Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

piano

Trio Season 6 – Suite #6: Instants

by

This Trio almost wound up being titled “Primer” because of the following three quotes:

On being primed:
If you’ve ever read an interview with a songwriter … you’ll hear a repeated theme: that you have to constantly be writing, and constantly be revising and playing. It seems sortof counter-intuitive, because at some point you’ve written a certain amount of material, and you feel like you should be playing or rehearsing that material. But … when you have a new idea it’s much more easy to capture that idea.

It’s funny that you can apply any kind of science to songwriting. You spend a lot of years as a songwriter thinking it’s just lightning that strikes you, but there are things you can do to make yourself more of a lightning rod.

All This Time
When the chorus came in my head I literally walked to the piano and played the entire song in one go and wrote the lyrics. It all happened in 30 minutes. … Effectively the whole song came at once. It was because I was primed. That’s the challenge, you know? You have to be working on songs to have other songs that work.

Will It Ever Come?
Much like “All This Time,” it came at this point that I was very primed, in the summer of 2000. I wrote a lot of what are still my favorite songs at that time … songs that I really still play very frequently. And this one was kindof in the middle, and it just got ignored. It was at the very beginning of Crushing Krisis and I blogged the lyrics. [Ed note: Literally; I wrote them out in nine minutes in the Blogger window. They were my 81st post.]

The next year when I went into the recording studio … I can honestly say I don’t know that ever played it before. And we did it in one take.

.

Lyrics and chords for “Time Is Running Out” are behind the cut. [Read more…] about Trio Season 6 – Suite #6: Instants

The road flows like a river, and pulls me around every bend.

by

I think that was a sufficient amount of time to bask, uninterrupted, in being a fiancé.

Much stuff is afoot in chez krisis, and not just our impending wedding. I have more to say on that topic than you could ever hope to consume in a single sitting, so I’ll be dragging the whole mess of it through National Blog Posting month, and beyond.

Okay, I’ll say one thing now: I love all the dire wedding warnings that come from every quarter when you first get engaged. I suppose it’s a cultural hazing thing? I just don’t get it. Each of our favorite weddings were relatively lacking in insanity and drama according to the various brides. Also, we’re both OCD project managers with the same taste in everything.

Right. Remind me to come back and read this post in about twelve months and see what I have to say about it.

If that was all that was happening it would be, oh, say, the most exciting time of my entire life. However, chattery on the topic of engagedness tends to eclipse the fact that there are also some other life events in motion, such as the massive behemoth of posts that is NaBloPoMo looming a mere two days away.

You should be comforted to know that I’ve drawn up a comprehensive content grid so I’m never lacking for post topic (see, OCD project managers). The challenge will be finding myself awake and at a computer long enough to do any posting.

Part of that challenge is that Gina and I (AKA Arcati Crisis) are playing a second trio of songs with a rhythm section on November 9th at the Rotunda, followed by multiple holiday performances, and moving through a half-hour set at Doc Watson’s in January (and, possibly another appearance at the Tin Angel), all of which results in plenty of rehearsals, both together and separately.

Oh, and the normal busyness, such as having four of my projects reviewed (and approved!) by our CEO over the last month, learning various exercises and arias for my weekly voice lessons, working up a communications plan for our homegrown music festival, and trying to drag my sorry ass out to East Falls every Thursday to play our favorite open mic.

And, last but certainly not least (though, what could really be least in this list?), I suddenly – and completely out of the blue, I assure you – can play piano. I’m still slow to learn actual pop songs, but I seem to have collected a modest enough palette of rhythms and riffs that I can bang through my own stuff with increasing ease and surprising variation, and I actually prefer some of it on keys to guitar strings. Imagine that!

Anyhow, that’s life, at the moment – full of activity, but paradoxically forcing me to take frequent naps in order to keep up with it.

How have you been?

Or, For Short: I Play Guitar

by

In the midst of a lengthy conversation over dinner and several bottles of wine I got into a bit of a chat about guitar playing with our friend Geoff.

Being a relative folky (though, i think that’s a bit of a misnomer), i don’t typically venture into those sorts of discussion. Any non-rocker has surely been put in that position – one side of the conversation is about sick speed riffs and crazy gear, leaving you and your acoustic by the wayside.

Over the years I’ve learned to hold my own in those conversations – especially after my lengthy hunt for a perfect acoustic. It doesn’t matter, because Geoff is mostly of the jam-band persuasion – i don’t know that i’ve ever seen him play an electric guitar. So, in this instance i was actually fairly evenly matched (though that’s also a misnomer, since Geoff was a guitar wiz when i was just learning to read sheet music).

