Tenacious Music

I'm back at my favorite haunt, after a full day around the house. Tenacious Root is playing. This band has been around for at least 25 years, and they sound better than ever. I wish they had a sound man though. It's a little boomy for this coffeehouse. My bones of hearing are getting rattled.

I've had two beautiful mornings of improvisation. Yesterday was especially rewarding. I wish I'd recorded it. I'm going to have to get something set up to do that. This morning's improv was informed by a little educational video I watched yesterday, by Allan Holdsworth. He was playing a bunch of beautiful chords, and I tried to do something like that. It wound up sounding a bit like Stravinsky. It was exciting, to be able to work with voice-leading, and then abandon that and play widely spaced chords succeeding each other.

I finished sight-reading the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 31 no. 2, the Tempest piano sonata. Now in the middle of the Adagio. Beethoven's sense of humor is all over the piece. I wonder if the music wasn't funny to him sometimes. Could he have been serious? It's so pompous, and the rhythms are so stilted. He had to have been joking when he wrote this.

Well, I can't hear myself think, what with Tenacious Root playing. Why isn't there a music aesthetic devoted to playing as softly as possible, making the audience strain to hear it? Music that fades away as swiftly as it appears? Ideas that  barely break the audible surface, with an implied existence before the notes that you hear?
Perhaps that music would be best for an opium den :) Really, my idea for a coffeehouse music would be all acoustic. Chamber music for six, maybe. Harpsichord, cello, flute, oboe, violin, and viola.

Tonight's weather is crisp and clear. People outside are dressed up in costumes, walking quickly in the cold. They seem happy. I should join them outside, and I would if I had the energy. I worked out twice today, and did lots of laundry & cooking. 
 Still, I'll be driven out soon enough.

Until next time.