Count, or recount?

A problem I have with this project of learning the Well Tempereed Cllavier is that I do not know anyone who cares. No one in my immediate life would have any desire to sit and listen to that stuff.

I play for my neighbors. Occasionally I turn my camera on and broadcast over one of those webcam broadcast networks. That is usually fun.

But mostly this is a solitary pursuit.

My life is haunted by screen names and chat room handles. Most of the people who pass through my life are people I will never see, and who I would not recognize if they sat right next to me.

It may be a self-fulfillilng aspect of my personality. Someone once described me as "keeping the world at a safe distance." Appropriately enough I never knew that person, nor did she know me.

At any rate, the journey through the WTC has consumed most of my past 10 days. I know of nothing else in my life that feels so satisfying as playing the fugues from those volumes. Sunday in particular, after 6 or 7 hours at the piano with that stuff, I left the apartment feeling serene. Something was passing through me, like air through the tips of my fingers.

When I start memorizing these pages is when I will start to feel free. That is when I can stop learning and starting knowing, when I can stop accumulating and start understanding.

Memorizing fugues is hard. For me, at least. I think it has to be done, though. The further I get in to this music the more apparent it becomes that I must memorize it to comprehend and suitably recount.

But there is a dilemma. There in the last word of the previous paragraph. Why am I recounting the works of others? Why am I repeating and recycling? I am a creative person, not re-creative . For whatever creative input a pianist might bring to the works of others that pianist is an interpreter, not a creator. A performer is a critic, even, if that is possible -- one who makes the work of others understandable and through whose point of view the work is known.

What I have started to see in Bach these last few months -- where he differs from other great composers -- is the lack of ego. Music of Beethoven, Chopin & Stravinsky ultimately belongs to the personality and (not to get too lofty but) the greater glory of the composer. With Bach the deeper I go the more I feel that his music exists for the greater glory of something beyond the composer, and beyond the music itself.

And it feels good. It feels good to play the stuff. It's niiiiice.

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For some reason the last few postings I sent to this place disappeared. That is no great loss, but the only thing I can think of is that the cron pipes the script to /dev/null. But it's always done that. For as long as I've been posting to these screens from this Treo I remain almost completely ignorant about how the scripts that run it work. That is not my usual way of working, but it is just kinda the way it happened when I started doing this.

I was, coincidentally, looking Last night at other ways of doing this, and I am also looking at trading this Treo for something else. At the Samsung showroom at the Time-Warner Center the other day I saw the Samsung Broadband PDA, as well as their strange Ultra-Mobile PC platters. Those things are strange. Too big to be truly ultra mobile and too small to be much more than a novelty.

I think the future of ultra mobile PC or otherwise functional devices is in foldable screenspace. A device the size of a Treo or other cell phone/PDA should connect to a foldable LCD screen that opens up to a usable size.

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