Piano
One of my first performance recollections on this instrument involves me tripping up on the way to the stage, falling off my seat and playing every single note wrong because somehow the thought of transposing the whole piece up three notes was more appealing to me than admitting I started on the wrong one. Aside from personal mishaps, there's also been times when the piano itself was not up to par - most prominent in my memory is the piano that lobbed its keys at me in a way similar to if it were hurling ninja stars. All I wanted was to practice on a real piano for half an hour before a concert, what I didn't expect was that the 200 year block of wood was set up to be home to 88 keys all set out to kill anyone with the misfortune of touching them. My recollection of this event is somewhat like this :
but being brutally honest what really happened was somewhat more like this :
Violin
There's been far worse misfortunes with the violin - there's more components that can go wrong. I've had strings snap in the middle of performances (I now have a massive fear of ever touching the E string), I've had catapulting bridges, exploding shoulder rests and there was that one time that I accidentally let go of my bow and watched it fly off into the first row of the audience. Sheet music has flown off, music stands have toppled over as if they've had far too much to drink and a couple of times I've managed to destroy chairs - no-one knows how it happens, it just does. I'm the thinnest person imaginable so the only logical explanation for such occurrences is that the chairs in the music department in my school have conspired against me, along with the piano.
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| My attempt at fixing the remains of my shoulder rest |
Saxophone
For once, I believe that this was through no fault of my own and thankfully I never performed on the sax so only my teacher was there to witness the following. It was 1:50 on a Thursday and I was running late for my sax lesson, I ran up the stairs to my teacher's studio, barged in and upset a bucket of water that was by the door (apparently it regulates the humidity in the room but I know it was a trap), having righted up the bucket I set about constructing the saxophone and was ready to prove to my teacher that his efforts in making me a top saxophonist weren't futile, I was ready to conquer the world - for once I had practised my saxophone and I was determined to take his breath away. However... no matter how hard I tried, the measliest little squeak would come out the metallic lump in my hands, the harder I blew the more high-pitched and squeaky it'd get, after five minutes laughing at me, my teacher finally mustered up enough breath to tell me to stop playing and dismantle my saxophone so he could see if there was an obstruction. I checked my case - I'd taken out the cloth and pipe cleaner so what on earth could be obstructing it? It was then that I felt something hit me on the back of the head - a little finger puppet version of Cinderella lay on the floor all crumpled up, I recognised it as belonging to the demon-child of one of my mum's friends but I was far too embarrassed to have thoughts of revenge. I packed up my belongings and left the room, my teacher was kind enough to put the incident in my report much to the exasperation of my tutor...
I'm not sure if there are any morals to the above stories or tips to hand out - don't play musical instruments? but then the world would be boring... so I'm going to settle with - take care of your instruments, they can bite back...
clutz
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