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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lady Lurksalot who wrote (65102)	3/26/2004 7:48:37 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Chris, If I live to be 23 years and some months, I could never get used to those split keyboards! If you were a wide body, as I am, believe me, you would love them. Having to contort my wrists into position to use a standard keyboard is painful. Wrists just weren't meant to be bent at such a sharp angle.

To: Lady Lurksalot who wrote (65102)	3/26/2004 7:49:17 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 71178

Holly (who has the wrists and fingers of a 5-year-old. Or a five year and some months old. <g>

To: Lady Lurksalot who wrote (65102)	4/8/2004 7:26:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71178

I was just catching up and saw your statement about the wrists and fingers of a five year old. It made me laugh because I had written a couple of weeks ago to an old friend saying that though I was old and wrinkled, when I died they would say admiringly, "But she had the wrists of a teenager." Last weekend I played a competition for forty middle school soloists. It took five and a half hours with NO breaks. Now, there is accompanying musicians and then there is accompanying middle schoolers, which must not be confused with making beautiful music. Middleschoolers are totally reliant on the piano and have no concept yet of leading. In addition, they have a unique ability to skip happily from page 3 back to page 2, or ignore entire sections, or decide that those rests weren't really necessary so let's get on with the next measure. Accompanying takes on a sort of frenzied, desperate aura where you just pray you are vaguely close to their note. By hour five, the notes were dancing on the pages and there was an out of body feeling about the whole thing. Luckily, the next piece was one I knew well, a little Italian song from the ubiquitous 24 Italian Songs and Arias. Because the teacher wanted this kid singing a half step down from the written key, we used the clavinova, an electronic keyboard that you can set lower or higher. We were almost to the last page when this terrible noise erupted from the keyboard. I thought it had had an electronic seizure of some kind. Everyone did. There was this universal gasp from all. The poor 13 year old stumbled and turned to me panicked. I looked down and I swear, I didn't recognize the things on the ends of my arms. They had dissociated, had taken on a mind of their own and had decided that they wanted the right key and they were playing a halfstep higher. Now this is an amazing feat. I could never have done this normally. ONly the girl was still singing in the other key. The effect was-- chillingly, awesomely bad. In an afternoon of some really bad vocal performance, this was outstanding. I fought with my hands for a moment-- it was touch and go-- but finally I got them back to the right- or wrong-- key and we stumbled to the end. There is no way to make something like that right for a 13 year old. I felt terrible. I will say the adrenaline rush carried me through to the end without further digital rebellion. ON the other hand, they had precut the check and it was for only four hours, so what they got what they paid for.