Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Daily Jam - Piano Sonata No. 14 (Movement 1)

I know it’s hoity-toity and as pretentious as all hell, and could possible be viewed as a written foray into pseudo-intellectualism on my part, but I’m totally riffing on classical music today.

One of my great regrets in life is never having taken any kind of music lesson when I was younger, most specifically piano lessons. Sure, I managed to teach myself some of the basics and guitar as well, and I’m pretty good at tapping or picking out a melody by ear, but at the end of the day, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t have a damn clue as to what I’m doing. So, if I could go back and do it all again, I would take piano lessons, and learn how to read music, and absolutely master playing Beethoven’s “Piano Sonata No. 14 (Movement 1),” one of my absolute favorite pieces of music ever put to paper. (As I am not a connoisseur of classical music, though I enjoy it from time to time, it’s one of the only pieces that I actually know both the name and composer of.)

There’s just something so ominous and devastating about the “Moonlight Sonata,” the piano notes creeping and oozing like the moon rising over a bloody, muddied battlefield, the pleas of the wounded and dying going unheard, the officers looking over their plans in covered, candle-lit bunkers. It sounds like plotting. Or it sounds like deceit. Or it sounds like anguish. It has scored an endless number of scenes in my head, the perfect soundtrack to a million movies or plays. And there’s a darkness and somberness to it that just gets to me every time I hear it.

So yeah, I should have taken piano lessons when I was growing up. Maybe I still should. At the very least, I could learn this song.


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