I really must commit to blogging more frequently!  It’s an unfortunate irony that during the most interesting times one is too busy to blog (or at least it feels that way). Now, I feel I can only hint at some of the adventures of the last two weeks.

The Dropback Workshop at Sankalpah was FANTASTIC.  Everyone was so willing and I felt truly inspired to be teaching again.  Going to Leslie’s party in the Hamptons with Adrian was extraordinary as was staying with my friend Katherine and my new friend, her son Jake.  Loved my art opening at Sankalpah and crashing at Amy’s in Chelsea.  So many fantastic drinks with friends, I’m still basking in the afterglow!

Then back to LA  and getting off the plane and heading right to  Belle’s first audition (fingers crossed, although we are apparently finalists!) and then two days later, my birthday dropbacks.

This year, Colin assisted me on the beach in Santa Monica.  I decided I wanted more than just another pretty and/or neutral backdrop.  I wanted some sense of scope/scale with the environment so we went for sunset with the pier in the background.

I really love the photos.  Here are a few samples…

OK, I’m back….Quite Literally:

Back to blogging.
Back on the East Coast.
Back in my parent’s house in Connecticut.
Back and ready to teach my first class/workshop in six months this Friday (and raring to start teaching again, period.)

Today’s agenda:  create the workshop for dropping back.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot, ranging from imaging how fun it will be, mostly how great to connect with old students, to having very specific ideas while I’m practicing over the past month and making mental notes to incorporate them on the evening’s dance-card.

But today I have to shape things more specifically, narrow down the playlist from infinite to 2 hours, and decide which of my wackier brainstorms will actually translate for students.  [I am reminded of how Diana Vreeland confesses to wandering through the Vogue offices shouting “Remember Velasquez!” and admitting something close to (I’m paraphrasing) “that was one of my ideas that never quite caught on with the general public.”]

My goal in the workshop is to not only create a fabulously fun time (lots of sweaty, euphoric movement) and of course to also impart some information, but also (and more importantly) to create a metaphor of the dropback experience where each person gets to move beyond some fear or into the unknown (in a supported way.)   IE, breakthrough time!

I have been neglectful of this blog, even though there have been several wonderful, easy-going moments in the evening when I’d find myself unwinding by playing through a few sonata movements.

The reason is that I’ve been prepping for my Kipton Art Event from last Thursday.

Honestly, it was a FANTASTIC night.  Here’s the video of my artist’s tour that showcases the work:

Kipton Los Angeles April 2010 Event

And here’s one of the Grange Hall images, a series that continues to be quite popular:

The Kipton event is moved until April 29th and I feel that I am actually for once truly ahead of the game.

Although I am astonishingly punctual, perhaps it’s because I always have the feeling that I might be terribly behind.  All of this may come from the fact that I was a very overdue first baby and was ultimately induced on July 2nd so that my mother’s obstetrician could have his scheduled 4th of July weekend as planned.

All of the pieces are 95% ready and I’m hoping to have time to do a few more live drawings (while listening to the sonatas of course.)

Somehow the Keith Jarrett recording of the Goldberg Variations — which I realized I’ve owned for over a year — has suddenly now become my latest obsession.   Having grown up with them via Gould and my more recent passion for Simone Dinnerstein, it’s so intriguing to hear them on the harpsichord.  I began looking at buying one on ebay today and I am only a canvas or two away from owning one, it seems.

Here’s one more from Symmetry, and one of the newly painted dropbacks and a drawing for good measure (It makes me happy that the drawings are in the affordable price range for almost everyone.  Perhaps I should market them — versus couture — as my “ready-to-hang” line….)

Oh, and you have to click on the dropback to enlarge it and see the full-image….

My practicing has taken a distant artistic second these past two weeks to preparing for my April 22nd Kipton Art Event.

It’s rather awesome:  I am the first LA artist they are honoring with an event.

I’ve put together a ton of work:  the large dropback from the Duo event + four smaller dropbacks + an entirely new installation for Symmetry consisting of 11 different pieces.

Loving the Symmetry working and wanting to share a few….and now that we are 95% complete and ready to go, I feel relaxed and ready enough to practice a bit.

[I didn't complete forget the sonatas;  I've had a few anatomical drawing sessions and listened to the recordings while I sketched!]

All the new pieces are online at:  http://www.kiptonart.com/artists/edward-vilga/
[I love the way once you click on one image you can use the arrow keys to glide through the rest!]

And here are a few now for fun (click on them individually to make them larger):

I’m fond of the truism that  ”Too Much is too much––but Way Too Much, can be just right.”

That was definitely true today as I uncovered exactly what I’ve been searching for for my newest series of art pieces, SYMMETRY.  I had been dreaming of distressed window and door frames, and then putting stills from the short film behind frosted and broken glasses––appropriate for a series about voyeurism.

