Random thoughts or comments...
Moderators: Feg, Gill the Piano
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Codswallop! After ten years and I don't know how many lessons in that time it has had the complete opposite effect on me.
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When I hear of stories from learners who say that piano playing relaxes them, or it takes them to another place, or helps their health/cognition it only seems to highlight the divide between utopian idealism and grim reality. To actually experience pleasure when playing would be for me the sort of thing that is produced by ones friendly neighbourhood sandman.
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Mabel Mucklethwaite has taken down her piano teaching website. Guessing she has retired.
AAh, but you already have that coveted piano playing skill. Question: "Do you play the piano, Gill?". Answer: Yes, with confidence. What would you like me to play?? You are learning the guitar and finding it a wee bit difficult. Well, that's me with trying to learn the piano. If I'd had learned at the age when you had learned the joanna, well, I wouldn't be sat here in such a state of indecision about learning the piano when as I speak, Donald Trump may be plotting the opening moves in the third world war. As far as musical instruments go, it's Gill 1, David 0. 1 would have been nice....thank you Mother.
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This house is full to the rafters with farage and the piano is one piece of farage too many.
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I shall now email Fanny Fosdyke and ask her if any of her students are looking for one.
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Despite me disagreeing with her, she was absolutely and 100% right all along, and to acknowledge her wisdom I shall even post a link to her page:
www.piano4solihull.co.uk
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Bloody buggering pianos...
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Sorry about your relinquishing Fiona, Dave. It'll be interesting to see if you get itchy fingers next time you pass a piano. Did you take it up for the sake of learning a skill, or for the sake of making music? I do seem to think it was the latter, so you might still find an outlet which provides you with less anxiety.
Join a choir (oh, that's if T will let you)
Or even - learn to follow an orchestral score, there will almost certainly be loads of miniature scores in your library, and get to know some stunning masterpieces.
Buy a cheap trumpet. She'll love that...
Sorry I've been away so long; I was really quite ill in October - I had a throat so bad I couldn't swallow without it going down the wrong hole, all my taste-buds had gone haywire, lesions on the back of my tongue and my soft palate, and the doctor diagnosed herpes. He didn't take a swab or a blood test or anything but he was confident that was what it was. I hadn't known you could get it in the throat, and it turns out it's very rare unless your immune system is buggered, so that's told me something. Anyway, he gave me these pills, the tablet form of the Zovirax you take for cold sores, and said "you're going to feel very ill, you're going to feel sick" and sure enough, I was. After about the fourth day of it I thought I'd never felt so ill in my life and the medicine wasn't working, then I realised that the doctor wasn't telling me what the illness would do to me, he was telling me what the pills would do!
It took a few weeks to get absolutely right again, and actually I'm not really right because I still have a cough that's lasted over four months now, feels like I'm inhaling food, drink or just spit, and it hits me all of a sudden and feels like choking. I make a noise like whooping cough (but lower) when I breathe in during one of these events. I only cancelled one week of lessons, back in October, so most of my kids are used to me suddenly saying "play that again, I need to go and get some water" in a strangled voice. Happens about half a dozen times a day. I've had blood tests, I've had a chest x-ray, I've had an ECG, apparently everything is clear, and now I'm waiting for an appointment with ENT. My suspicion is that my epiglottis is burgered.
Meanwhile... I've just been asked at very short notice if I could accompany someone for grade 8 trumpet a week tomorrow, as their arrangement with another player had fallen through. I am meeting up with him this afternoon, and will need one more rehearsal as I haven't had much time to practise yet, and my printer is producing very smudgy dirty copies which I can only just read. One piece is the Concerto in Eb by Neruda - pretty straightforward, mostly chunk chunk chunk chunk and the occasional semiquaver scale. The other -

