, “Really, in order to play better, you have to improve your technique.” I knew what this meant, but demurely asked a one word question: “Scales?”

Scales

“Scales,” came the one word answer.

Scales

So, I’m playing scales. In the interest of getting the fingering down and not stultifying my brain too much right at the start, I’m doing contrary motion two-handed scales. That way, the same fingers are always doing the same thing at the same time, hopefully programming my muscles to hit the correct keys at the correct time. It’s not refreshing, but it is somewhat invigorating to be tackling these rote sort of tasks at long last. So this week’s project is contrary and parallel scales in C, G, D, A, and E. I’ll probably go ahead and push on to at least B so that by next week, I’ll be halfway finished. Honestly, I don’t know if I can get there by next Tuesday, but we’ll see.

Scales

Kids, learn your scales now and don’t cry. You’ll thank me later.

Sprucing up for a piano purchase

With the imminent purchase of a baby grand piano, we've been trying to figure out where to put all the furniture that is going to be displaced by it. As we've done so, we've made the realization that our house needs major overhauling in the process. The other realization that Mrs. S and I have both made is that our values have changed and as far as furniture and knickknacks go, we have a lot of stuff that we were once attached to which now we don’t care about so much. Along with everything else, we are noticing how neglected our house is and how much stuff needs attention. Rather than torture ourselves, we've decided to spend the money and get fixed what needs fixing. Here’s where we are.

Our big plan is to get rid of all the carpeting in the house. We are going to do that by replacing the worn, torn, cat-puked and pissed on carpeting in the last four carpeted rooms we have with hardwood in all four rooms. We’ll therefore have to buy some rugs to put down on the floors so we don’t end up living in a damn echo chamber and also to give the rooms a little warmer feeling. (We have in fact already purchased one hand-woven wool rug and a pad for under the piano.) The cost for having the flooring done will be substantial, but not unmanageable, and it will leave us with much more livable conditions. It’s a big first step that takes a long time to start, but we have already received two quotes, so we’re getting close.

I replaced two non-working blinds in my study with off-the-shelf faux woods blinds from Lowes. The room looks 100% better. We also ordered custom made blinds for the future music room. That will replace two broken blinds and displace one working blind that we will move to Mrs. S’s study, where we will dispose of the one that is broken in her room. Nice.

Tyler meditating behind the sun room curtains.

We looked around our sun room yesterday and were thinking about the furniture when we suddenly just decided to throw it out. I hauled a glider, three chairs, and all the necessary cushions, plus one for a chaise (long gone) to the curb. Within five minutes, we had somebody packing them into their Pontiac Vibe. After the furniture was gone, Mrs. S took the vacuum to the sun room and we moved our new cat condo into it, and wallowed in the extra space that we got from doing that.

Roosevelt posing on the cat condo.

Our kitchen sink backed up around the disposal and leaked water all over the rugs we had set there, so we took those out to dry them and are looking to replace them.

We gave away our fish tank, along with the fish and everything that goes with it, to a guy where I work. He even agreed to take the extra one we have up in our attic. Less time feeding fish and cleaning the tank, more time playing the piano.

Stuff for donation: two pieces of exercise gear, a printer, a scanner, some T-shirts, my Nintendo Wii, bunch of Mrs. S’s clothes. Like that.

I’m also going to throw out my old computer.

I threw out eight cans of old paint. I have about eight more that I need to get rid of. I need to clean out the garage in general while I’m at it, especially where the mice got into the birdseed. What a mess.

And, I start back to piano lessons on Tuesday with a different instructor. We’ll see how that goes.

A piano search update

Although I haven’t written about it in while, the piano search has actually been going quite well. I've started to find more pianos that are priced better and that are in decent shape, although I haven’t quite found the exact thing I’m looking for. I looked at a beautiful used C7. It was played by a woman who passed away and her husband is trying to sell it. It is actually only 30 minutes from our house, so we went to see it shortly after I found it. It’s in beautiful shape on the outside, with hardly a scratch or mark on it, with the exception of inside the fall board, which was badly scratched from the woman’s nails. The only other cosmetic defect was the sostenuto pedal was a different shade of brass from the other two pedals. I wasn't sure if that was a question of usage or something else, and I also wasn't sure if it was something that could be corrected. That made it just like the fall board in that respect, as I’m not sure that could be buffed or polished back to normalcy. I checked the tuning on the piano with my Korg electronic tuner and found the piano was perfectly in tune. Perfectly. In fact, it was more in tune than any of the other pianos I have looked at so far. There were two things that were amazing about this. One was that the piano had not been professionally tuned in three years, and the other was that the piano was thirty five years old. 