I’m working with my friend Matt who’s a master woodworking craftsman.   When he came over today, I suggested that the abandoned building that’s back to back with ours had a cool window on the second story.   Matt climbed the ladder and we found a goldmine of incredible windows and doors.  We ended up excavating 12 windows and 3 door frames which are going to be incredibly perfect.

Tonight while practicing along with Barenboim, however, I recognized that while TOO MUCH may be just right in terms of distressed windows and doors, a little off is WAY OFF when it comes to chromatic passages.

As I began to play some sonatas which were newer to me along with Barenboim’s recordings, I noticed that whenever I was just a half beat off how jarring the dissonances were during any charming run or frilly ornamental passage.  So much worse to be so close yet just a little off and therefore painfully at war with the recording.  Part of it’s the speed of those passages, but mostly it’s the number of notes clashing.  Rather than a momentary clunker here or there where I miss a sharp or a flat, suddenly a long phrase of 4 or 8 or 16 notes is clashing against Barenboim (and rightness).

There’s some kind of spiritual lesson here, too, I think about being just out of alignment with one’s inner vision.  Somehow the momentary mistake that quickly evaporates is less unsettling than an extended run of being “just out of whack.”

This reminds me of  everything I’m working for on a spiritual level;  more or less, it’s all about bringing myself back into balance whenever I’m out a alignment, and never settling for long passages that are just a little out of harmony.  I’ve learned that that really creates the most extended and worst kind of discord.

It’s sort of the same principal as playing tennis with someone much better than you.  It’s really the only way to improve your game.

Since I’ve renewed my interest in writing some songs, I’ve been working on some vocal stuff again.  After years and years of not really singing at all, I was worried that nothing would come out, that those pipes would be more or less rusted over.

However, given that it’s 2010, I realized that with Garage Band already on my computer and a snowball mike in the house, I could record myself and listen to playback to get an honest sense of where things were vocally.

What astonished me, however, is how much I improved in just over a week.  Pitch problems more or less corrected themselves.  Phrasing got better as did the performance as a whole.  I went from a kind of not-too-embarrassing if you are doing drunken karaoke level of performance to something that was actually rather pleasing.

There was an enormous benefit to hearing myself rather than just singing live and moving on to the next song;  what was important is that I was getting really useful FEEDBACK (albeit from myself), and making automatic, easy and continual modifications and improvements.

Today, since I own his recordings of all the sonatas, I began practicing along with Daniel Barenboim.

I started with the two I’ve known longest and best––K332 and K330––and it was quite informative.  Of course, the goal is not ultimately to deliver a duplication of his playing, but I certainly heard wherever he and I were out of synch, and except for a couple of interpretational differences, I concede that Barenboim is no doubt correct wherever and whenever we “disagree.”

This was really useful fine-tuning.  I discovered a few trills I’d somehow been neglecting, or a section where I was rushing a bit.

(I also discovered in K330 the importance of playing all the repeats.  If you’re playing along with the recording, you’re forced to, rather than my usual ignoring them.  The movement really lives and breaths when it’s at its full length.)

What was most informative, however, was playing along with a sonata that’s newer to me, like K311.  It was like having the world’s best piano teacher sitting with me, one who never snaps or grows impatient, but simply exists as a source of pure correctness.  Although K311 mostly comes to me in an easy and friendly way, everything “off” becomes so immediately obvious.

Honestly, I feel I should use this method lots more.  I probably got a better set of corrections than any physically-in-the-room teacher might have given me.

And on a spiritual level, it’s a perfect analogy to so much of the work I’m exploring with “lining up my energy” or “getting centered.”  Forgive the crackpot phraseology, but I now see my greatest spiritual practice as coming into HARMONY with my Soul/Inner Being/Source/What-Have-You-Within.  My process, to quote my teachers, is all about “gently tuning myself” back to that Alignment.

By noticing the contrast between my playing versus Barenboim’s––or noting the resistance that keeps me out of harmony with my True Self––I am indeed taking the fastest path to improving my Game (musical or Cosmic!).

Keanu demonstrating how to slow down bullets.

This week I finally decided to listen to the warning bleep at my gym when lifting weights, the one that tells me “Try to Slow Down” (my posting on 8/29/09).

I decreased each weight by a full bar and focused on going slower and more intently.  It turns out all the machine wanted from me in most instances was to slow down from 0.8 seconds to 1.4 or 1.6 (not really even a second!) in both directions.

What’s fascinating though is that this is truly significant.  It’s a much more intense burn, and probably more importantly, I’m working more deeply in the muscle and not just using the joints to move.  But that extra 0.6 to 0.8 seconds in each direction seems to make a massive difference.

