kepo-ing Zz85

Just like at times when I pop in the tiny, green, Diphenoxylate pills to stop my strong stomach’s acid from churning, I need some elixir for my mind/soul blobbing music practices.

Sometimes the music pills comes from watching some classical videos (doesn’t that reminds me of the Pururin Gorota’s space candy in Nodame Cantabile, Gapoo!), sometimes with listening ears comes therapy, when there’s someone to hear musical stories I tell (and my current teacher has a good set).

There was also treatment for my musical illness when this elderly piano tuner arrived, long after the piano at home should be serviced.

Hearing I was still in the army, he conversed with his companion in hokkien, comparing the similarities between firing the rifle and tunning the piano.

As he took apart the piano into its skeleton form, I looked closely into the parts, and immediately the piano seemed drawn closer to me.

I usually marvel at the body of a grand piano. There’s in a upright piano has the similar workings, the ribs of the piano’s voice box, and its soul from the frame in a harp-like structure hidden with its usual standing position.

As the piano tuner runs across the keys to test the piano, his expressions express his shock of a almost baroque tuning, each keys about a tone down.

On commenting his good ears as he needed only a tuning fork, he recalls how he tells young tuners, “Young man, you are very good, you can hear with eyes”, as the new generation piano tuners seem to rely on their electrical tuning tools.

As out of tune intervals starts to clear, he wipes and polishes black wood while I test the keys.
Bright, though not too much like Kawai’s, not too heavy keys, not too hollow came the sounds of the Czech produced Bohemia tones.

“Remember 6 months time”, as we waved goodbye.

This is intoxicating. I would almost compare this to hunting. The hunters run after the animals like I run after the notes. I thrust myself trying to play them with precision. It releases adrenaline, and it feels insanely good.

Russian piano virtuoso Boris Berezovsky said with regards to playing Kachaturian.

I feel “intoxicating”, not as how rock musicians associates music to drugs, but with my struggle to understand and play music well. The confusion of the many different “schools” of music playing started my suffering to seek an answer. Take a piece of Bach, i try to compare editions, and different written interpretations and analysis of them. Recordings of just several great players for a same piece shows diverse differences, and teachers adds another hurdle you with their influence of style of playing and teaching.

The questions that usually bombards me are “is this how I like it to be sound?”, “is this how the composer wanted to be expressed?”, “do non-musical laymen like this?”, “musicians’ interpretion on this?”, “my teachers’ views on this”, “will examiners understand this style of playing?”.. I usually come out with a compromise between the styles.

Why do I think so much? Ignoring the statement Berezovsky puts “piano playing is physical”, I’m always more of a mechanical player rather than musical even though how I wish I’m the latter. Playing the piano for me from the start (at a not so young age) was a little like typing- with my mind going: “which keys to be depressed, which fingers are going to down or up” and so on, rather than “whats the next chord, the next expression, the next mood..”.

Some asked me how I kept the pieces I play from memory. It is perhaps, due to my poor sight reading, the pain staking mechanical process of playing a note at a time, has cultivate the muscular memory of the fingers, less of my mental memory which in general has always been poor.

Even the young, well-known Chinese pianist Li Yundi said it was lots of hard work with regards to practicing the piano. Anyway, despised how music playing and practicing has a toll on its performers, some of them have their lives pretty balanced out.

One of my favorite composers is Franz Kreisler, was a famous violinist during his time. I was first hooked to his pieces Liebesfreud and Liebesleid, meaning Love’s pleasures and sorrows. Quite many seem to enjoy and listening playing his piece Prelude and Allegro in the Style of G. Pugnani too, one of the pieces which he had composed under the style and names of other composers.

He not only studied music, but medicine and painting too, and was involved in Battle of Lemberg in World War I. You could read his memoir “Four Weeks in the Trenches” ebook at the Project Gutenberg. What I liked was his personal touch, presented in his playing and even in his last days “radiated a gentleness and refinement not unlike his music”.