The Quill and the Cembalo

TODAY I showered again after basking in what I think of as a piglet state, rather gloriously, for the past week or two. I still feel happy about the way the essay turned out, and am only a little nervous about the grade I am getting for it, which is a minor consideration in the grand scheme of things but it would be disappointing if the professor isn't as perfectly satisfied with it as I am. Besides I should pick up my Latin exam eventually. But on the whole my conscience feels splendidly at ease.

So, anxiety about preparing sufficiently for the next semester aside, I have plunged into a news junkie state, flirted with the idea of doing a normal driver's license and then a truck driver's license and taking horseback riding lessons next year so that I am prepared to work on a farm for three to six months after I graduate from university, have daydreamed about journalistic enterprises again, played a little piano and cembalo, and otherwise am reading books.

As far as the journalistic enterprises go, the blog I am keeping up again requires work similar to that of my university essay, and I have decided to go for a magazine approach and write long features. But even intelligent research is no substitute, I think, for personal involvement and legwork, so I have been trying to feel my way into doing interviews and so on. The thing is that I had a shortlived blog where I asked someone from a reporter NGO for more information, and the responsible individual responded with edifying enthusiasm and we ended up having a Berlin-to-New York off-the-record phone conversation — so I know that some people at least are glad to talk even to minor bloggers.

What I did more recently, and more as a cheeky experiment, is get into contact with a Goldman Sachs media representative to see if I could get a quote from the corporate perspective about "political intelligence" in the US. (This was after I did something like a dozen hours of reading up on it over two days.) I either wrote down the wrong email address or was genuinely fobbed off, but I did talk to two different ladies with a received pronunciation British and an intermittent Anzac accent respectively.

So even if nothing comes of it and a true journalist would despise my efforts, I have learned a good deal while doing it; and I like probing a subject from different perspectives and in depth, then writing about it in a much boiled down way, until it 'gels' into a cohesive couple of paragraphs which, while hopefully rich in information, give no obtrusive evidence of the knotty and long path of preparation. Besides I have decided not to try to popularize my approach to any subject or my style, but to write as heavily as I like, while being sure to write what I mean and mean what I write.

Even the interviewing doesn't address a problem which I find with armchair reporting, which is firstly of not being privy to the milieu in which news events occur (like, let's say, a Congressman's office) and secondly of writing glibly about things which one hasn't felt with one's own skin, so to speak. Thirdly I worry that the absence of journalistic training will lead me into thoughtless breaches of prudence, ethics, or professionalism.

AS for the piano, I haven't been playing on it much lately, because I have come to the conclusion that I am Not Very Good, and my ego requires far more nourishment than it has gotten to be convinced otherwise. Besides I have been thinking that my temperament might not be best suited to music even if I do become good, because it might bring out too much of my softer sensibilities and leave me more prone to megrims or whatever, than some pursuit which has strong practical element and takes me out into the world a bit more.

This has been reinforced by playing on the cembalo, which on the one hand has reassured me that it's no wonder that I haven't been able to achieve much with Bach on the modern piano because he really sounds a million times better and characteristic on the cembalo, and on the other hand has shown up the difference between a sound technical base and the slipshod habits into which I've gotten. Since the cembalo requires a different approach — much more different than I'd thought — it makes me look at scores in a new way, and so I also see how I compensate for finger strength by dragging one note into the next and how I ignore the proper phrasing and so on.

Besides, since the keys of the older instrument require much less pressure, it has also become clear how far my relative feebleness has been an obstacle to speed and trills. Conversely, though, I have not ever wanted the technical side of playing the piano to come easily, since the labouring process forces me to engage with the notes and the music 'behind' them much more slowly and carefully and thoroughly. The problem is if it is (and it definitely is) an impediment to the 'music behind it.'

So the last time Pudel, Papa and I played the Haydn trios, I played more slowly, but I also paid more attention to everything — particularly the way I 'produce' the notes in relation to each other — and there was, in that respect, an improvement.

Lastly, though, I think that there has been a lull with the piano because I don't need it to work through thought processes any more; university and my 'journalistic endeavours' and so on have greased the squeaky wheel (as it were) of ye olde noggin. And I'd need to really get into again, and in the absence of a YouTube spree that might not happen so quickly.

But basically what I think is that it is clear that it is quite different to play amateurishly the way I have and to be trained in an environment where one is held up to standards but at the same time also has one's path smoothed by the influence of others and is around others who are deeply absorbed in music. My route has the advantage of originality, and it is only a lack of confidence and of trust and of courage which prevents me from accepting it as perfectly valid, without being embarrassed and insecure.

P.S.: Papa bought a bottle of ouzo for our corner room supply of liqueurs, and I have become quite fond of it. I think it is about the most fun way one can celebrate or supplement the study of Greek, the next fun way being my finally making the pan of baklava I've been thinking about for a while. (Back in Canada my littlest brother and I made it once entirely from scratch, but the 'phyllo' pastry we produced was thicker than what one gets in stores, so it was simply not the same.)