the musical wiring of my brain

A friend recently asked what musical instruments I play (and how well). In writing the answer, I realized something about how my brain is (or isn't) wired for playing music.

I play hammer dulcimer (well), bodhran (competently), hand drums/tambourines/etc (minimally), and bowed psaltry (basically competent). I had several years of piano lessons as a child, but can't do anything more than very basic stuff now (oops). I used to play appalachian dulcimer a little, but haven't in years. I've played around with harps a little bit, but never learned to play.

I tried to learn folk guitar when I was in high school, but my fingers were too short to chord correctly. (They probably still are, though back then I didn't know that there were guitars with narrow necks for people like me.) I also had trouble wrapping my brain around this "non-linear" instrument; at that point the only instrument I had played was piano, where the notes were nicely in a row from lowest to highest. Of course that's true on a fret board as well, but the parallelism of doing it six times with offsets confused me. Still does, somewhat, though I've played really simple bass lines (electric bass) on a couple songs that On the Mark does. Really simple, though. And I memorized the relevant fret/string positions; if you asked me to find a particular note (that's not an open string) I would have to stop and compute. That gets better with practice, of course, but I find it challenging.

I have played around with recorders a bit, but haven't put the time in to actually achieve competence. I find learning the fingerings to be hard.

The conclusion I draw from all of this is that while I am good with timing and rhythm, I am not so good with fingerings, especially if I have to move several fingers at once in order to change pitch. I think of music "horizontally", not "vertically", and I think of notes as single things that you do, not aggregates of multiple actions. (This horizontal/vertical thing applies to singing, too. I can sing arbitrarily-complex counterpoint, and stand a decent chance of sight-reading it not too badly, but close harmony drives me batty as a singer, as does your stereotypical randomly-jumping-around alto line.) Obviously I can play instruments that use all the fingers, as I was competent on piano lo these many years ago, but I suspect the linear nature of the instrument makes a big difference for me.

If all of this is true, then it should be a predictor of other instruments that would be good, or bad, for me to try. It's a pity that cello or viola da gamba is probably on the "bad" side of that evaluation; I love the sound of deep, rich, bowed strings.

weekend

This Shabbat we had a cantorial intern; she's in her first year of school. She has a nice voice that I think will mature into a great voice with more training. More importantly, she sang with real feeling -- the kevanah (intention, spirit) was present in her singing in a way that it often is not. We'll have her for two more weeks.

Small-world syndrome strikes again: Friday night I ran into a co-worker from Transarc (now IBM). His son was bar mitzvah this Shabbat. He remembered me by name; I remembered him sans name (until I sneaked a peak at the program). Everyone I know seems to be much better with names than I am.

We got a call Friday night from a friend who wanted to organize some last-minute gaming Saturday. It ended up being at our house. Since Shabbat was already underway, that posed some hostly challenges, specifically dinner and having drinks/munchies on hand. Fortunately, we had enough drinks on hand (leftovers from another recent gathering), and the friend ended up bringing a main course that I was able to supplement. Maybe next time we can play last-minute games at his house.

Are board games getting visually more cluttered and hard to use, or is it me? We played "Kings and Things" (not a new game), and I was struck by how hard it was to see some of the counters on the board. (Compare this to, say, the first edition of "Cosmic Encounter", or "Civilization".) The board could have been perfectly functional with less "art" and different colors. I rejected "Twilight Imperium" (a newer game) as a candidate because I have trouble seeing the low-contrast chits. I also rejected "Disc Wars" (a recent game) because the important parts of the counters, the stats, are tiny, low-contrast, and buried in busy art. I stopped playing Magic primarily for visibility reasons. (I found that I was memorizing the art because I couldn't read my opponents' cards, and then they both increased the number of different cards by a factor of 4 or 5 and started producing up to four different versions of the art for each common card. That was too much to keep in the cache.) And it happens in computer games, too; the reason I never advanced beyond "Civilization" (I) was that the map and units were too darn hard to see in Civ II. (I've looked at Civ III over Dani's shoulder and it looks like they didn't improve things with that version.)

I got mail from half.com again Saturday night (time to reply: 5 days this time). They are sorry that their seller shipped my DVD nearly a month late without prior communication of any sort, but until 30 days elapse from his claimed shipping date, they can't do anything to help me, like issue a refund so I can go buy the DVD somewhere else without double-paying. So by the time they can issue me a refund, two months will have elapsed from my order. And while the amount in question is not large (about $80), they'll have had use of my money for those two months. Given this experience, I would recommend against buying anything major through half.com. It's likely to be a long time before I buy anything at all from them.

This afternoon, finish transcribing the Rossi piece and then Sunday dinner. (We've missed Sunday dinner the last few weeks, and I'm looking forward to tonight.) If there's time, catch up on some taped TV.

On the transliteration, I finally opted for using the apostrophe to mark a shva. It seems to be what most transliterators use, and there's probably a reason for that. (Last week during services I paid some attention to the transliterated passages in the siddur; that's what they do, and everyone who was obviously reading from translit seemed to be comfortable with it.)