Piano day again but I’m going to do a little change of pace here and talk about something that’s only tangentially related to piano. I’ve discovered e-readers and, though, I haven’t yet had the pleasure of using one, Kindle, by far the top-rated reader, just announced about a week ago that their latest and greatest, the Kindle 3, has been dropped in price from $189 to $139. I’ve not yet joined the 21st century as far as HDTV goes, or the iPod, or data phones, or texting. (I’ll never do texting! I see no need for iPods, and I have no desire to do Internet on my phone.) But I think I’ll probably soon be joining the Kindle Kraze!
So what does the Kindle have to do with Beethoven? Only that it will be so much easier to listen to Beethoven and read about Beethoven and myriad other musical reading pleasures on the Kindle. I read so much but am always frustrated by all the great books I can never get to. I used to listen to a great many audio books and I was amazed at how many of those I could put away in a year during driving and downtimes throughout each day when you cannot be sitting and reading but you can certainly be moving about and listening. And listening to audio books is a completely different visceral pleasure from reading.
I had my car handily set up to listen to books on tape and pipe the audio through the car stereo so that it would come in loud and clear. But for some time now, all audio books are only available on CD and CDs just don’t work very well. The main advantage of a tape is that you could stop it at any point, eject it, carry to another player, and start off exactly where you left off whenever you wanted. You can’t do that with a CD. Every time you stop a CD, you lose your place and must hunt and peck like crazy to get it back. As you might guess, this is too cumbersome so I just don’t do it. I don’t listen to audio books anymore since CDs are too cumbersome. In order to use a CD, you have to have paper and pencil with you at all times and make a note whenever you stop as to the CD#, hour and minute you left off on. As you might also guess, most of the time, this skips my mind. (Why the hell didn’t anyone ever invent bookmarking capabilities on CD players?)
So I’ve discovered the Kindle 3, the first Kindle that has text-to-speech techology so that you can now "read" any book as an audio book, the only exceptions being new best-sellers that are already commercially available as audio books and for which the publisher has specifically locked out the Kindle speech option. But this is an extremely small percentage of the millions of books that are available.
So Kindle will once again allow me the pleasures of listening to audio books. They offer CD quality but with the flexibity of tapes plus a whole lot more. I’m currently reading a number of books, most of which I do during the 30 minutes each morning that I’m on the exerise bike. It’s amazing how quickly you can go through a book that way, and how quickly the 30 minutes of huffing and puffing just fly by when you can occupy yourself with a book. (And, from what research I’ve done, Kindle is the only e-reader that offers this speech option.)
I am currently wading through several books: James Michener’s, "Texas," which is an 1100 page epic spanning the entire history of the Lone Star state from its 16th century beginnings as a cast-off Spanish colony all the way through the year 1985, the year the book was published. I’m also working on my birthday present, Bob Woodward’s wonderful new account of Obama’s first two years in which he does his usual top-notch scholarly research going into the very depths of the behind-the-scenes activities via interviews with the literally hundreds of people of all stripes involved. And I’d like to add to that as a companion piece Bush’s new book about his eight years. You might also guess that I’m reading a couple books on the financial markets, as I frequently do, and one title that I’ve been spending a lot of time with is an obscure little 1965 book, "The History of Interest Rates," which is long out of print and costs $100 on Amazon but I was able to get it from Saginaw Valley College. It may sound like the dullest reading in the world but it’s not; it’s a history that goes all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia and explains in fascinating detail how trading has evolved since the beginning of time and there are many genuine surprises that are helping to unlock the mysteries of how trading is done today. There are tons of old books like this that are available as free downloads that I would just love to be able to listen to.
But aside from reading for business and pleasure, I also do a great deal of reading just to satisfy my own compulsion for research on screenplay ideas and book ideas. There are a number of books that I have on the drawing board. I plan to write a memoir, "Sleeping With the Devil: My Twenty Year Battle With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," which I think may be the first book written about this disease that is not by a medical professional or badly ghost-written by some layperson who had the disease, but rather taking the perspective of a layperson with the disease who is also a writer. I have a second memoir in mind, "Hard Facts & Cold Figures," which I actually wrote 90% of while at USC. It was originally going to be, "Hard Facts & Cold Figures: 101 Weeks at USC’s Graduate School of Business," modeled after Scott Turow’s marvelous book, "One L," about his first year at Harvard Law. It’s passe now but, if I pursue another master’s to update my career, I may very well be able to resurrect most of the material from that one.