A 35-year old C7, nice as can be. Could still be mine, as far as I know.

In all honesty, at the price the guy was asking and given the overall condition of the piano, if it had been only 20 years old, I would already own the sucker. So, age is the first problem. The second problem is size. At 7’4”, it will have to be placed in our living room, which means our house will basically be taken over by that piano. Mrs. S says she wouldn't mind, but she hasn't heard me play Piano Exercises for Dummies for an hour and a half on a booming piano in the middle of our living room yet. I think by the second of third week of that, she might change her opinion.

The GC1 in a sea of pianos. 5 year warranty, 100% trade up value, no fussing with piano movers...yep, it's looking quite attractive...

For comparison sake, we looked at some new and near new pianos at the local shop, our second visit there (almost a year to the day after the first, too, I might add). There was a very young, very clean divorce sale C1 for sale, but it was a little pricey and not quite what I was hoping for. If that one had been a C3, I might already own it, but I think it was overpriced and unexciting for a C1. I did like an Indonesian built Yamaha that I looked at, until I found out it was Indonesian. Then I played a Japan built GC1 that I quite liked. We would have the option to trade up at full purchase price if I got that one and at 5’3”, it would be much more easily accommodated in our house and furniture layout plans. We are leaning in the direction of buying that piano, once we get our master bedroom arranged and our dining room painted and arranged for turning into a music room. We also need to buy a rug to put under the piano, which will also affect our painting scheme. Lots of considerations, but good that we are getting some direction if not entirely getting closer to an actual purchase.

I've also been fine tuning (get it?) my practice routine for the arrival of the piano, so that I might actually get good enough to play the damn thing when it gets here. I’ll write about that soon.

Edgar Meyer Redux

About a year and a half ago, Mrs. S and I had the privilege to see and hear Edgar Meyer as he performed his third concerto, a piece he was commissioned to write for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. At that time, I bemoaned the fact that his talent as both a musician and a composer was sorely under appreciated by the Alabama patronage. So when we decided to go see Mr. Meyer again in tandem with Joshua Bell in Nashville, I was, maybe not worried, but I was skeptical and doubtful of what kind of reception he would get. Fortunately, Messrs. Bell and Meyer’s performance was a bit more dynamic than Mr. Meyer’s solo work on his concerto, the orchestra was complete and well-rehearsed, and the piece itself was exciting, enthralling, and altogether amazing.

 

Edgar Meyer and Joshua Bell, hard at "work"

Of course, the dynamics of a piece written for solo violin and double bass are what make it so amazing. I mean, as somebody who has arranged a piece for a 17-piece jazz band, I understand a little better than most the difficulty of making dissonant, dissimilar instruments sound good when playing together. I can only imagine, however, the difficulty of getting the highest and lowest instruments of the same family to blend as well as Mr. Meyer and Mr. Bell made them do. Mr. Meyer also managed to hit a bunch of notes right at the low end of the bass neck, much higher sounding than you would ever think you could get out of a bass. It was a fantastic performance of a highly original and interesting piece.

Hard to miss a big guy in suspenders and bow tie, but most people did

They did not announce any autograph session with Bell and Meyer, so Mrs. S and I went about our normal intermission routine of stretching our legs to and from the restrooms. While I was waiting for Mrs. S, I noticed a guy in suspenders who looked suspiciously like Edgar Meyer run past the top of the stairs with a bottle of water and up the stairs into the foyer. I followed him and found that it was indeed Mr. Meyer and Mr. Bell was already seated with him at a table with a long line of autograph seekers already queued. I went downstairs and retrieved Mrs. S and we went to join the autograph seekers. We succeeded in getting a few good autographs and a few mediocre snapshots (what you see around here).

Mrs. S adds to her pile of Joshua Bell photos. (You could tell he does this a lot more than Edgar does.)

