Like swinging a bag of cats against a wall

My lovely practicing drove my friends' cat out of the room today. The placid fat mackerel tabby named Pandora had been firmly ensconced on her cushion on the sofa for hours on end. This cat does not move, let me tell you. But off she went to the kitchen as soon as I started tuning. Oh, and here she comes now that I'm done. It's so insulting.

Obligatory Les Paul R.I.P. post

Les Paul was just a name to me till I took up this whole guitar-playing thing. I admire his playing (listened to a CD of it earlier this year). I'd love to listen to it more if I could find it unadulterated by that old-fashioned singing, that grates on your ears after a while. You know, that Andrews-sisters-tight-happy-harmonies thing.

The NY Times dug up a bunch of interesting retrospectives that I've enjoyed: one, a brief account of seeing him play live earlier this year; another, an interview with him about seeing Jimi Hendrix play. He had a long and distinguished career.

Enjoy.

The joy of practice

It's hard to practice when it's hot. Not just because heat makes me sleepy, like a cat, but because in a house without central air, I don't want to take even a cheap guitar in and out of air-conditioned rooms, and it's TOO hot to play in a non-AC room. Sweat and all that... Today it cooled off enough for me to have fun flailing away at it, though kinked into a terrible posture and, I'm sure, inflicting Aerosmith on the unsuspecting neighbors through the open windows.

It reminded me of the last book I read on the elliptical before I left Chicago, Glenn Kurtz's memoir Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music. Though a great read, it was in some ways incredibly depressing. Kurtz was an extremely talented child guitarist and practiced his way right into the New England Conservatory. (I knew a bunch of singers at NEC in Boston -- lovely and only somewhat dysfunctional place -- and attended many a concert in their Jordan Hall.) There, he retooled his technique, fought for the good practice rooms against other instrumentalists, and eventually headed for Europe to really brush things up for a great career. One fine day in Vienna, he abruptly realized he didn't have what it took, packed up his guitar, headed home, and didn't touch it again for ten years. (Instead, he went to graduate school to study literature, and if that didn't depress me thoroughly, well...)

But he did pick it up again another fine day, taking us back through his career by framing it in one of the loving and rigorous practice sessions he now does next to the window of his San Francisco apartment. I think I was supposed to feel good about how things turned out for him, and that an amateur or failed professional can still love, enjoy, and vigorously pursue their music. But I have to say that it also made me selfishly glad that I have so little musical talent, because at least I never really thought I could make a career of it. I don't know if it's better or worse to have so much and still not enough.

MIK

Here's my friends' guitar, which they bought at a local stoop sale (the city equivalent of a garage sale, in case the term sounds odd). It came with a chipboard case missing one latch, but good enough to sit around and keep the cats off. And, um, that's half my foot and my knee. What happened to the tan I got kayaking?

I don't know how old it is, but it's a Hondo, made in Korea, so probably not more than a dozen or twenty years old. Still has a tiny sticker with an inspection number. This was pre-stringing, so you don't get to see my novel ball-end-through-the-tuners look.

It plays fairly well, but those nylon strings are still stretching. I was trying to play "Scarborough Fair" for my mother, and realized that it was about a full step out of tune. I said to her, "I bet you thought it was my playing and didn't want to say anything." The look on her face answered that question. I'm also having a bit of trouble with the wider, thicker neck and longer fret spacing.

Oh, and since it's a Hondo, I've named it John Wayne. You can probably figure out why... but does anyone else remember when that movie was on TV in, say, the late eighties, and it was a big deal because they had 3-Dized it and you could go to 7-11 to get free 3D glasses?

No fool like a tired fool

I am silently but no less hysterically laughing at myself while my parents slumber upstairs in the Brooklyn digs. Today I bought classical guitar strings to restring my friends' guitar (to be explained another day), and the friendly guy at Dan's Chelsea Guitars (a tiny, tiny, crammed-full store) sold me the cheaper ball-end Martins. I was confident enough in my string-wrapping skills to go ahead even after an afternoon spent rowing my parents around the Central Park lake -- I do, after all, kind of fancy myself as good at fiddly little manual dexterity tasks. But I neglected, in my fatigue, to think long and hard or short and soft about the ball-ends.

I swear that the guy had said they go "up top," but he must think differently about top and bottom. So... I put them through the tuners. Well, it looks ridiculous, and it's wrong, of course, but it serves the same function, after all. And I rather enjoyed doing the wrapping and tying at the bottom end. They're quietly stretching out tonight, but tomorrow morning when everyone's awake, LOOK OUT SEGOVIA!


P.S. In the never-ending saga of my wirecutterlessness, I once again need wirecutters. I hope I can find my friends' pair, because I can cut the nylon with scissors, but I don't know about the others.

