WTF-Beta

@Mik BTW don't get me wrong, I'm very happy for you that yours was funded. Any studies getting funded in this admin should be celebrated.

But there is (was) a vetting process in place. Trump just ignored it, the way he ignores everything and just does what he wants.

So I wouldn't call that winnowing.

@Mik said:

some sort of winnowing going on

I feel like that's some next-level euphamizing to describe the way Trump operates.

@Axtremus

thanks @kluurs and @jon-nyc !

@jon-nyc said:

I like how the C hits before the A

me too!

BTW, I like my new teacher but she's no where near as dynamic and creative an instructor as my previous teacher was.

That's the way the system here works (uni music school), I don't have much choice, and my teacher last year is graduating in Dec (with a doctorate in piano performance) so she's not teaching this semester anyway.

It's fine, but it really underscores 1) how good my last teacher was, and 2) how inexperienced my current teacher is as a teacher.

All the ideas in this thread are things I don't think she would come up with, but I bet my previous teacher would. She had a trick or a solution to anything I threw at her.

/threaddrift

@AndyD thanks! I'll try to see where I'm sitting, and if I can lean more to the right. That's very helpful!!

@bernard omg! doing the mirror thing is brilliant!! I'm also going to try to do the LH rolled chords an octave (or two!) lower and just see how it feels, because I haven't tried that at all yet.

These two things (mirroring and moving lower on the keyboard) might also help me decide whether to use the thumb on the top two notes.

My current teacher has very small hands, like, to my eye, dramatically small. I'm 5'4" and have probably a slightly larger than average reach for a woman. She is quite petite, maybe only 5' tall, and her hands are very small and her fingers look short to me. But of course, she can get her hands to do all kinds of things that I can't. So I think the thumb on two keys things is probably something she has to do. And it sounds fab when she does it.

But I'm not sure I "have" to do it this way.

So I will try all these ideas -- leaning to the right more, mirroring to see how I'm using my body when the roll is in the RH, and then also playing lower on the keyboard to see what fingering feels natural -- and then go from there.

To your (@bernard point about making up exercises -- I was trying to play just the top three, 3-2-1 and it's really getting over "c" that is the problem. (also I think my 3-2-1 spread is stiff)

There’s a rolled chord in Clair de Lune that is giving me a lot of trouble. Here’s the score:

This is measures 25-27. Oh and for the record, CdL (this part anyway) is in Db major, so five flats.

The part I’m struggling with is the LH in measure 26. First I played it 5-4-3-2-1, then I tried 5-3-2-1-2. Neither fingering choice was working. Then my teacher suggested to take the Db Eb with the thumb (i.e. play them with the thumb at basically the same time o r maybe with a slight lag as the thumb goes down on Db first), so now I’m playing it 5-3-2-1-1. I’ve been trying to play it this way for the last few days.

But with each of these three options, I can’t seem to get it to sound right, or even passable. The rest of the LH here, and of course the RH, are all fine.

Any suggestions about how to practice it? Or any thoughts on these different fingering options? What fingering would you do?

@kluurs @bernard and @andyd any advice?

Anyone else, please chime in!

TIA!!

@Daniel thank you. It’s really frustrating.

Also, would you mind editing your post so that it doesn’t quote me like that? I might want to go back and delete this in the future, since it’s kind of personal.

Thank you in advance!

@Bernard that sounds like a great approach!!

Snotty

@Bernard ah, got it. That’s a neat way to set up the class. I wish they had something like it here (did I already say that above?

Re music theory, I’m pretty sure I wrote about this back then, but I enrolled in an online (mostly async) music theory class through the uni here, but I quickly dropped because I really didn’t like how it was taught (and it was a huge time commitment right when I was getting for a research trip).

I think it might have been different with a different instructor (or if it was a in-person class), but it was taught in such a decontextualized way, it was very frustrating.

I would love to try to study music theory again some time, but I think it would need to be tightly connected to playing

@mary-anna that sounds great! And you get to sing the fun parts! Also, it's cool that you're able to play the piano for one of the pieces too! What is the music?

@Bernard I'm sorry you had a rough class! It definitely happens to all of us!

@Bernard said:

I should have a few weeks before I play again

Oh so you don't play every week? Does the class meet every week?

@jon-nyc said:
This year they canceled days 2 and 3 due to a Nor’easter. We usually ride rain or shine, and that’s the ‘official’ stance, but on Saturday and Sunday we had sustained 25mph winds with gusts to 45mph so they canceled two days for safety.

Yikes! I’m glad they canceled!!

@jon-nyc what kind of ride was it? I mean, distance, time?

@Big_Al said:

The past 2nd Trump term has seemed to me to have been like being in the trenches during a mortar barrage. Some hit at a distance and you count yourself lucky. Some hit nearby and you know where it hit. Some land on someone you know and wounds or kills them. You just wonder if one had has our name on it.

Sadly, this feels very, very accurate as a way to describe how things are!

@RealPlayer I didn’t know that, but I just googled and it said that he lost vision permanently in one eye and was told there’s a chance that it could happen in the other eye (although it has not yet).

@bernard your piano class meets weekly right? What?

I was thinking about your class and I think it’s similar to what they call “studio class” here at the university music school. Except that studio classes are only for music majors, so I’ll never be able to take one.

Today is my piano lesson day. It’s funny how much I look forward to it!

I don’t think I’m making any actual progress with Clair de Lune, but I did add another two measures to the parts of the score I’m working on, so that’s not nothing. But the slowness with which I move through this piece is in stark contrast to how much more quickly I’m moving through the other two pieces I’m working on.

@steve-miller A few days back, your photos weren’t laid g for me, but I came back to this thread today and now they are. What a great trip you’re having! The photos are stunning so I can imagine how glorious it must be to see it all in person!

@jon-nyc said:

They’re over 20 years old. It’s just that prescribing them for weight loss is newish. Used to be just diabetes.

Wow, I didn’t know that! I knew that expanding them to general weight loss came after their use for diabetes, but I thought the drugs themselves were truly new.

@jon-nyc said:

I strongly suspect that the risk to your health of obesity greatly exceeds the risk of this potential side effect if it is one.

Probably. Still, if someone isn’t diabetic and is just taking the drugs for weight loss, they ought to know whether it incurs an increase in this kind of risk that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

I’m probably more attuned to thinking about relative risks with medications

I would imagine!

given that I take drugs known to cause chronic kidney disease (with utter certainty, the only question is severity) and increase my skin cancer risk by 100x (not a typo).

I didn’t realize that! Are there things you can do to mitigate these risks?

@Rontuner said:

So far our son's research job is still ok - I believe lots of private funding has been able to bridge the gaps left behind by the Trumpublican regime

Hopefully your son will continue to helped both those resources.

But some of those gaps are just going to go unfilled.

@bernard thank you!