In any event, i was whinging about how i need to wear my wrist braces more often because all of my recent keyboard practice is making my hands and wrists a touch sore for guitar playing – a bad sign in the short term and the long term. Geoff, rightfully skeptical of my sometimes exaggerated conversational gambits, asked, “Well, just how much do you play guitar?”

I was stymied. Last summer i know it wasn’t very much because i was counting the hours. That was before i met my beautiful Breedlove, which i truly never get tired of playing. Since i received it this May i feel like i’ve hardly put it down.

I ventured a guess: “If i play at all, i play for two or three hours at a time.”

Geoff clearly thought i was exaggerating, if ever so slightly. Not a surprise, since we had just been talking about my many hours of keyboard rehearsal, and before that about our nightly Netflix habit. On those two accounts i seemed quite sure, so my estimate must be high?

The whole point of this ramble is that i’ve been paying attention since our dinner, and i actually play that much or more. It’s usually one of the first things i do when i get home, and one of the last before bed if i don’t fall asleep watching a movie. It’s probably what i do the most other than sleep and work. This weekend i very nearly put in ten hours.

You’d think that with all that time logged that i would be able to shred with the best of them, but i spend all that time alone, and most of it singing – not an environment to unlead my inner speed demon. And, if maybe i’m now playing more than i ever have before, i’m finally feeling the impact.

The other night at the keyboard i mused that songs always seem to take forever when you’re learning them – a mid-tempo five-minute version of a pop song can seem like an eternity when you’re the one suffering under its weight. I feel like that at the piano all the time, but i can’t remember the last time i felt that way playing guitar, other than maybe while trying to slowly count out the timing of a ridiculous solo.

The short of that incredibly long story? Well, for one, i wasn’t lying to Geoff. More to the point, this whole train of thought made me realize that i finally feel confident when saying “i play guitar” – no disclaimers, no exceptions. Ironic that this came almost half-a-decade after the first time i felt confident saying that i was a singer, since sometimes that’s doubtful, but i’ve arrived, nonetheless.

Pennies

by

I used to have this dream when i was sick that i entitled “the penny dream.” It would have been more aptly titled “the repetitive stress disorder” dream, or more colloquially “the Chinese water torture” dream, and maybe now you get the idea.

In the dream there was a set of balanced scales, and on one scale would be something improbably heavy, like a refridgerator, or a Buick. On the other scale, its weight would be ticked off by pennies steadily dispensed by some unseen hand. And, though the scales were large, inevitably as we approached the actual weight of the thing, one of the pennies would land just so that it sent dozens of other pennies cascading off of the scale, leaving me even further away from equalling the weight of the elephant or RV on the other side.

Any run of the penny dream that made it to the penny cascade more than twice almost always ended with naseau. Which brings me to today’s topic: the Hanon Exercises. Charles-Louis Hanon, evil genius and bane of piano students everywhere, penned The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises, a series of repetitive runs, arpeggios, and trills meant to strengthen all of the bits of the hand that are typically weak and lifeless.

Fine in concept, but then you merrily unwrap the book from its swoosh encoded box from Amazon to discover that past the first few exercises, just reading the exercise is going to be an exercise. And, furthermore, what looks like a fairly simple sequence with one or two skipped keys is actually the slow penny-dream-like torture of your pinky finger, until at the end of the first time you make it through four repetitions without hitting a stray note (for me, about forty minutes of warming up) and your pinky stretchs for the last perfect bass C you think, “yes, i will actually vomit on this casio fully weighted, graded, lifelike keyboard if i have to push down that key with my pinky.”

It’s after i reach that point with Hanon that i moved into the Bach, staying to the blessedly non-accidental keys and playing at approximately one eleventh of the speed that a professional player plays the exercises at, because professional players read eleventy times faster than i do. (Actually, i’ve discovered that if i’m allowed one run through a measure to screw it up i can usually do it correctly the second time, which means all of my Bach practices run doubly long, but i’m getting much surer much quicker than i expected to).

And, if i managed to get through the Bach relatively in one piece and with most of my dinner still intact, along with my pinky finger and my sanity then, depending on my mood and level of death-defying counting skills, i either play Tori Amos or Radiohead.

