My enthusiasm grows each week as we get deeper and deeper into our little piano world, but also my nervousness does. Everyone’s encouragement up to this point has been very nice and I do feel as if I have taken a step in a good new direction, but this is the easy part, being in school. Everyone should congratulate me when I have got through my first year after school and not starved to death; that will tell the tale. Right now I am trying to still get my head into a good place of just enjoying each day as it comes and also relishing the experience of being in school and frankly of being checked out of the rat race for a few short months. On the other hand, every day I am thinking about trying to get a fast start with my business the day I get out of school and worrying about how Dale and I will manage to get through a difficult first year or two while things build.
The title of this entry refers to my continued amazement at the very unique way one must approach working on a piano, but which also seems to me to be a microcosm of life. When I think about it and look back at where I have come from in the last few years of my working life, it’s pretty amazing to think I am now focussed on working on these Victorian era music machines made mostly of wood and felt. And thinking about the exactness of working in the computer world juxtaposed with a more craftsman-like focus on this work continues to give me cause to ponder. At the same time as there is a great deal of thinking and design that’s gone into the piano building process, if skilled craftpeople don’t somehow put some soul into the machine all that other stuff doesn’t matter. Our tuning teacher told us a great anecdote about one of his clients that he tunes for, who told him she loves the piano after he tunes it because it sounds ‘like an old whore’. Damn, I can’t wait until I can do that. (This particular client is a brain surgeon at the university. I can feel a rant coming on about how many really smart people I know have an education in music. Our Physics prof also plays the piano.)
Even the weekly Physics class has me thinking. I’ve talked about it a bit elsewhere I think but this is the Physics of Music and Sound we are studying; all about energy, vibration, sound waves, strings, pipes, simple harmonic motion, and other things that would cause some to glaze over but that I find quite interesting. I’m not so much interested in applying algrebaic formulas (formulae?) to answer questions on the exams as I am with the overall concepts. What’s really kind of freaking me out is how the physical laws of the world and universe play a part in something so - to me - unscientific as the way music makes you feel. And how the same physical laws that govern the formation of stars and galaxies also determine where is the best place to put the holes on a clarinet, and why octaves and fifths sound good to us. As we have learned, the Greeks thought music held a very sacred place in the order of things - the ‘Music of the Spheres’ they called it - and they were the first to discover much of the underlying scientific principles behind music and sound. There’s a real beauty to it.
It’s all science, and yet…