But with this being piano day, the real purpose of this posting is to introduce my latest book idea, "Beethoven’s Progeny." Today was a great piano day. Today, after failing five months in a row, I finally passed the third level of the One Minute Notes Test, in which you have one minute to identify 28 notes. It’s actually a wonderful exercise for sight-reading, to be able to know where the notes are without even thinking, because to get through that many notes in one minute means you don’t have time to think about it. Getting all but one doesn’t count. It’s all or nothing. You hit just one note that you have to think about (and for five months it’s been just one note that’s held me back), suddenly you’re not done in one minute anymore. So today I finished in one minute, one second! (Pam gave it to me anyway.) Next month it goes to 38 cards! I really have to study my flashcards everyday now.
But it was a great feeling of accomplishment. And I always get to relive my childhood when I do this. She always gives me some little music-related gift when I pass a level. This time I got a little mahogany pencil sharpener in the shape of a grand piano. It could not have been a better gift since my goal is to eventually own a mahogany grand piano. But this may be the closest I get to owning a mahogany grand piano!
This is why I take piano, not only because the music is so beautiful but because it gives me such a wonderful feeling of accomplishment every week. Since my lifestyle doesn’t come with a lot of things that give me closure, piano is one place where I do get regular closure and so it helps me keep my sanity. It also inspires all my other creative endeavors.
But even before I started my lessons three years ago, it had been my intention to document the entire journey from first grade to the Collegiate Diploma of the National Piano Guild, and to do so in writing and on video to eventually put together both a documentary film and a memoir, "Beethoven’s Progeny: The Journey of a Man Coming to Piano at Middle-Age." I haved scoured the Internet and have not found anything remotely resembling what I have in mind.
This is a rather rare thing. There are tons of middle-aged professionals who have been playing since they were five. And tons of middle-aged amateurs who never get beyond the third grade. (It IS hard, after all!) And there are also tons of older and very talented amateurs but they’re almost all people who’ve been at it since childhood but never aspired to make it a career. There are almost no people who STARTED at middle-age and stuck with it through the entire curriculum, certainly no one who’s done this and written about it. So I plan to be the first, but I do have to go the distance before any of this can happen. That’s why I’m documenting everything!
I got the idea for "Beethoven’s Progeny" from what I consider one of the greatest films about piano ever made, "The Competition," with Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving. They are both playing extraordinary talents in their late 20’s who are on the verge of breaking into concert piano. Just one more hurdle: they must win this competition in San Francisco, modeled after the real-life Van Cliburn competition. In the film, Amy Irving’s character is described as a 5th generation pianist in a direct line from Beethoven, meaning her teacher was taught by someone what was taught by someone else who was taught by another who was taught by Beethoven.
It got me thinking. Is this for real? Is there really a very privileged list of world class pianists who are actually in a direct line of succession from Beethoven? I spent a great many hours researching this and found out it is absolutely true. There is a direct line from Beethoven! Near as I can tell, the most recent is 82 year old Leon Fleischer who has for decades been a renowned professor at Philadelphia’s esteemed Curtis Institute of Music. Fleischer was taught by Artur Schnabel, who was taught by Theodor Leschetizky, who was taught by Carl Czerny, who was taught by Beethoven. This is a very exclusive club. And I’ve only just begun to uncover the list of today’s living pianists who are Beethoven’s progeny.
The objective of "Beethoven’s Progeny" is not only to document this very unique journey of a middle-aged man coming to piano, but also to document the entire evolution of piano since its beginnings with Bach and to locate and interview every living pianist who is in a direct line to Beethoven. I’ve never seen a book like this – certainly not a documentary film – and I think it will be a fascinating adventure.
So that’s why I write about piano as there’s no substitute for the emotional ride that comes from recording these experiences as they happen, even the small thrills of passing a One Minute test after five failed attempts. But certainly getting the A’s on my report card from the concert pianists who judge me every year at the auditions are all grist for the mill too. (And yes, even if it is just the small thrill of getting a mahogany pencil sharpener in the shape of the dream grand piano I hope to own someday.)
That’s why I am studying piano, not only because of all the personal joy it brings me, but because it will provide the raw material for a book and film the likes of which the music world has never before seen. So stay tuned ...
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