I am trying NOT to dwell on the negative in all aspects of my life, but on Monday I had an annoying conversation that was ultimately quite illuminating about the importance of slowing down, even for just a few seconds.

Via the omnipresent power of Facebook, I saw a posting I liked and scheduled a conversation with a “social media consultant” who might have some ideas about me expanding my reach.  In the past, it has happened that more than once––before I became a retired guru––that a few excellent clients found me on the web, bought large packages of private lessons, and even became friends.  Since the beginning of this year, 5 print publications have found me via my website, along with a good doctor who bought a batch of DVDs in bulk for his clients.  I understand that this “interweb” thing is here to stay.

But the “Social Media Consultant” dude, however, was quite a trip.  Basically, for 20 minutes he rattled on about the “power of twitter” (which is rather a hilarious phrase when you think about it, recalling T.S. Eliot’s “this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”––would TSE in 2010 have changed the last line to be “not with a bang but a twitter?”)  Anyway, the SMC Dude had not really prepped or put any thought into our scheduled call, even though it was allegedly for me to hire him.

Honestly, I was suspicious from the start in that on his site and in the conversation he has no clients mentioned, much less any success stories.  Then it was clear he hadn’t really read anything on my site, didn’t understand the level of my art career or my past press, didn’t know that I had a publicist already, and even confused Belle my chocolate lab with being a mere human child.  The final nails in the coffin of the possibility of my hiring him, however, were when I asked him a few direct questions about how we might worked together such as how I might increase the readership for this blog, and he had no answers but would “need to get back to me in a few days.”

Fascinatingly––and I think not even related to our conversation––the day afterwards, he posted something telling on his blog about how his generation has a problem listening.  “Why Is Is So Hard to Listen?” was the title of his mini-essay which unfortunately seemed more generational musings than self-analysis.

It really is interesting how significant those few seconds can be in human interactions.  Pausing a moment before responding off-the-cuff.  Letting the other person complete his or her thought.  And it this case, putting in 15 minutes of research before speaking to a potential client rather than just spouting the generic “interweb” pitch.

I am interested to see how adding on a few seconds to each weight machine affects my work out, but I’m more interested in how being more generous with a few seconds in listening and in all my practices.

I’m trying not to “swing into action” before feeling really aligned and connected.  Slowing down with the piano is constant living proof that this works;  difficult passages only unravel themselves when I actually drop the speed from sixty to one and work them out rather than speeding through them.  My own speed for many things is already on warp-drive––which is great for crossing galaxies––but must be slowed to make any powerful internal changes.

All of this has led me to completely reevaluate the phrase “just give me a second”––sometimes that’s all it takes to make a massive difference.

This week I’ve been thinking a bit about the complication of ornamentation in classical music — all those trills, turns, mordents, appoggiatura, acciaccatura and grace notes – most of which can be inverted or doubled or have an accent beat – and on and on.  There are seemingly infinite varieties for ornamentation.

For fun, here’s a table from J.S. Bach’s father of some Baroque possibilities (the ornaments are indicated on top and their actual execution is below):

In my daily sight reading, I often omit the more complicated ornaments, achieving a kind of Cliff Notes experience of the piece.  Last week, however, now that I’m playing the new sonatas I’m learning more fluidly (like K330), I’ve begun to “get down” and tackle the specifics of these flourishes.  I’ve basically been saving them for last, like the proverbial as icing on the cake — which, ironically, is by far my favorite part.

From now on, however, I’m determined to slow down a bit and unravel these musical complexities right from the start.

All of these “extra notes” are really rather glorious.  It’s more than just a shame not to play them.  It’s a real crippling of the “truth” of the piece.

I’ve realize been skipping them in this drive to “get the piece down” faster, to have some comprehensible reproduction of it rendered as quickly as possible.

There is something truly GENEROUS about all these notes that just pour forth in classical music.

Those who know me socially, know I have been obsessed with how our closest local restaurant/tavern is the only place I have ever dined or had drinks in my entire life as a regular that has NEVER compted us anything (except for 1 dessert on my birthday for a part of 8).

When we moved into the cottage, without a working kitchen, Jude and Adrian and I (and even Belle, in fact) ate 2 meals a day there for 10 days.  I shudder to calculate how much we’ve spent there over the last nine months but between Jude and myself, it is in the many thousands of dollars.  Beyond this, the bartender — someone I cast in a short film — even unsolicitedly refilled out glasses recently but actually charged us for the second drink we technically never ordered!

This year, my Xmas miracle was running into my old friend Montgomery on Christmas Eve day while sitting outside Swingers with Belle and Adrian.  I’d cast him in a bunch of readings and in a play we did in Edinburgh.  I haven’t seen Montgomery for about two years since he moved to LA, however, so it was delightful to reconnect.  What’s really amazing, however, is that four hours later we ran into each other AGAIN at the video store where Montgomery was returning the DVD I wanted to rent:  IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.  (That really says it all!)