- is Piece en Forme de Habanera by Ravel. It's not that long, fortunately, and it's slow, but the rhythm will be so tricky coordinating with the soloist, and the chords have unexpected sharps and flats all over them. But it's soooooo sensuous! Very exotic. One chord also has 11 notes in it. I've tried counting my fingers, but I still can't get them to go up to 11 like the amplifiers in Spinal Tap. Fortunately it's also a rolled chord, so I guess by the time I reach the last note, I will have a spare finger on my left hand to take that one.
No idea at all what I ought to charge for doing this. It's at 9:30 on a Monday morning.
Everything else is "as normal" (for us) The dog is getting bigger but once she's out of the house she starts to look small again - and SO well-behaved. Husband's memory problems are getting more and more severe by the day, but his memory clinic doctor insists he wouldn't classify it as dementia since he's still very intelligent, can drive well (gets lost, but as handling the car is dealing with the hear & now, not much short-term memory involved)
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Are you saying you dissed Donald Drumpf on the AB forum??? I must have missed that one. When was that, and who were you this time?dave brum wrote:That's the one. The web planet where you are immediately excommunicated for dissidence. Stalin and Khruschev had absolutely nothing on the ABRSM moderation team (maybe Mr. Donald Trump has some sort of 'Power Game-esque influence on them too as they don't like criticism of him on there).
Thank goodness we aren't like that at all.
I've got quite a lot of really good friends on that forum including at least one (male) who I know you didn't like, though most of the others in that category are much the same as usual. There are just a couple of them who seem to report me every time I open my mouth, even though they don't see any harm in hasving a go at me themselves, so I've had several warnings. Maybe they have too, I don't know. Almost all those you knew personally (or at least had been a "friend" of) seem to have disappeared, though Dawn (Sunrise) is a fb friend of mine and now living in Birkenhead.
No, we/they aren't all "like that".
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One of the reasons why I received a lifetime ban from the 'other side' so to speak, was (as well as daring to scrutinise Donald Trump BEFORE his election as US President) may have also been to post this link in particular which is jazz poem 'B-Movie'(Live) by Gil Scott-Heron, which is a damning indictment of the administration of Ronald Raygun, comparing his Administration to a film set:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFUPaT-h91M
That time, I posted as 'expianist' (which I indeed am). Many users, well in fact most users were very very helpful indeed (sbhoa for example) and gave much food for thought and conversation to a piano learner on the verge of giving up for good after suffering persistent bad luck. It is such a shame that the ethics of the page's Moderation seemed to be in total polarisation to most of the musicians and learner musicians using that forum.
There also seems to be a fundamental distrust of anybody or anything that is outside of their own comfort zone. Yes, conservatives. Like Donald J.Trump......
But do I care...Do I *****. All that went with my piano which I am so glad I got rid of, after giving it a darn good try.
OOh, and I've also been given a lifetime ban from the Facebook 'Piano Network UK'. Maybe I am actually too working class to learn the piano ('we don't want those blooming plebs associated with OUR instrument!!')
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I think the worst particular point to of this whole thing is that they did not provide me with a reason for their highly drastic actions despite me emailing their office and asking them (of course, like all fascist dictatorships, their first alibi would be to say that they didn't receive my email, and then allege that they did but it got lost or accidentally deleted). And then there is the mistake on my part of not keeping a copy of the email.
I should also add that when I contacted another forum user to express my appreciation, explain what had happened and post a sincere thank you from myself, this poster immediately got a telling off from Moderation for "posting on behalf of a banned member".
I often use the example of the ABRSM moderation to imagine what it would be like if Nigel Farridge had won the 2015 general election and he immediately appointed himself King Nigel I, but fascist resistance aside, it really feels like the world never wanted me to learn the piano anyway....there is a God and He is trying to tell me something because of all this misfortune that has come my way over the past 10 years.
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The moderation seems v. draconian on their forum. I think perhaps they take themselves far too seriously sometimes - levity and debate not encouraged!

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It is also easier to look down on positivity (positivity that was shown by many members of the ABRSM forum) but on their actions, what the moderation have done here is generate something that they CANNOT possibly put a positive 'spin' upon!
I am a great admirer of an organisation called Searchlight, which exposes fascist organisations (such as the National Front, British National Party, Racial Volunteer Force etc.) by infiltration of their ranks. Searchlight have been a great inspiration to me as I have repeatedly duped their Moderation and managed to register and post on the ABRSM forum. I shall continue to do so, so they had better watch out. Victory for me, however, would be to enter myself and pass my ABRSM Grade 1 Piano with a Distinction, get on there and blog about it and imagine the ire of their Moderation!
Alas, I have no piano....which is another matter entirely.
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dave brum wrote: Alas, I have no piano.....
Told you so....

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Ah, I'm assuming you don't mean you've appeared again in another incarnation? I can't see how they could possibly be capable of stopping you from even seeing the page. So did you just see my Peter Sellers reference?dave brum wrote:In the definite unlikely reality of my fairy godpianoteacher walking through the door, I have just succeeded again to get onto the ABRSM forum and read the comments. Someone please inform the ABRSM politburo that expianist is able to read the forum without any difficulty whatsoever and as they know my ISP address, could they ensure that their excommunication of this subversive little anarchist remains in place as this is an abuse of their power to give me the freedom to read their forum without the 'you are not allowed to visit this page' page coming up.
Are you on fb these days?
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It turned out to be a tiny bit more than I'd expected, though of course not nearly as much as in my wildest dreams I had hoped. But it did bring home the real possibility of deciding to move. Both of us think we'd like to downsize and live in a single storey house. But as I am teaching and rather tied to the immediate vicinity of two schools in particular, I can't manage to move more than a couple of hundred yards or so! There are some LOVELY bungalows just up the road from us of course, but by the time we had got our act together, they would already have been snapped up, this estate agent said, as bingalows in Cherry Hinton are very desirable indeed.
He said don't worry about trying to improve the bathroom or the kitchen, or redecorating, as the house was best suited to be bought by a developer. But we would also need to sell the house before we could afford to buy one, so as to be able to jump in feet first and get first dibs for cash. This would mean trying to find somehere to rent, and also being able to teach from somewhere. It goes round and round at the moment. I've even contemplated renting somewhere cheaply a bit fursther away and somehow just renting one room in someone else's house where I could have the piano and teach, just till we got our dream bungalow - OK if it's only for a month or so, but the nightmare scenario would be this going on for a couple of years.
Pne big advantage, though. is that it would absolutely force the decluttering we don't seem to be able to get round to in this house.
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Have done, and I can be sure that my email has fallen on blind eyes and weak minds. When their junta have glanced at each other in total agreement. 'His 'bad luck' is of his own doing' sort of assumptions.Gill the Piano wrote:Don't tell us; tell them!
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Random thoughts or comments
I love their rooftop concert when Nasty kicks that camerman off the roof right before they start playing their first number
Reason: To remove link at the bottom of the post