I don’t know if i could have ever really endured these piano-practice pennies as a child – i had a lot of patience, but not a lot of endurance, if that makes any sense. As an adult i realize that, occasionally, something tortorous is in my best interests.

Insufferably Essential (or visa versa)

by

I think the main reason that i’ve never been a consumer of classical music is that there is no tidy discography for me to steadily consume. Sure, Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco are prolific and untidy, but neither of them are Debussy or Bach – neither woman has every Tom, Schiff, and Gould releasing and re-issuing her major works once or twice a decade, only to have the best of them fall back out of print almost immediately. My inner OCD-completist is doubly stymied by the whole concept – once by the in-and-out-of-printness of it, and again by the idea of having to choose noit only my favorite composers, but also my favorite interpreter(s).

The thing is, i really like classical music. It’s beautiful, moving, rewarding, and very relaxing to listen to. However, for someone as anal as i it’s seemingly impossible to make a solid connection to some small facet of it. I joke with our Masters-in-music friend Anthony that if i ever get put on hold somewhere with good classical music i would three-way him into the call so he could identify the composer for me, as that’s my primary exposure to the medium.

The result has been that i don’t prefer any specific composer, and certainly no specific interpreter, but sometimes a specific work gets knocked into my head and never quite shakes loose. In high school our friend Sara was endlessly practicing a Debussy Prelude or Nocturne or whatever, and in college i picked up a two-disc set of them. At first it felt a bit indulgent – me, sitting in my room, listening to classical music. Now that i know the pieces a little better i actually love them – i sometimes play them quite intentionally, often on a loop at work for days at a time, humming along merrily to my favorite passages.

Recently Elise and I have been learning to play piano, and she has already reached the point of playing some of the simple Bach pieces, including two from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Which, so far as i understand, is to piano music as Superman is to comic books.

Trying to be a sweet boyfriend, i bought the collected Books 1 & 2 – not realizing, perhaps, that aside from providing a handful basic piano studies that these 48 pieces were some of the most highly regarded and difficult works for the keyboard. Of course (surely you can see where this is headed) that just meant that i wanted to learn them too.

I mostly sight-read and largely flailed my way through two preludes in friendly key signatures over the weekend, planning to alternate them regularly with my Hanon exercises. But, f you’ve ever met me, or read my web page, or even looked at its title you know that at this point in my obsession with a newfound interest i absolutely require more things. Collateral, collectibles, delectable trivial knowledge. In this case a recording, or maybe several recordings, of the complete Well-Tempered Clavier.

You might think that with all the powers of the internet at my command i could be recommended one version of one of the most famous collections of piano music with some amount of uniformity in relatively short order. You would, of course, be wrong. The internet is an capricious mistress, and from her the best i could muster was that Glenn Gould’s versions were the quintessial interpretations of a tempo-mangling asshole. Or, as termed by one of Amazon’s more skilled reviewers, “Not for Bach beginners–fair enough?”

[In the interest of aiding other erstwhile searchers on a quest similar to my own, i’ll continue this excerpt from the charming wit of one Mr. Sanity Inspector, Top 1,000 Reviewer: From the very first bars, with the flowing ascending theme played partly in a counter-intuitive staccato, the in-the-know listener can tell that this will be a highly idiosyncratic rendering. … However, a newcomer to this work would do well to begin with a more conventional reading.]

My search continued past the obvious and oft-namedchecked Gould, for the moment. Of use to this endeavor was The J.S. Bach Homepage, which contains a modest but well-kept archive of reviews of major JSB releases. Between this and raptly reading along in our WTC book to 30-second Amazon song samples, i’m least closer to making an informed decision than i was two hours ago.

As of now i am down to Richter (a rather essential interpretation, apparently) or Bernard Roberts (moderate, recent, well-recorded, and affordable), or possibly Angela Hewitt (recent, technically proficient, researched, stellar liner notes). Gould, obviously, was discarded, and I saw Schiff described as “mushy” a few too many times for my taste (haterz always prevail on the internets) (also, check out that album cover; yeesh). A few others i passed on just based on the blah-ness of their C, D, and G passages (i.e., the ones that make the most sense to me) (says the incredibly inexperienced listener brandishing his music minor threateningly).

All that said i will – as always – also submit to the vast and whimsically cultivated knowledge of my readership-at-large. If you have a favorite version of the classic 48 pieces that compose Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Books 1 AND 2 played on piano and available on compact disc please don’t hesitate to recommend them to me at krisis at the venerable domain of uprush dot org.