Music, Well Learned

I got a harmonica for Christmas. The first thing I did, after blowing enthusiastically for a bit, was to try to play some scales. That got me thinking. I first learned about scales probably in preschool when I was in the ‘oh, aren’t they so cute’ chorus. We’d dress up in greens, reds, blacks and whites and make loud noises following Mrs Caroll’s playing the piano. We had fun, made a lot of noise and were not particularly musical.

Later I took piano.

I didn’t really appreciate it at the time, but learing to read music was probably one of the better things my parents made me do. I liked to mess around with my mom’s guitar and the piano we had. But before taking those lessons, my ability to do much more than bang on the keys was rather limited.

I quit piano after, I think, a year or two. I don’t really remember, I didn’t practice enough. I stuck with singing though.

I continued to sing in chorale through high school and College, practicing here and there but mostly relying on my ear and my sense of music to get me by. That is until I started voice lessons. The thing about individual lessons at the University level is that they expect you to practice. And they expect you to get better and will tell you if you aren’t cut out for what you are doing.

So, I practiced everyday and I got better. I spent thirty minutes every afternoon running through my pieces, finding their hard parts practicing them and folding them back into the piece as a whole. Ater discrete math one semester and japanese another I would cross campus to the music building, sit in a practice booth and play my parts.

I intentionally and methodically worked my way through two years of voice and at the end I found that playing piano was easier than it had ever been for me. Becoming good at the piano was a side effect of practicing my voice music everyday.

That sort of relates to my as yet unstated goal for this blog, which is to write a post in it every day. The truth is, I need the practice. And, I wonder what kinds of things I will learn along the way, through writing and publishing something everyday.

Besides, trying to keep my qwerty and dvorak straight of course.

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