missroserose | Playing catch-up

After two months' consistent practice followed by a month of only sporadic effort (hurrah for the holidays), I'm finally back on the piano-practice wagon. This is helped somewhat by the (hopeful) resumption of lessons - my pianist friend seems to have gotten his life back together, and Wednesday we worked together on some more basics. New cool thing I learned: written music has evolved and changed over the centuries! I had always assumed that (say) a staccato mark meant "play this note short" in any music; while that's broadly true, a staccato mark in Baroque music is played longer and with more emphasis than one in Romantic music, which is similarly played longer and softer than one in modern music. This was one of those revelations that I found simultaneously fascinating and patently obvious; written music is a language as much as words are, so of course different generations will adapt it to suit their needs and fashions. It also nicely contextualizes the work in its period in history (one of my favorite things!) - Baroque music, being all about the flourishes and complications (not unlike Baroque art and architecture), is played with much more emphasis on the ornaments and accents than modern music.

Yesterday I had lunch with Elyse, whom I love dearly and whom I see far too rarely (through no fault of hers or mine; we just both have ridiculously busy lives, and her December was even crazier than usual). We spent some time catching each other up on our work lives and personal lives and talked about the news and ate far too much Mexican food and generally had a lovely time. We even managed to catch a Sculpt class together last night; I was particularly entertained at how it caused a reversal of our usual demeanor. (She's usually quite bubbly and ebullient, whereas I think I come across as more reserved; this was a "challenge" class, though, where the teacher encouraged us to grab weights a category higher than we usually do. So by 2/3rds through, when our arms were dying, she had the biggest bitchface going on, whereas I was almost maniacally laughing and singing along with "Beat It" as we did our 3,974th set of tricep kickbacks in chair pose. I...am beginning to wonder if "bring it on, is this the best you can do?" is an entirely healthy stress response, heh.) If nothing else, it was a great bonding experience!

That said, between the busy few weeks and that class, boy are my arms sore today. I have a King Spa day planned with Martha tomorrow, and I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it...