Sunday 10 December 2006

I have been doing some practising today: well, learning of music really rather than practising it. The more Beethoven-esque patches of Schetky's music demand more athleticism in the fingers than I currently possess, so I need to get into training by the end of next month. But today I came up against an unwillingness on my part to deal with certain demands of virtuosity, that come along with the music of the late 18th/early 19th century. 

Good harpsichord fingering is generally about elegance: matching the movements that your hands make to the way that the music goes, so that your body naturally plays the music in a comprehensible way.  But historically, once you hit what's unequivocally piano music something else happens, and you start having to make movements that don't coincide with the music: specifically, turning your thumb under while playing scales. All aspiring pianists have to learn how to do this smoothly and without making a bump in the phrase. With harpsichord fingering, the whole point of it is that making an unnatural movement like that *does* make a bump in the phrase, so you have to put those movements in the right musical places. But in piano music, you usually make them in the 'wrong' places and so have to do it imperceptibly. Well, fine, but I can't help resisting this rather underhand practice (excuse the pun). I've got used to my technique being relaxed and out in the open, not hidden away under the back of my hand. I find myself starting to lose interest in the music. Maybe I'm just looking for an excuse for not being arsed to practise B flat major scales any more, but I'd rather learn movements that have a useful musical result, than movements whose musical result has to be covered up.

I've been listening to Fred Frith's guitar solos CD from 2000 'Clearing'. It's very interesting to compare what he does with a guitar and some electronics to what Robert Fripp does (which will be soon be heard all over the world every time someone switches on their PC, thanks to Windows Vista). You can probably guess which I prefer.

Incidentally, I realised as I was walking down the kitchen this morning that the famous tune of the so-called 'Albinoni Adagio' written in 1945 by Remo Giazotto (supposedly elaborated from a MS fragment - yeah, right) is strikingly similar to that of 'La de Drummond' from the fourth book of Jacques Duphly's Pièces de clavecin from 1768. So it was actually inspired by a Scotsman. Ha ha.

And talking of Scotsmen and war (Pierre-Jacques McGregor Drummond was in the Royal Scots), am I the only person appalled and furious that John Reid can calmly tell the country that we'll probably be attacked by terrorists over the holidays, without also saying 'sorry' on the government's behalf for its spectacularly stupid and ill-conceived foreign policy? The Observer newspaper's smug, lazy metropolitanism usually irritates me to the point of throwing it across the room, but this was worth reading today (written by another Scotsman, funnily enough).