The Fredösphere

I will be the accompanist for the traditional service at church this Sunday, and it has put me in a resentful mood.  Of all types of performing, playing keyboards gives me the least joy.  There are so many notes, and you produce them by poking your fingers into narrowly defined regions.  The whole system seems optimized for mistakes.  Compared with singing, the technique is a nightmare; stop practicing the piano for a few days, and the decay is evident, but stop singing for a month and you can get back to 95 percent right away.  (Although, improvement in singing cannot be accelerated by greatly increasing practice time.  Ramping up is just as gradual as ramping down.)

I find myself playing loud as a practice.  I need to play the hymns as though I am filling a large space.  It reminds me of my old composition teacher, Fred Shulze, who got a job as a young man playing piano in a rescue mission or some such.  The preacher instructed him from the pulpit:  "put yer foot down on that loud pedal and play it like yer saved!"  Which, though regrettably unnuanced, could be worse, as far as philosophies of performance practice go.

Meanwhile, The Overgrown Path found a nice Guardian article that wonders if the pop music world has its period instrument performances.