Skill A Month: Let's Get Classy!

-
For my latest birthday I decided I wanted to try something new: a skill a month! I pick a skill, work on that skill for a month, and see what happens!  There are no illusions that I master anything, just some intentional practice.

For December I knew I'd need something that wasn't a very heavy lift; something I could fit into the cracks while I'm doing other things. For a while I've wanted to learn more about classical music. Here are some takeaways:


If you want to be a major composer you better give up if you start after age 12. Preferably you'll be composing by age 6 like Mozart and Strauss.  Mendelssohn composed 4 operas and 12 symphonies by age 12. Thinking of starting at 13?  Pah! Get a new dream.  It also really helps to be German.


 Did you know there are four periods of classical music?  I didn't! Here they are:
  1. Baroque: lots of music for churches - think Handel's Messiah and lots of Bach. And LOTS of harpsichord.  Oh, all the harpsichord!! 
  2. Classical: This is confusing because you have a classical music period...within classical music??? Who named this one? These are the people you think of like Mozart and Beethoven, and music started to be less about religion. More symphonies, "prettier" sounding music. 
  3. Romantic: Harpsichord out, piano in! Now people were starting to tell stories with music, and were able to run the whole emotional gamut. 
  4. 20th century: Romantic music was too pretty!!  We've got World Wars going on, people!  Let's make music that sounds as tumultuous as the world around us.  
Here's an excerpt of my random notes about composers: 
  • Liked the ladies even though he was a priest! (Vivaldi)
  • Nicknamed "Little Mushroom" for his plump body and short frame (5'1")! (Schubert)
  • Women went nuts for him after hearing his playing. Had crazy white hair and looks a bit scary. (Lizst)
  • Had a mistress named George. His heart was removed and is sealed in a pillar of a church is Warsaw while his body is buried in Paris! (Chopin)
  • LOVED trains. (Dvorak)
  • No one knows how he died; might've been cholera, might've drunk himself to death, might've been gay(!) and committed suicide so it wasn't revealed. (Tchaikovsky)
  • Norwegian. Kinda looks like Einstein; married his cousin. (Grieg)
  • Married two of his students! (not at the same time). (Bartok)
  • Hitler was a fan. (Wagner)
If you're a famous composer, there's a good chance you'll be sickly and/or die young. 
Schubert: 31
Mozart: 35
Bizet: 36
Mendelssohn: 38
Gershwin: 38
Chopin: 39
Schumann: 46 (went mad)

Awards Ceremony!!!
Guess what the best part of being an adult is??  You can feel however you want to feel about classical music because you don't need to answer to anyone!  You can give up on Schumann (for example - but I'm also looking at you, Bartok) whenever you want because you're not in 7th grade orchestra anymore and no one is saying you have to. 
  • Biggest surprise, #1: Brahms!  I only knew his "lullaby" going in, but turns out I really like a lot of his stuff.  As I wrote in my notes, "I am loving Brahms!"
  • Biggest surprise, #2: Philip Glass. He's a 20th century composer whose style is "minimalist" and I'd read his music can drive people crazy because it's so repetitive.  Well...I really liked it!
  • Biggest surprise, #3: Hey there Vivaldi! After wading through all the organ of Bach and Handel, your fiery violins in your Violin Concerto in G Minor were more than welcome!
Here's a playlist of some stuff I like:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Skill a Month: Better Conversations

-
Image
February's skill of the month: better conversations.  Now, I can do small talk and have good conversations with friends and all of that.  But sometimes I notice - especially with acquaintances or people I've just met - like I'm not offering up much of myself in conversations.  I'm very task-focused: give me a task, I will complete that task. So when someone asks me a question, I will sometimes answer that question without offering any additional information. Why do I do that?  Sometimes I might be afraid of saying something dumb (when people ask me "what's new?" I feel like I need to come up with some awesome response).  Or sometimes I literally might not be able to think of anything to say.  Sometimes I worry I'm talking too much about myself.  What I realized more and more throughout this month is that everything helps - it's about offering the other person something, anything, to work with.  So here's what I did this month:  Tried ...
Read more

My Favorite Stuff of 2019

-
I may not be Barack  Obama , but I also like to recap my favorite things of the year! Here we go: Books The Price We Paid, Andrew Olsen.  I had a vested interest in this book: my 3rd and 4th great grandmothers were in the Martin Handcart company, but they were so traumatized by it they didn't like to speak of their experiences and couldn't bear to look at a handcart for the rest of their lives. Reading this book helped me understand more of what they went through. For that alone, this book was invaluable to me on a personal level. The Only Plane in the Sky: A Narrative History of 9/11, by Garrett M. Graff.  This book was both hard to pick up and hard to put down. Hard to pick up because you knew you were going to be reading about the worst day of people's lives; hard to put down because you became transported into that day and then superimposed it with what you yourself remember from that day. I can't imagine how much effort must've gone into gathering these ...
Read more

Skill a Month: Learn to Bake Bread

-
Image
In January, I channeled my love for the smell of homemade bread into learning how to actually, you know...bake homemade bread. Here's what I learned along the way:  Baking bread is ridiculously easy...IF you have the equipment.  And by equipment, I mean a stand mixer with dough hook.  I think that's why I've been intimidated in the past.  Luckily Santa gave me one this Christmas.  Everything takes 3 hours.  They don't tell you this.  The recipe might say it takes 40 "active" minutes with 2.5 hours "additional time" that includes a double rise.  And you'll miss this and think the recipe takes 40 minutes.  No matter what recipe I made, they all took about 3 hours.  I found Sundays a good time to do this because I usually had a chunk of time in the middle of the day.  There are TWO kinds of yeast!  I've only ever known the kind in the packet (active dry yeast).  But most recipes call for instant yeast.  This is d...
Read more