I'm so happy. Katie is debating today and she gets to show off the baby at the same time. I was asking her (Katie, not the baby) what the schedule for today was, and she described the schedule to me and she mentioned something about CR and I realized I had completely forgotten about the baby! Wow. I must not be a good uncle! Mom is going to watch CR for the day... wait... this is suspicious...
(1) Mom hears about an open spot for a debater
(2) Mom tells sister
(3) sister accepts
(4) Mom holds baby
Ha! I knew there was a plot to hold the baby somewhere! And I found it. The great mastermind behind this fiendish plan? MOM!
Over last weekend, I played some Beethoven music I brought south with me and tried playing it a bit. Moonlight Sonata and The Pathetic Sonata (Opus 13). At this very moment, I'm reading the company's notes for The Pathetic Sonata... "full of sorrow, with a mingling of love and devotion..." Nowhere does the author mention anything about excitement. Beethoven has a whole measure of 1/64th notes. There is no way that even "Grave" can play those slowly. And the very next movement has the left hand playing at 552 notes a minute. That is 9.2 notes a second. "full of sorrow... love and devotion"???? Did the guy that wrote that line ever hear the music played? How do you get "full of sorrow" from a tempo marking of "Allegro di molto e con brio!"
Related topic - Trans Siberian Orchestra. That band is who I first heard "The Pathetic Sonata" from. i think the actual name of the song was "Mephistopheles." I'll look it up tomorrow. It was such a beautiful, enrapturing part of the band's song (the rest of the song wasn't so enrapturing), that as soon as I first played it for practice I recognized what it was... and after I looked at the temp markings, I also realized the Trans-Siberian Orchestra was playing the song at one third tempo. Bah. I can play it almost at full speed... but only for about 30 seconds... Well, I can only play two pages of the 17 pages song at that speed. After the first two pages, my familiarity with the song goes down rapidly. After hiking this weekend, I'll probably sit down for a hour or two and practice.
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