Montgomery has been tending bar at Mozza, one of Mario Batali’s restaurants and of course, since 12/24 I’ve now become a very well-treated regular.

The entire staff is fantastic — from the host and hostess to the servers — and I am, in fact, now working on an art installation with Matt who is a superb custom carpenter.

For Jude’s birthday on Friday, Mozza was, of course, our choice.  I knew the staff would be great, but the level of generosity was off the charts.  Starting with a round of drinks from Owen the  maitre d’ (who turned out to share Jude’s birthday), and several appetizers and sides, and dessert wines appeared courtesy of our friends.  It was a supremely wonderful night in every way.

Jude Making Her Birthday Wish

Pre-Mozza, whenever I would complain about how no matter how much we spent at the other restaurant we could never get a single glass of wine topped off, I realized that my complaint was essentially “I am only getting exactly what I am paying for” — something that sounds lame when phrased that way.  But something really was missing from that dining and drinking experience that was increasingly infuriating.  In a word, like a sonata without any ornamentation, there was a total lack of GENEROSITY.

With music and food and drink, we need that generosity or the experience is more or less like taking a vitamin pill or skipping the opera and reading the Wikipedia article instead.

I looked up generosity on my online dictionary and this was definition #2:

the generosity of the food portions: abundance, plentifulness, copiousness, lavishness, liberality, largeness.

I realize I was playing these pieces in the style of restaurant one — grace note omitted, just giving exactly the bare minimum that would appear on the bill.

I’ve noticed that Mozza seems to always offer an amuse-bouche to all its diners, which of course translates to “mouth pleaser.”  Well, I now think all these classical and baroque ornaments as “ear pleasers” — free-spirited, plentiful, and mostly importantly, because they are off the menu and one is never charged, truly generous.

Echoing the proverbial business-speak of  ”giving 110% percent,” that’s the philosophy I want to inspire my practicing, and quite frankly, everything else in my life as well.

I spent a lot of time this week searching for a scribbling in the margins of old music book.  My first truly good piano teacher, Mary Blish, wrote not only lots of helpful fingering but also tons of musical suggestions.   For example:

What I love about this is not so much the reminder of the D and F sharps or the “slower” but that Mrs. Blish has actually drawn a pair of glasses at the top right.  This was, I learned, a reminder for me to “look more carefully.”

I spent an hour going through old scores of every piece I remember playing with her, which was actually rather delightful and completely took me back to my entire high school repertoire.   For the first time in many years, I played through the Gershwin preludes and Reverie and countless other warhorses of my recitals.

I failed to find the drawing I wanted — as did my mother who looked through a few pieces I thought might be lingering still in the piano bench in Connecticut — so I’ve had to reproduce it from memory.  Once my piano teacher scribbled this in the margins:

When I asked her what this was and/or meant, she replied, “It means when you play, try to listen with MY ears, since yours aren’t any good.”

Harshly quirky as this was, she was probably right.  My ears then had little powers of discernment.  My knowledge of the repertoire was limited.  I hadn’t yet worn out records of master pianists playing the pieces I was learning.  I was a messy but enthusiastic high school player, drunk of big chords and dramatic passages without the humbling refinement that my later teachers would instill.

Getting back to the present, this week I’ve been playing through a lot of sonatas that are new to me, taking particular pleasure in K457 and K311.  They both feel quite responsive to my future playing, accessible and willing.  We “get” each other.

There’s something so soothing about my ritual now of playing every afternoon when Jude hits the gym.  I pour myself a glass of sherry or port — my New Year’s resolution — and play through at least a few movements.  There’s such comfort in the simplicity, stability, and repetition.

My “to do” list, however, has grown to astronomical proportions.  In fact, I spent most of today just trying to organize my week, weeding down activities and prioritizing.  Right now, there are literally 1 dozen writing projects going, 4 art series, and the vast, nebulous licensing and teaching activities I feel I should always be pursuing.  Beyond this, there are my amusements — the Winston farewell dinner, chief among them — that occupy way too much of my time.

I don’t really know how this wealth of 2010 New Year’s creative outburst relates to “better ears” except for the fact that I really am expanding my knowledge and experience with these sonatas.  It’s hard to define, but beyond the obvious 6 million musical activities I’ve engaged in since high school, this disciplined project really has “improved” my ears more than anything else.  I’ve also been recording myself which is enormously helpful, hearing myself through my own listener’s better ears than those when I’m merely playing.  It’s a phenomenal education.

So as stinging as Mrs. Blish’s comment to me was when I was 16, although I can’t find her drawing, I’ve never forgotten her point.  Here’s to “better ears” in 2010!