Of course the hard economic times world wide will affect every nook and cranny of our lives sooner or later, and not only banks and financial institutions will suffer but Orchestras and opera houses will have to bare the consequences as well, down sizing and down glitzing to suit the new train of thought.

Along those lines of thought, even without worry for the major orchestras, museums and Opera companies it is quite certain that the smaller institutions, will be severely hurt, if not demolished.
I am not sure though, that I buy into this tragic line of thought.

I much prefer what Daniel Wolf says:

But what if this moment is one of economic opportunity and not just severe restriction? Let’s have a little vision, now! What if we could re-organize our musical lives in a fundamental way, with the basis not in our music-institutional lives but in music-making at the most local level? In part, I believe that we have already moved in some important ways in this direction. The large corporate recording industry has lost considerable weight and technological advances have made it now possible to produce the most sophisticated recordings and broadcast-equivalents with means modest enough to be available to a middle-class household.

I am in complete agreement, at least as far as the sentiment goes. This is not the first economic crisis the world has endured nor will it be the last, and never before has it resulted in a complete standstill of anything. Where the old establishment and ways fell, the new sprung up like new growth after a forest fire.
Art and music has a way of renewing and reviving themselves in dire stressfull times picking themselves up and dusting of the debry to begin again, in a new and often better way.

Yay for optimism.

I am so tired of hearing about the end of the world and watching people panic, Daniels thoughts are like a breath of fresh air.

Edward Weiss Piano musings blog is always a great place to go and find new and wonderful piano resources.

Apparently Jamey Aebersold, the jazz man, but not only has put down in one slim volume everything you need to know to get started in terms of theory, and not only that - The man is giving it away for free here (Downloadable version).

Now how could that possibly be bad?

I read this in the Well Tempered Blog.

“Andrew Vactor was arrested for playing rap music “too loudly” on his car stereo. Vactor faced a $150 fine, presumably for ‘disrupting the peace’, but a judge offered to reduce it to $35 if the defendant spent 20 hours listening to classical music by the likes of Beethoven, Bach and Chopin.”

For some reason or other it pushed all of my buttons at once.
(And now I am sure that I am going to push some other peoples buttons…but that is not the intention).
I love music (obviously), Classical music included of course if not preferred, but I have, will and do listen to all sorts of music - Hip Hop included. I can’t find any way possible to compare the two, and say one is preferable to the other, unless it is in a completely subjective way - A person can prefer classical music to hip hop, which that same person can like a bit or not at all.

I don’t know what the judge was thinking to himself,”condemning” somebody to 20 hours of classical music - like in all genres there is good and bad here to, plus Mr Vactor was not arrested for listening to Rap but for playing it to loudly… Don’t you think that if he was driving though the streets blasting Bach or Beethoven it would be just as disturbing to the peace - the fitting punishment to be exchanged for the fine would be 20 hours in complete and utter silence.
Am I right?

This is a Project Guntenberg eBook of Harriette Brower’s 1915 book Piano Mastery: Talks with Master Pianist featuring some of the greatest pianist of the earliest 20h century.
I found this on the collaborative Piano Blog, who found it on Scribd.
Now I am going to make some tea and read it!

When you decide what it is you want to be when you grow up, you are usually unaware of the difference between your dream, or how you picture your day will look, to the way it actually looks in reality.

This is true of most choices but especially true for the arts.
How much of our time do we spend doing what it is we intended on doing, Writing, composing, playing, potting or painting - and how much of our day goes to surfing the Internet, blogging, corresponding, having lengthly important phone conversations about this and that and the other.

Before we can say Jack Robinson, without even realizing it, we have to fit what ever it is we set out to do in between managing the rest of our lives….which makes us, instead of potters, composers, writers and musicians - secretaries.
I find the most difficult part in all of this is that even if we do set aside sufficient time to do what we set out to do in the start - in order for the world to hear our compositions or read our book a certain (huge) amount of marketing needs to be done - including emails phone calls and so on.
So how can this be avoided? The magority of your time sould be set aside for your main ocupation so that you can get high quality results, and so that the creative process can take its course.
Kate from the Ivory Tower has says

But the problem is Parkinson’s law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available.” You made the other project the priority, which inevitably leads to other things and opens the door to new responsibilities. One, then two days go by, then a week, and next thing you know it seems like it’s been months since you last had the chance to focus on your work.

By this point, of course, you feel behind and disoriented and it’s even harder to get back to where you were before you got off track. So the trick is twofold: 1) Set aside time every day to do your creative work. Let the essential trivia of daily life fill in the gaps, not the other way around. 2) Assess and drastically limit distractions. Write brief e-mails. Press the delete key. Turn off the phone.