Me eat Food, hear Music. Me love them both

I hardly get tired of blogging - you get to reach out to so many people outside at the comfort of your own desk, your own home, your own fan. Erm, and computer. My own, of course.

And after reading Theo's latest post I can say safely that if he doesn't stop blogging we're all going to lose our writing jobs. And I NEED MY PAY. Well if he succumbed to the nuffnang ads he would earn enough to buy a bungalow tomorrow.

Halt! Everyone has his/her own strengths, and I'mma work on my own strengths, which are astutely minute and minutely astute. (Where the heck did that come out from.) So anyway I was working on my post about the parallels we can draw between music and food yesterday.


A couple of weeks ago I was dining with Piano Teacher at home along with my apprentice cook Dad. The adults were drinking the red wine, when Dr Hecht started talking about different kinds of wine and oils and their depths.

Obviously you can see where I'm heading to, but I'm here to draw you a clearer picture.

So yesterday while I was practising my piano I thought of the quote again, and I realised Sze actually mentioned it before! When the run-throughs were slacken and deproving, he would always bring in the analogy of the cook.

The cook cannot enjoy and savour the steak, only the diner can. Which basically means the cook can't lose his concentration and start drooling at the steak, because he's the one who's responsible for PRODUCING it, while the diner is responsible for CONSUMING it!

Just like the musician. We cannot slacken and enjoy this music we're producing, because that would cause us to lose our focus, and focus is neccesary in a performance! It's like a hole that expands when one's focus increases, allowing more ideas to come through and formalise, and lastly be translated into vibrations to the audience.

So there. The chef has available to him the different kinds of colouring (ooh), oils, wine, salts, peppers, and sugars, icings, toppings. And just like us, we have the pedals, tones, ornaments, phrasings, dynamics.

Of course, chefs can inject 'soul' into their products, and of course, we can too. But what makes it more challenging for us musicians would be that we get to do it ALL IN REAL TIME! And this process repeats thousands of times in one performance -
Prepare, Play, Listen, Prepare, Play, Listen, Prepare etc.

This applies to all musicians out there - we mentally listen to how a note would sound like, prepare it, and then play it, then we listen to the previous sound,and then we prepare it again and etc.

So that's what makes music more challenging than food in a way.

Of course, there's only ONE chance for the food to make it. Once you taste the end product, that's it, you're graded. And that's what makes it challenging for the food section too!

In music, when you have a memory lapse or you improvise (otherwise play a wrong note), you still can make up for it through the rest of the piece.

Yay! Italicized parts are things that I wish to share to some musicians blogging about music constantly. It's a joy to see fellow musicians talking about sounds and the human mind, body, and soul.