About Beth
I am a freelance writer, based in Pittsburgh, PA, specializing in science and technical topics. Yes, I am available for new writing projects! la la la
Well, I failed my audition for the chime competition. I don't feel so bad knowing that everyone who auditioned had been working their asses off for four weeks to get to that point. I have new respect for the chimesmasters. (and I like to think that I almost made the cut - it makes me feel better, ok? :)
Practicing a giant wooden 21-key piano made me realize how much I missed the smaller, 88-key version. So the other day I called the music department - they have piano practice rooms available to anyone who feels like barging on in and practicing (unless you want a grand piano - then you have to pay for a key).
The really bizarre thing about the practice rooms, which are very small, is that the grand pianos are substantially larger than the doors to the rooms they're in. Since one grand piano I looked at appeared to be older than the building, it could not have been assembled in the room (unless they moved it from elsewhere on campus piece by piece?) so either they built Lincoln Hall around it, or Cornell's music department has figured out how to harness quantum migration.
Actually, the most bizarre thing about the practice rooms is that none of them are soundproofed. When you sit down at a piano you get to hear everyone else in the building who is practicing anything: pianos, soprano voices, steel drums. If you concentrate really hard you can hear yourself play.
So, since all my piano music is in my parents' living room 300 miles away, I went to the music store in hopes of buying one of the Tom Waits piano books. The music store in question is in Triphammer Mall, which is a deserted shell of a former shopping plaza.
So I walk into a strange store in an empty mall. The room is full of pianos, but the only humans in sight are two teenage(?) boys sitting at two of the pianos, plonking and banging on the keys in an entirely tuneless way. It was surreal and creepy.
They had no Tom Waits. I bought a Tori Amos book, "Anthology", which had a few songs I already knew. I was surprised to see that two of the others were from a little-known album called Y Kant Tori Read.
That's an album that Tori recorded in the '80s, before anybody had heard of her. Nobody bought it. When she heard later that fans were paying $400 for original copies of it, she reportedly said, "That's a shame. Take that $400 and buy yourself something nice."
Practicing a giant wooden 21-key piano made me realize how much I missed the smaller, 88-key version. So the other day I called the music department - they have piano practice rooms available to anyone who feels like barging on in and practicing (unless you want a grand piano - then you have to pay for a key).
The really bizarre thing about the practice rooms, which are very small, is that the grand pianos are substantially larger than the doors to the rooms they're in. Since one grand piano I looked at appeared to be older than the building, it could not have been assembled in the room (unless they moved it from elsewhere on campus piece by piece?) so either they built Lincoln Hall around it, or Cornell's music department has figured out how to harness quantum migration.
Actually, the most bizarre thing about the practice rooms is that none of them are soundproofed. When you sit down at a piano you get to hear everyone else in the building who is practicing anything: pianos, soprano voices, steel drums. If you concentrate really hard you can hear yourself play.
So, since all my piano music is in my parents' living room 300 miles away, I went to the music store in hopes of buying one of the Tom Waits piano books. The music store in question is in Triphammer Mall, which is a deserted shell of a former shopping plaza.
So I walk into a strange store in an empty mall. The room is full of pianos, but the only humans in sight are two teenage(?) boys sitting at two of the pianos, plonking and banging on the keys in an entirely tuneless way. It was surreal and creepy.
They had no Tom Waits. I bought a Tori Amos book, "Anthology", which had a few songs I already knew. I was surprised to see that two of the others were from a little-known album called Y Kant Tori Read.
That's an album that Tori recorded in the '80s, before anybody had heard of her. Nobody bought it. When she heard later that fans were paying $400 for original copies of it, she reportedly said, "That's a shame. Take that $400 and buy yourself something nice."
To my boring life by Beth on
2005-03-10.