Baroque

Day 66: With rain coming down and no sign of a break from unpleasant weather, I'm getting a little desperate for material here, so today I'm going for baroque and will bore you with a glimpse of my back-story. In the long-ago, I trained as a keyboardist, and it was then that I first became interested in the harpsichord and the music of its era. Although I had only a piano on which to play, I began tucking away my figurative pennies in the hopes that some day, I could purchase the instrument of my dreams. Evenutally, I saved up enough for the double-voice rosewood Sabathil you see in this photo. As has been said of harpists, harpsichordists also "spend half their time tuning and the other half playing out-of-tune." Fortunately, my husband was possessed of perfect pitch and kept it on key. For me, though, tuning is a struggle, especially when two strings serve two different notes, and each single note is served by two strings (one for each voice). It takes me hours to tune it up, and one humid afternoon to knock it out of whack. As a result, I don't play as often as I used to (or as I'd like), and although my electric piano has a harpsichord voice, the artificial generation of the sound simply doesn't have the character of plucked strings. That said, although I don't play many carols, various instruments seem to come out of hiding during the holiday season even though I can only play one at a time.