The performance after Meyer and Bell was some long Mahler symphony that was not completely depressing. The first violinist had to finish the performance with just three strings, as he broke the E-string just before the start of the final flourish. After the clapping and “bravos” I caught his eye and I said, “Next time, maybe you should just start with three.” He laughed a little bit and said, “Yeah, maybe it is just in the way.” After that we went back to the foyer to mingle with some of the orchestra members. I talked to the first viola about his ear plug. (I’m interested in things that not everybody notices or cares about.)

And, one of three CD's we now have with both their signatures.

Not sure why I didn't write about this concert earlier, as it was the start of our bourbon country mini-vacation (May 31), but like my blog, better late than never.

Coming soon: The piano search update.

Jean-Yves plays jazz, he just “Don’t think much about it!”

So last week, I wrote about Yakov Kasman, a pianist who I heard play for the Huntsville Chamber Music Guild and who, at his educational event, forthrightly told me that he doesn't play jazz. This week Mrs. S and I took a drive through rainy 40-degree weather to visit Nashville, enjoy a scrumptious dinner at Merchants Restaurant and see another classical pianist perform with the symphony orchestra, Jean-Yves Thibaudet. He performed a modern classic called Piano Concerto No. 3 “The Mysteries of Light” by James MacMillan.

This is what Merchants looks like if you eat as early as we do.

Let me be succinct and clear about what I heard. This is supposed to be some kind of theologically inspired piece about “mysteries”, but what I heard was a fantastically abstract and intricate piece that simply blew me away. There was one “movement” where Thibaudet had to play two completely different lines, in what sounded like completely different meter, that overlapped and threaded their way around each other, and I swear to God, my brain was fried trying to make sense of it. I just don’t see how you can get two hands to play such completely different lines using one brain. In fact, I would say those would have been immensely challenging  lines for two pianists to play accurately. I just never heard anything like it.

This is what Merchants looks like if you drink as much as I do.

Thibaudet, was a true master, but the orchestra was also in top form. A lot of the piece revolves around a certain amount of confusion and cacophony in the sound. There are lots of bells and chimes and while they seem to be echoing the lines coming from the piano, they didn't always match, which was obviously part of the design. Thibaudet was playing a Steinway (very cool when it rose out of the stage), and compared to the Yamaha CF6 we heard DaniloPerez play with Wayne Shorter three weeks ago, it had a duller, more uniform high-end, which I felt was exactly suited to this bit of music. In fact, I’ll go so far to say that the resonant low end, the deep, commanding middle register, and the tinkly, baby-spoon clang of the high-end on the Steinway particularly lent itself to the piece. I think the CF6’s clarity and icicle like sharpness would have broken up the MacMillan piece too much.

This is what Merchants looks like if you think too much about photo captions.

At intermission, we got some CD’s signed and spent a few minutes getting photos and chatting up Jean-Yves, who was immensely personable, smiling, and pleasant. After taking pictures with me across the counter, when Mrs. S asked for one more, he brought her around the counter with him. Just a real nice guy, class act, and superb pianist.

I can't even make my hands move separately when I'm not playing...

I was going to ask him if he plays jazz, but I’m glad I didn't  Turns out he has two “jazz” recordings out, so we went ahead and Amazoned (online purchased) them. I did ask him how he got his hands to play those two contiguous yet conflicting lines so nicely, concluding with, “I don’t see how anyone can do it.” He said simply, “I don’t think much about it.” There was a definite glimmer in his eye. Probably a tear from thinking about how many hours he sat on a piano bench to learn those lines. I don’t know. It scares me, so I don’t think much about it either.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet and me.

The question I’m asking myself is, if it is possible that I was more impressed by Jean-Yves Thibaudet because he does play jazz, keeping in mind that I didn’t know he played jazz when I first heard him last night? The answer is, I think, almost certainly. Maybe it’s jazz, maybe it’s something else, but there's a different quality and dimension to Thibaudet's playing. Regardless, I promise you: You’ll never hear that MacMillan piece performed any better anywhere else, than it was last night with the Nashville Symphony and Jean-Yves Thibuadet.

Dude sure gets a lot closer to the ladies, no?

Yakov don’t play jazz. Jean-Yves don’t think much about it.

I do (play jazz), and, I do (think much about it), but maybe I will (play jazz) and I won’t (think much about it) from now on.