WTF-Beta

@Bernard said in Piano Class:

Chopin was adamant that it never be published!

Oh wow, I didn't know that!!! It's sort of breathtaking to think that we might never have had this music!

@Bernard said in Piano Class:

that's too bad about the class. It goes that way some times.

Yes, it was definitely disappointing. I talked with a piano teacher about it, and she said there's a tendency for people who do music theory to just sort of assume the value of music theory as a thing in and of itself, and fail to do the all-important work of connecting it to the actual music...

@Steve-Miller gorgeous!!

@AndyD said in Piano Class:

Btw, my old piano teacher bless her, would, through her tears of joy, be shouting at Pressler "raise those wrists" and "none of that curled pinky"
... a classical old school concert pianist was she.

btw I love this!

@AndyD said in Piano Class:

Do you think age allows greater expression of slow & quiet passages?

I don't think it's age.... I think it's intention.

I think it takes intention and a vision to breath into the music like that, to let the space between the notes expand, to resist the urge to rein in the expansion....

It also takes patience and calm....

So yes, maybe I'll contradiction myself a bit, these things are perhaps easier to bring the fore with age and experience.

@AndyD That was lovely!!

@Bernard I feel you re theory…. I enrolled in a music theory class during the summer and ended up dropping it because it was completely divorced from musical context (if you can believe that!). The instructor just jumped in with what felt to me like an approach that was just “memorize this just because” without contextualizing how those concepts would apply. It was very frustrating.

But since you’re doing this inthe context of a piece, I am sure it’s much more tightly relevant. I can imagine the tug to focus on something less technical/analytical, but at the same, you could probably do that quite nicely without the teacher’s guidance. This teacher is giving you something you can’t get on your own, and that alone is valuable, I would guess.

@AndyD that’s a lovely performance! Thank you for sharing it! I recognize the pianist’s name but I’m not especially familiar with his playing. But I love how unrushed it feels. Some performances of this piece feel more intense, whereas this one has a lot of breath and space to luxuriate inside.

@Axtremus said in Hey JohnNYC, your retirement gaff?:

It's kind of them to include a mortgage calculator to help estimate your mortgage payment.

@AndyD I'll have to check when I get home, but I think I sit most with belly button aligned to middle C.

I used to get disoriented if I shifted left or right but these days I rarely shift, and when I do, it's not enough to throw me. OTOH, when I play pianos not my own, differences in the bench height and the height of the music (due to music stand) are definitely disorienting.

@Bernard said in AI still needs a little work:

Are we a shit hole country yet?

Yes.

@wtg said in Yes, things are pretty bad now:

things are actually pretty bad right now

The most understated understatement of all time.

Butt breathing!

@Axtremus said in Robots getting the jobs:

It's the AI engineers who are training your replacement.

In this case, it's basically the same thing. The AI pilots in the article are training those AI robots, and eventually, they'll train themselves out of their own jobs.

@Rontuner said in AWS outage and the peril of Smart Things:

to get the lights on in the piano room, she had to call her husband at work to control from his phone...

Good grief!!

Nothing in our house is "smart" -- yet. I'm dreading dealing with it when it's time for something new, esp. something major like the HVAC system. Our current one has a programmable thermostat, but that's it, it's not connected to anything (other than itself).

The thought of having a bed malfunction because of an Amazon outage would make me go crazy.

Well, if nothing else, now everyone knows what AWS stands for. I learned about it some years ago when I learned that AWS was the underlying infrastructure of basically all of the internet pages of the uni where I worked at the time. I remember thinking it seemed like a bad idea to have a public uni so reliant on a company like Amazon.

When our course learning management system was down this week of over 12 hours, I was reminded of that...

Seeing the video of the demolition made me very sad.

@wtg wow that was both fascinating and depressing.

Nothing like having to train your replacement.

I need to listen again with good headphones. But even on my phone it sounds gorgeous!!!

@Bernard said in Bosendorfer at Costco!:

Klimt Bosendorfer.

Whoa! How did it sound? Was it gorgeous?

Also, that sounds like a lovely event!

Ooh, thanks for this, I'll listen tomorrow.

it's suddenly very fall-like here.

@wtg said in Tariff chaos:

the company told NBC News it has begun “disposing of” some shipments.

Wait why??

What an idiotic mess.

Thanks for the link! I'll have to steel myself before I read it....