Practice

Q: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
A: Practice.
--my friend Jenna's favorite joke, when we were in the 5th grade

I finally found the practice rooms here, and let me tell you--there is nothing quite so demoralizing as practicing in a music conservatory when you are not enrolled in said music conservatory, and you can barely remember key signatures. It is also much harder to find available rooms, since people practice all the time. I don't know if any of you ever used the practice rooms at my undergrad, but (T-Saur can attest to this, if she is reading), they are really, really bad, which also meant that they were usually deserted. I started using the piano in the art department because, while not as private as I'd like, it is so aesthetically pleasing. The practice rooms here, though, as they are accommodating a different caliber of students, are equipped with grand pianos. Yes, some are looking a little worse for wear, but when I get to play a Steinway, even with paint flaking off it, I am pretty delighted.

My friend Jenna, of the Carnegie Hall joke, got her BFA at Eastman, so I know a little bit about the conservatory mentality from visiting her and hearing stories (although the moral of most of those is that musicians drink more than anyone I've ever met, and it doesn't seem to faze them). But other than people watching the conservatory kids, the BEST part about practicing here is the cacophony of sounds that can be heard when you wander the halls of the school of music. It's a circular building, so when you go inside, the halls curve around into almost a figure-8 shape on each floor. If you just keep walking and looping you end up back at the door where you started. Initially, I didn't know which floor had practice rooms with pianos, so I went up to the fifth floor and walked my way down, and on each floor the sounds were different!

There was a symphony (I think) rehearsal happening on the top floor. When I got out of the stairwell the first thing I saw was at least 30 'cello and bass cases. And my first thought was, "they look monster exoskeletons" which is weird until you realize that it was sort of twilight, and I could have fit inside most of those cases, so it was a little surreal. The next floor down was jazz, underneath them was drums, and underneath that was piano and organ, which is where I ended. String people often practice in the piano rooms so they can pick out melodies on the pianos too, so those sounds were also mixed in.

It reminded me of these CDs that my sistah and I used to listen to when we were little--Mr Bach Comes to Call, and Mozart's Magic Fantasy, I think. And we watched Beethoven Lives Upstairs so many times that I think we've probably still got it memorized. They were AWESOME. And they always started with these kids hanging out with people who were practicing and tuning up (I always love that sound) and running around doing last minute things before a performance. That noise, all of those noises combined, just sounds like creativity to me.

Tangentially, we've been talking about aurality a lot in my Islamic Art class, because mosques are not meant to be silent spaces. The Qu'ran actually means "recitations" and that is how it is really meant to be understood, almost as a rap or chant. That's why minarets are so important--they call to worship, much like bells and bell towers do. We had a quiz on the Great Mosque of Cordoba this week, and one of the interesting (and straight up awful) developments was that it was reconquested by the Christians, who built a cathedral on TOP of it, and turned the minaret into a belltower--they weren't just fighting over the space, they were fighting over the aural space. In 997, the bells were stolen from the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, and brought to Cordoba on the backs of Christian prisoners. The mosque leaders turned the bells into mosque-lamps, as a symbolic gesture of their dominance. In 1236, during the reconquest, the bells were returned to Santiago de Compostela--on the backs of Muslim prisoners.

A depressing closing for a post about the joys of playing the piano and musical expression, but that jumble of sounds, the mixing of voices and scrapping chairs and tuning forks, turns into something that (without being too dramatic!) is sublime. My piano teacher in high school used to say that music was the most transient and wonderful of arts, because it was always, always different, every time you played something. It connects to the visual in wonderful ways, too. So go out there, and listen.