“Good luck out there. Should you need to vomit, please do so away from the piano,” quipped the competition organizer.
Out of all the days I could have woken up feverish and dizzy, it just had to be March 27, 2011, the day of the piano competition. Playing the piano for an unwelcoming panel of stone-faced adjudicators when everything I saw seemed to spin round-and-round was the last thing I wanted to do.
Well, no. Second-to-last.
Every day for several months, the same cascading arpeggios from Schubert’s Impromptu Op. 90 in A-flat major could be heard coming ceaselessly from the Yamaha upright in the fourth house on Clearfield Lane. The unique blemishes of each musical figure that flickered into and out of the present time-frame drove me, …show more content…
On such meditative adventures, the rhythm of my 191 steps per minute inevitably unite with my wandering thoughts to produce music that only I can hear. Conveniently, Schubert’s Impromptu plays today, its tempo scaled to match my gait. I turn left off of familiar Dublin Road onto an unfamiliar forest trail. Through this decision, superimposed with the hopeless, pleading harmonies of the piece, I suddenly understand that the story Schubert was telling in the Impromptu was actually no different than my own story—one of doubtful strife and sweet, sweet success. Like a farmer who would still laboriously sow his seeds into the ground each spring, not knowing how successful the fall harvest will be, I have been conditioned by my music education to invest my free time in pain—whether it manifests itself on a long run, in a practice room, or anywhere else—and let Fate work its magic. Yes—on the way, there will be hopeless times: times when you question the process, the pain, the purpose. But in his Impromptu, Schubert trumpets to me, with a victorious A-flat major arpeggio, that success will at last reveal
Out of all the days I could have woken up feverish and dizzy, it just had to be March 27, 2011, the day of the piano competition. Playing the piano for an unwelcoming panel of stone-faced adjudicators when everything I saw seemed to spin round-and-round was the last thing I wanted to do.
Well, no. Second-to-last.
Every day for several months, the same cascading arpeggios from Schubert’s Impromptu Op. 90 in A-flat major could be heard coming ceaselessly from the Yamaha upright in the fourth house on Clearfield Lane. The unique blemishes of each musical figure that flickered into and out of the present time-frame drove me, …show more content…
On such meditative adventures, the rhythm of my 191 steps per minute inevitably unite with my wandering thoughts to produce music that only I can hear. Conveniently, Schubert’s Impromptu plays today, its tempo scaled to match my gait. I turn left off of familiar Dublin Road onto an unfamiliar forest trail. Through this decision, superimposed with the hopeless, pleading harmonies of the piece, I suddenly understand that the story Schubert was telling in the Impromptu was actually no different than my own story—one of doubtful strife and sweet, sweet success. Like a farmer who would still laboriously sow his seeds into the ground each spring, not knowing how successful the fall harvest will be, I have been conditioned by my music education to invest my free time in pain—whether it manifests itself on a long run, in a practice room, or anywhere else—and let Fate work its magic. Yes—on the way, there will be hopeless times: times when you question the process, the pain, the purpose. But in his Impromptu, Schubert trumpets to me, with a victorious A-flat major arpeggio, that success will at last reveal