The friendly (SW) skies

Flew out to NYC today, and after much agonizing about whether or not to bring my 3/4 size Yamaha, I didn't. I was congratulating myself on this decision when I found that it was a completely full and delayed flight (bad tempers, full bins). Then one of the last people to board was a teenager with an electric in a gig bag. I quote the flight attendant: "You can put your guitar wherever you can find space." And trust me, at that point they weren't going to make him gate-check it. He found space, and I was annoyed with myself. If he, a teen with an overly pretentious hat, could get space, surely a more respectably dressed young lady who looked like a "serious" musician could do just as well. Moral of the story, take the risk and fly Southwest. They have a great reputation with guitars on guitar message boards, and this looked like proof.

One finger at a time

I have started interspersing chromatic scales between songs, so as to build up single-note skills and avoid, in my friend's words, becoming a permanent rhythm guitarist. Fingerpicking these is much easier than up-and-down strumming with the pick -- for that, it really would be nice to be able to see the top of the guitar. I found a good little solo to practice today, "Fields of Gold." I think the Police may be a good source for these -- so mellow that there's nothing too high on the neck or too dauntingly fast.

Down memory lane, part II

I was about five years old when I started playing piano. My brother (three and a half years older) had started a little before he was five, and his teacher at Westminster Choir College was so ecstatic that she wanted to send him to Curtis to play for Jorge Bolet. My parents opted out, something that dad, at least, regretted for years.

All things considered, I was a disappointment. I was all right, but not terribly diligent about practicing. It probably wasn't a boon to my education that we shifted teachers a few times for financial reasons. I started off with Ena Bronstein, who is not hugely famous in a performing way but studied under Claudio Arrau with Daniel Barenboim ("Danny's a genius," she always used to say). You will also find her listed in Arnold Steinhardt's wonderful memoir Indivisible by Four as one of the many pianists the Guarneri Quartet played with in their time. She was lovely, and much too good for me. We then switched to a lady whose name I will not mention, may she rest in peace, but she was an awful teacher and drove me to tears at least once -- and I was a fairly stoic child. We might have taken a break around here. In general, I was not really enthusiastic, not much for practicing, and definitely lazy about memorizing scales, which I now regret a lot.

At this point, say fourth grade, I was Seashore-tested for pitch and musical aptitude en masse in the school cafeteria and scored very high, leading to the band director trying to persuade my father to put me on French horn. But I wanted to play flute, and I think my dad thought that this was a good instrument for a girl, so flute it was. I was never very good at flute. My musical training obviously gave me an advantage, but I don't think I ever had very good air, and only a decent tone. A flutist friend of mine recently kindly said that she thought I just don't have a good facial structure for the flute -- I'd like to blame it on physiology, but I think talent probably fits into the story somewhere.

Then it was back to piano at Westminster, my brother back to Bronstein and me to a gentler teacher named Elise Yun. More laziness, more boredom. I was playing a lot of Bach and Clementi at this time. To jump on the soapbox for a moment, I wish someone had seen along the way how I learned rather than following the old classical style of conservatory training. Goal-oriented child. I would have spent a lot more effort (and did) trying to play things I liked, and fighting through two pages of the Moonlight Sonata probably did more for me musically than a lot of Clementi. Who cared about finger strength? I was never going to grace Carnegie Hall as it was.

Somewhere in here I discovered modern Broadway, and for one birthday my parents cracked and bought me the Les Mis and Miss Saigon songbooks. They heard "Stars" a lot.

I don't remember when I gave up flute. Maybe ninth grade. Piano trickled on... another teaching switch to an old tyrant of a teacher in my home town, who was terrible. I wanted to quit, and my mom caved after the first concert. When she heard how heavy-handed even the more advanced students were, she decided it really wasn't doing me any good.

That was it. No more musical training, ever. I bought a keyboard from another student in sophomore year of college and trucked it around till a couple of years after graduation. My old student flute being out of commission, my aunt found me one that was in a little better shape at a garage sale last year. I played it a bit, but I've lost my air completely.

But guitar's great. It's making me work, it's making me think, and I like the challenge. I never wanted to play a stringed instrument as a child, so maybe I had to grow into it.

More on my musical taste development another day. A little preview there with the Broadway mentions!

Meet Elzbieta

I decided to hang onto the Yamaha dreadnought for while, so I put my Wroclaw sticker (the Polish city where my brother lived/taught the last couple of years) on the case. Then I decided to name the guitar, and it decided to be Polish and female. Elzbieta. Elizabeth. The tallest church in Wroclaw, which I climbed -- it was good training for the Dom.


View from the top of St. Elzbieta.