Steepish!

The world's steepest street is Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand. The slope is 20° or 38%!

Our Fingers

Well, this is the kind of thing I get up to at my house. Yes, thinking of fingerings for piano music.

The example is from the beginning of Beethoven's "Pastoral" Sonata, Op. 28 in D major.

As you can see (as you can see even better if you click the image), the note D features rather heavily in the tenor part (left hand). Also if you can read my writing then you can see that I thought I have got better things to do than bang out the Ds with my thumb all the time.

What I arrived at, seemed to be better. These fingerings are OK, i.e. definitely not wrong. If they are not quite right then I will change something. But I think it is right, or at least I am comfortable with nearly all of it.

Strange to think that there are so many other notes in this piece that I don't need to invent a fingering for, yet I have spent all this time on a repeated note. Oh well, that's my brain I suppose!

If I hadn't thought about it, then I could have played this note with my thumb and managed OK. But something would have felt wrong, and perhaps some of the notes wouldn't have sounded too. I wonder what other people do?

Without details (the right kind of details) there is no picture. No sound picture, I mean. And it may have taken a while to look at these details, but I won't need to do it again. Ever!

That doesn't mean I can't revise it if I want to, but without paying any attention to these details there would be nothing to revise, just a sort of vagueness. And this note D is important in this piece! On and on and on it goes but it is as important as your heartbeat. Which it rather reminds me of...

Ideally hot

My mission: to constantly write about hot temperatures and sunshine until everybody gets tired of me!

On the same subject...

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round. That's what Frank Sinatra said, anyway, and he should know, as one of the world's leading experts on Columbology (or is that the study of Columbo?). Well, anyway, they all laughed when I said my ideal temperature is 30°C. But today it has been revealed as the truth! Yes, that was today's temperature and it was perfect. So I just have to find somewhere that hot to live. Easy! If I pick 30° as the average temperature, that could be fine at a steady 30 all year round (where is this place?) or unfortunately somewhere that oscillates between 0 and 60°....hmm. Luckily I can't think of where that place is either! Phew!

Mrs. Miller

Go Downtown, where all the lights are bright! There's something pretty surprising waiting for you tonight! And listen out for some important whistling at around the 2 minute point!

Good Luck!