beethoven the pianist update

My new book Beethoven the Pianist (Cambridge University Press) is now definitely published and available at booksellers all around. There is a small pile of them on my little table at home, so I can’t be wrong about this. Previews are available on Googlebooks and at various Amazon sites.

I am announcing this only for the sake of completeness (since I mentioned the upcoming event in an earlier post) and in the hope that the community of piano and Beethoven aficionados will have patience with my style and a good time reading it.

With even more enthusiasm, I would like to direct interested harpsichordists to the tab “Skowroneck harpsichords” in the sidebar of this blog to check out a new second hand offer of a Franco-Flemish 5-octave Skowroneck harpsichord in Spain, that has reached me yesterday. This instrument is especially dear to me since I played my first series of public recitals on it in the early 80s. Judging from the pictures that I have seen, it is in very good shape.

performance versus research

The nice thing about a funded research project at a new university is the possibility of an exchange of experience with a whole new set of colleagues. So I am, for instance, learning that it is not everyone’s cup of tea to write blog posts about one’s research. I see the point, up to a certain level. There is surely no need to publish snippets of one’s first efforts, and only little need to communicate one’s mid-project struggles in any detailed way. At the moment, still in the middle of a mixed collecting and text-accumulating phase (and side-tracked, I admit, by some specialties of modern British life, such as recurring incorrect energy bills), I feel that it is not helpful for anyone if I publicize what I haven’t yet properly thought out. Otherwise, I find it totally excusable, even commendable, to blog about snippets, gems, side-thoughts or meta-musings that would otherwise find no real place in one’s work.

Whether to admit that good research takes time (as I did above) is something that should be withheld from the critical eyes of potential search committees (and hence not be blogged about), as people try telling me, is another matter. I am writing blog posts in order to demonstrate how my particular branch of the trade works for me. This can only be a good thing for the community. I would have liked to have access to similar resources when I was studying. One all-too-often thinks that the problems one encounters are exclusively one’s own. They’re not.

time management I

In early spring, perfectly timed with the snow that paralyzed the south of England for a few days,  I introduced myself at the music department of the University Southampton – a first move in connection with my post-doc research project which is up and running as of 15 March (see a short abstract under the “research” tab). One of the questions I heard was how I combine playing and research. One could add, “how do I manage to write blog posts about either activity?” A look at the frequency of my postings during the last half year provides the answer, “hardly at all.” The rest is time management, to be attempted again every new day. The following posts are about this topic.

One of the reasons why I’m not drinking ale with my colleagues in Southampton at the moment is that the new project requires an awful lot of reading – and I’ve got more relevant books than I can handle right here at home. I used to be a performance practice person with a bit of knowledge about instrument building; now I am confronted with art worlds, how users matter, the history of technology and Viennese concert life, to name but a few of the things I have to know about before I can even begin worrying about the thickness of strings and hammer heads and the correspondence of various Viennese piano firms. All this material is spread out over several horizontal surfaces all over the house, and whether it is read or not depends solely on my discipline. I need discipline to refrain from cutting the firewood in the garden first, from making another cup of coffee, from thinking that I first need to practice for one of the upcoming concerts, from sliding off into the depths and widths of the world wide web and even from doing the dishes. The problem is not so much that reading books about theory isn’t fun (I will not put a parenthesis after this statement). It is that one needs to create space for truly absorbing what one reads. In the absence of a real plot in most of these books, “stuff” tries to invade one’s brain all the time, and one’s thoughts want to wander. But the paragraph that floats past un-understood is in effect an unread one. There are hundreds of candidates for such paragraphs in scholarly books. One must resort to foolproof and simplistic methods for getting the reading done. Half-engaged scholarly reading is a gigantic waste of time.