There are so many messed up things in this world.
Chewed gum tossed to the ground for people to step in, fellow classmates cross-dressing for a womanless beauty pageant, or Pachelbel's Canon in D performed in Eb major just seems wrong right there, but playing Leroy Anderson's "Sleigh Ride" in the middle of June for a student recital tops the cake of screwed up insanity. It's 81 degrees Fahrenheit at 8:30 pm and I have to ask myself, "Why of all pieces to play on the piano did I decide that Leroy Anderson's Christmas classic would be a good duet to perform in the month of June???" When my duet partner and I first picked the piece of music, we thought it would be humorous to play this traditional Christmas piece in the summertime. After I was given my copy of the music and told that this duet would be performed for the student recital in two weeks, all the color in my face drained as I turned the color of snow whooshed aside from a wild and crazy sleigh ride I had just gotten myself into. I was given five pages of first part crazy piano mess and told to have all of the notes of the piece down by next Wednesday. Wait a second--let me back up a little bit and say that I haven't had any formal piano training. I'm a completely self-taught pianist. I've grown up with the mentality that you can do anything you set your mind to. In eighth grade, I decided I would learn to play the dusty sixty year old piano sitting in the living room of my house. With many hours of practicing simplistic piano accompaniment to modern pop songs, I could kinda say that I played piano. Before this year, the biggest piano challenge I had ever faced was accompanying a friend of mine in a talent show (in which we surprisingly won second place). This year, "Sleigh Ride" seems to be the cursed piano piece that is haunting me. Sure, I'm up for a challenge, but you can't rush me! Two weeks until recital and I have barely learned the first two pages of music. God, it's certainly not easy keeping up with my piano partner who has studied piano privately since seventh grade. I've practiced so many hours on that piece this week that I have an aversive to that song now. I swear that after this recital I don't want to hear that Christmas song again until it's actually Christmas time.
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AuthorKendall Driscoll is an accomplished writer/ musician/ artist/ academic scholar. Archives
May 2015
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