At the Mayoral Candidates Forum, I run into Craig R. the composer. I ask him about the fingering of the Opus 127 Adagio.  He says everyone has to figure it out for themselves.  Depends on your hands.  One “rule of thumb”: keep thumbs off the black keys.  When Chad drops by to pick up a precinct, I ask him to look at the fingering I’m working on.  He’s a good pianist but he’s stumped.  After two more days of trial and error, I arrive at a sequence my fingers can follow. I see where the strains within the melody begin and end, where they repeat and vary, where they accelerate and retard, rise and fall, build up and trail off.  The words click into place.

Audio [new window]

If we could find¦
The key to unlock beauty’s hidden clue
Then¦we might learn to reach
The love of life we sometime knew.
Then we might escape
Our lonely shell
We might arise out of our hell
Grow wings to fly into the air
And float free from care

But there’s no chance
That such release will ever
Be felt while we are here
Unless we can recall
From whence we came

Yet I am hopeful
(And so are we)
I’m truly hopeful
(And we are too)
I hope our lives
Can be the way
We want
The way we want
The way they truly should have been
Once more
Once more
Once more

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2010 and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.