(1) TRULY INSPIRED BY NATHAN LAUBE IN JANUARY 2009
© by Susan Burkhalter, December 10, 2009
Nathan Laube is a brilliant young organist around age 21 who studies at Curtis Institute. He can play perfectly from memory almost any classical music ever written, as do all Curtis students. In 2009 I heard his organ recital at Church of the Redeemer in Bethesda, played on a Hart di Genarro II. After the concert I went up to him to look at his hands. He said, “Yes, I have small hands.”
I have played from memory in numerous piano recitals. as a child, teenager, and adult, and sometimes one or two organ pieces at a service, although I’ve only played one organ piece from memory at a recital. My memorizing wasn’t always flawless. Sometimes I had memory slips. It was embarrassing. Off and on through the years I’ve been unconfident to trust my playing from memory in public, although occasionally I take a chance and play from memory anyway.
I had an extraordinary experience at the Nathan Laube recital: I was enthusiastic about his playing and decided to move to the front row of the church halfway through the program. I was now 8 feet away from him and could clearly see his feet and hands. While he was playing one fast piece from the French Romantic era I felt I could intercept his musical mind waves and I thought, “I could do that!” (meaning I could play an organ piece successfully and confidently from memory). It was a calming and thrilling impression. After observing Nathan Laube play, I thought, “You can do it, just like he does. He’s using tools musicians rely on.” Note that I’m not comparing myself to him as a musician, since he is much better than I.
After the recital, I decided to play the first half of Duruflé’s “Prelude sur le nom d’Alain” as a prelude from memory at the August 30th service at my church. Postscript: I did indeed carry out my plan to play the Duruflé piece. Here is how it went: My church is very small and typically only a few people sit down to listen to the prelude. As I began, two people were in there. One went out into the vestibule. The second man remained for about half of the prelude, then he left and closed the glass door, so that nobody was in there listening! It didn’t phase me. I continued to play. When I finished, I realized I had played the selection note-perfectly and with utter confidence! Mission accomplished!
(2) FAILURE TO SUCCESSFULLY PURCHASE I-TUNES SONGS
My friend with an i-Pod says the only music you can play on the i-Pod is i-Tunes music. I don’t have an i-Pod, only an MP-3 player. If I buy i-Tunes songs, I can burn them to CD’s, or play them on the computer. I-Tunes music formerly cost 99 cents per song, but recently the cost went up to $1.29 per song.
People in my generation, “Baby Boomers” born between 1946 and 1964, grew up with some different products and services which people born after 1964 never experienced. For example, I remember when I was in elementary school, children wore white ankle socks which had no elastic to hold them up. They were always sliding down into your shoe and getting crumpelled, unless your parents put rubber bands around the tops, which only held them up for a while. Also in the 1950’s and possibly the early 1960’s, milkmen drove around in trucks to deliver bottled milk to your door. Each house in the suburbs had, on its porch, a metal box with a hinged lid on top in which to store the milk. Finally, even into the late 60’s, there were dress codes at the public high schools in Maryland and girls never wore long pants, only dresses and skirts.
I have wanted to buy songs from i-Tunes ever since 2007 but I have procrastinated about trying to order the songs. I never had any experience with computers until our family bought one in 1995 and learning to use technology hasn’t come naturally to me. I remember when we first got a computer, even learning how to turn it on and off seemed an enormous hurdle.
Some older people, such as some of the music teachers in an organization of which I’m a member, are afraid to join the “Yahoo Groups” we use to post messages. They fear their identity may get stolen or a thief will hack into their credit card information. I wasn’t worried that buying songs online would affect my privacy. I have bought many things online by now with no problem. One reason I put off ordering songs was anxiety that once I bought a song, I’d get daily e-mails offering other songs and Lord knows I already get too many e-mails! This fear originated when I overheard 2 young men who worked at the Wild Bird Center joking about e-mails which offered them many i-Tune songs every day.
The second worry which perhaps caused my hesitation to buy i-Tunes songs was “eek, now I’ll have to learn more new technology!”
Finally on Wednesday, December 2nd, I mustered the courage to visit the i-Tunes store and attempt to order some songs. I managed to create an account, but on the first try the session timed out and I had to return and retry it several hours later. The tutorials and video didn’t work on OS-10.28 of our G-3 MacIntosh computer. I wasn’t able to order a song or contact “support.” My husband, who knows computers, helped me in the evening with i-Tunes, but we had to give up. Eventually he learned that a version of i-Tunes called 8.2.1 only works for OS-10.4.10 or later. Budget limitations currently preclude our getting a new operating system for our Mac.
In the end we realized that if I want to buy songs on i-Tunes, I must use the laptop PC and we need to install i-Tunes on it first. This is somewhat inconvenient, since I would like to put the new music on the Mac where my songs currently reside
The 2 songs I tried to buy were “When I Fall in Love,” a duet of Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole, and K.T. Tunstall, “Black Horse and a Cherry Tree.”