Timothy's Blog

Perhaps you like Pachelbel’s Canon in D?  It became popular in 1969 when the Paillard Ensemble released their arrangement of it in Europe, then it was played on an American radio station, and it’s been a wildly popular Classical piece ever since.  Why?

Well, part of its appeal, I’m sure, is its journey through a repeating pattern of chords.  There’s something about a cycle like that gets to our souls in a special way, especially if there is a compelling development going on in the melody parts, and they keep overlapping in new ways in pieces like that canon.

Practice makes perfect!  Well, at least, practicing something over and over for a long time will make it possible for you to play it better.  Of course!  And the more familiar you are with a piece from much practicing, the more likely you will have a marvelous command of its structure and expressive details when the time comes to perform or record.

But sometimes you find yourself banging against a wall.  If you’re playing hammered dulcimer (or any instrument) for enjoyment, learning a tune or arrangement can sometimes become a terrific burden, and you may be tempted to forget the whole music thing and just go play a video game or watch a reality TV show or something….

When I was an infant, quite some time ago, I started listening to Classical music!  It was because my mom would sing it and play it on the piano in the living room, and because she would put on recordings of Classical music and rave about the greatness of the compositions and performances.

Musical phrasing and interpretation are affected by the way the instrumentalist moves.  It often marks the difference between cold, dead music-making and compelling, electrifying results.

A lot of dynamic effect can be achieved with a very efficient and slight movement, as when a hammered dulcimer player uses mostly his fingers to flip the hammers in just the right way, with shoulders and elbows moving the hammers to the note locations.

Wooden instruments gain new sonorities as they’re played over the years!

My performance hammered dulcimer was made in 1999 by Dusty Strings, the eighth one released of the new design, the D600; they sent it to co-designer Sam Rizzetta for approval of the new model, and he recorded it on three tracks of the album Dulcimer Boogie with it. (That’s my D600 in the photos!  He played a new D550 on one other track, and his own Rizzetta Extended Range on the rest.)

One nice feature of the Classic iPod is that it has so much capacity that you can store tens of thousands of tracks of music and play them back in ‘shuffle’ mode --- a vast potpourri of, at least in my iPod’s case, a massive variety of genres and moods.

Today my iPod cycled through into a somewhat obscure piece by the great master J.S. Bach --- Violin and Keyboard Sonata no. 5, BWV 1018, the third movement, the Adagio, played by the inimitable masters Jaime Laredo and Glenn Gould.

When we play music on our instruments or when we sing, our ears hear what we’re doing the very instant each sound is made.

Our brains --- consciously or subconsciously --- immediately make an assessment: Is it in tune?  Is it exactly in time with the overall flow of the piece?  How well are the tone and the volume and the phrasing matching the goals of the performance?