Category: emotion

IN the late 20th century the band called the Indigo Girls wrote a brilliantly fun song about the most horribly brutal situation: Galileo, who’s “head was on the block/His crime?/Was giving up the truth.”

Matherton and me are listening to this as I type. I’m thinking : 25 year old song, better than ever.  Jackie is pushing for a comparison to a live version, both to compare speed and because it’s such a darned good piece of music!

Spiron w J Matherton

11/20/17

©Newman Tempo Scale By Me, July 1988, copyright Nov 16, 1992. I think it holds up as well now as when I saw it 30 years ago. I did not INVENT it – there is nothing *to be* invented!  Below is a pattern of nature I saw while living as as first year law student. As I’ve written, I was trying to get gigs playing at piano bars during my time in Manhattan and despite on one night playing without mistakes by notes, on some difficult pieces, the feel in the room was unenergized and I did not know why. One night at after a 3rd ave gig, Bruce B, a drummer from the east coast said to  me, “not bad dude. you almost were good with Farmer’s Trust at the end, but I think that’s because it’s a waltz and it didn’t give you time to go into your your own head making up your you  own speed. I don’t know what it is with you piano players you think you can play any speed.  From a drummer’s perspective, I listen to your playing. You seem like other piano players to get off on all the harmonics underneath the piano, this *huge slab of wood*, blurring the harmonics as there are three strings for every note.  That makes anything you play sound interesting harmonically with all the notes playing off each other each other. YOU, dude!  That is not what the audience are hearing though, man. In fact, the *first time* you miss a beat as in instead playing in time, you go into your own and rubato which nobody’s going to follow.” This is getting along the this will be part 1 of genesis of the Newman Tempo Universal Proposed Scale. I’d like to end this part of the the by saying how much I try to convince myself that Bruce was wrong and in and I went into a 6moth-8 month period complete denial about what quite simply came playing for twenty two-year that I could be on time without out a metronome to practice with.