Day 3 - Rachmaninoff; "Someday" lists on your iPhone

20 Feb 2017 100daysofwriting · classical-piano · music · piano · programming · writing

The two topics for today’s post are completely unrelated.

I write this to the background music of the second movement of Piano Concerto no. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff, played by Alexandre Tharaud. This is such an amazing piece of classical music. I play the piano, I am rather an amateur at it under Classical Piano playing skills and standards, but I have atleast heard Classical music to some extent, and this particular concerto (much like Mozart’s Early Symphonies, which I will eventually have to talk about because I am running out of things to write about. This exercise will certainly end up making me creative at the very least, I hope) is by far Rachmaninoff’s most famous work. I saw this lecture on this piano concerto by Paul Davies and it was so enlightening!

This is a piece of classical music, which means that it has an inherent structure (I learned from this lecture) that was considered to be appropriate for concertos in the time that this piece was composed. And Rachmaninoff tried to deviate from it a bit in the first movement by accompanying the orchestra himself, instead of playing the major parts himself. AMAZING!

My favourite parts of this piece are in decreasing order the subtle piano at the beginning of the second movement, the ill-fate-predicting chords at the very beginning of the first movement and the flute (?) part that plays on top of the piano in the second movement starting at around 1:10 in the version played by Tharaud.

Now, why am I talking about all of this? Because I wanted to understand classical piano music. It doesn’t have lyrics, it doesn’t have a music video, but it is music nonetheless and certainly wants to convey some meaning. The change in tempo in each of the movements, the very separation of the piece into movements, and the interaction between the pianist (the main act) and the orchestra (the accompanying, sometimes main, act), all of this perhaps holds a deeper meaning. I wish to someday understand what that means, I wish to someday listen to Piano Concerto no. 2 or one of Mozart’s symphonies or the Hungarian Rhapsody and understand the pain / jubilation / conflict that the composer felt when he was composing that piece!

And that leads me nicely into the next thing that I intend to talk about in this post:

The Someday list on all TODO List managing applications. A lot of people have this kind of a list somewhere: Trello, Evernote, iOS Notes, Google Docs, or a diary in which they have written down a bucket list that is a list of the things that they want to do someday. When will this someday come? No clue. Will you know that this someday has come and gone if it does present itself? Doubtful. Why did you file something inside Someday? Oh, now, that’s easy. I filed it there because I can’t do it now.

But if you can’t do it now, why do you happen to think that you might be able to do it someday? Um. Oh!

That was the fictional conversation that I had with myself when I realised that I was going to add a card inside this Someday list. And that was exactly what stopped me from adding a card there. If I obsess over something because I want to do it and I haven’t written it down anywhere, I haven’t put it anywhere for safekeeping, I feel that there is a larger chance of my going out there and doing it.

Compare that to the secure feeling I have when I file something I want to do in the Someday list and forget all about it until I finally decide, one fine afternoon when I am incredibly bored, to scroll over to that list and the flame is re-kindled.

But then, I came up with the counter argument to this too! What about when people say that the best way to do something is to get started. Write stuff down, start planning, start marking out dates on the calender, start counting down to the D-Day. Well, then, put that in the DO IN THE NEXT MONTH or the DO IN THE NEXT 6 MONTHS or the DO THIS YEAR lists. NOT in the Someday list.

There is indeed something that I want to do. There are many loose ends whcih are slightly related to the this thing right now, and I want to tie them all up before I start planning this. I am pretty sure that this is a great way to procrastinate. Because I am excited and nervous and scared and a little bit more scared to start planning it and take concrete steps towards doing it. Once I take those steps, I would have reached the:

POST #3 is OVER