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That's just an expression to me. It may be more or less than one dime. The solfeggio C is pitched a little higher than Middle C. I was singing the vowels tonight and I kept coming back to this one note to sing little scales putting an "h" in from of each vowel in turn a-e-i-o-u, and I got curious about that tone, and so I switched on my digital piano (that I never have to tune), and discovered that C#6 was the closest to it, but the real tone was just a tad lower than a true C#.
Remember how I once told you about how Johnny's dogs were born next door, and when they were puppies and tried to follow me home I tried to shoosh them back home by waving my arms at them and stomping the ground at them to turn them around. But, they kept following me until I turned around and screamed at them in a single note, and they went back to Johnny's house lickety split. I hummed that tone until I got back to my house and could find it on my keyboard, and it was C#.
I'm wondering if I've been screaming at people in C# and it works the same way with humans as it does with doGs? It's not like my screaming startled my listeners and they run lak a dog through the everglades, but I may have correctly observed that they groaned and rolled their eyes as if to question my motives. Yet, things seem to smooth out considerably if I reframe to Bb minor and sing as if I'm tortured by love sickness.
It tickled me when I found out the note I naturally reach for without a tuning fork is C#. It might have tickled me more to suddenly be inspired to pick out the tune I'd been singing in the chord of C# Major without hesitation or missing a lick. It made me so smugly pleased with myself I immediately started playing the Major and minor scales all over following the Circle of Fifths.
That may seem silly to real musicians who have been playing the scales all their adult lives and much of their childhood. I only taught myself the scales from researching the internet for how to do it in the last couple of years. The most tedious part of it for me was learning which finger needed to go where to do it the right way. All of it and more is readily available for free on the internet.
I took piano lessons briefly in the third grade. I may have had something like they give kids drugs like Ritalin to slow them down. I could not sit at a piano long enough back then to conquer the scales. I must have copped an attitude about sticking with it years ago when I joined the high school band. Nothing would have helped me more musically later on than learning the scales way back then.
It's still a big thrill for me to sit down and play the scales. I hardly play anything else because I still haven't learned to play chords with both hands smoothly. I don't know whether I'm avoiding it for fear of failure or that I'm fairly satisfied knowing that the longer I play the scales the deeper they'll be embedded in my subconscious.
A long time ago, at least thirty years, because it happened before I married my second wife, we lived in Key West where we met, and I took music classes full time at the community college to get money to live on from the GI Bill.
I failed the music theory classes mostly because I didn't know the scales. If I had, I could have worked out the theory assignments, if nothing else by counting out the notes pretty much the same way a kid adds and subtracts numbers by counting their fingers. I didn't have a process I could rely on for learning music. I didn't know how to learn how to learn like I did with history and social studies. I even learned math better than music theory.
I knew it wasn't too late for learning the scales to help me. Doing it was fulfilling a life time dream, and sort of anticlimactic. Being able to walk over to my piano tonight and consciously work out an understanding about what made me curious was such a big deal to me, and then to immediately play all the notes in C# without hesitation was like a sweet topping on some birthday cake.
The opening part of this entry is an e-mail response I had with a musician friend. It's like knowing the scales with my fingers gives me the ability to talk music with people who are much more adept at playing music than me. It doesn't help me to play music at a high level of complexity with them immediately, but it does allow me to think that if I worked at it a while I might be able to fill in the blanks here and there.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
