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September 24, 2002
mark thomas John Sterling, one of the WCBS 880 AM radio announcers for the New York Yankees games, sometimes starts a broadcast by announcing "It's a beautiful day for baseball!" Every time I hear that expression I think "Man, shutup, it's a beautiful day for anything." Today is one of those days. A beautiful day for baking, a beautiful day for water polo, a beautiful day for eating a sandwich. I suppose it's also a beautiful day for baseball, but who cares? It's a beautiful day for opening the windows and cleaning this apartment. It's been a B-Flat Major day here at the Mark Thomas homestead. I am practicing two arrangements for piano, the Beethoven/Rubinstein "Turkish March" from the "Ruins of Athens," and a Walter Rummel arrangement of Bach's "Mortify Us By Thy Grace." These are very B-Flat major pieces of music. I always found B-Flat to be a hard key to get around in. I don't think enough composers and arrangers are sensitive to the fact that a major 10th is much harder to reach in keys whose tonic is on a black key. I can reach a major 10th in all white-note keys, but in B-Flat and E-Flat that interval is too wide and too awkward for me. A beautiful day for B-Flat. Maybe it's just a beautiful day for anything B. A beautiful day for Bazooka Bubble Gum? Bionic Biceps? Baked Beans? I got a new piano about a year ago. I did a lot of research before buying it. I had planned for a long time to get a crazy-expensive Seiler upright, because it sounded and felt so much like a real concert grand. But I came back to earth at some point and realized that a full-out concert grand sound would drive my neighbors insane, and that what I really needed was a way to practice late into the night without bothering anybody. I used to be a snob about digital pianos. I thought they were all crap. After I moved to New York in 1990 the only place I could find to practice was the Yamaha showroom on 57th Street. That showroom no longer exists, but when it did you could walk in there and play on all their pianos, digital and acoustic, for as long as you wanted. I spent many hours each week at a Yamaha Clavinova, feeling that it was a poor substitute for the real thing but not having other options. Digital pianos have come a long way since then. I tried a bunch of them out and bought a Roland digital piano last summer. It was a lot cheaper than those Seilers, and much more practical. What the Roland lacks in nuance and depth it makes up for in convenience. The most important thing to me is that the thing feels like a real piano. It doesn't quite sound like a real piano, but it has the feel of one, and that's about as good as you can expect from a practice instrument. Here, judge for yourself. Here's a short piece that I recorded (less than 500k download) by Abram Chasins - I find that many attempts to squeeze subtlety out of this piano end up being laughable. But it's close enough. I've never had much interest in combining a piano with a computer. But over the years I've accumulated an enormous collection of piano music in PDF format. Literally thousands of pages of piano music, most of it sitting on CD-ROM dicsc or on my hard drive. I set up my old laptop on top of my piano and use the monitor as a music stand while I play through some scores and decide which ones to print. It's kind of a weird set-up, and not very convenient. I am thinking about using an old monitor and setting it up sideways so that I can read the pages of the scores like regular letter size, portrait oriented pages. OK, it's a beautiful day for a movie, and I think I'll find one to watch. « Ice Cube Trays • sorabji.com • Smoke and Gadgets »
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