Confessions of an anxious ballet pianist day #3: Pop songs
I’ve got to be very careful how I put this, for fear of being taken the wrong way (see, I’m even anxious about that). So let’s get one thing out…
Company class: Confessions of an anxious ballet pianist, day #1 (Advent 2014)
My post about problems of playing for a “White Swan” rehearsal generated a lot of interesting comments from dance and music friends on Facebook. One musician friend sympathised with my…
More (sorry!) on triple metre and ballet classes
One of the reasons that I’m very sympathetic to anyone who says they don’t “get” time signature, is that my own hearing and sense of metre can play strange tricks…
All fingers and thumbs
In an earlier post, I described how a nasty accident with a food processor blade helped me to understand a passage about the history of piano technique in Nicholas Cook’s…
More on “truly triple meter” – are Chopin’s waltzes really mazurkas?
I’m not saying that Chopin couldn’t write a waltz, or that his embodied sense of waltzing was too fragile to be able to incorporate it in music. But I wonder…
What Schenker, Nicholas Cook & a food processor taught me about piano fingering
By what turns out to be a happy coincidence, I managed this week to combine reading Nicholas Cook’s Beyond the Score: Music as Performance with an accident in which I…