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Rebecca Bogart Piano

piano lessons Berkeley

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Major Operating System Reinstall

May 16, 2013 By Rebecca Bogart

Where does this go?  No,  don’t put the sweatshirt away with the pajamas,  no the nuts do not go in the refrigerator.  Frantically looking for the butter,  finally I find it right where I first looked – and didn’t see it.

My firm ware is going  through a major operating system reinstall.  The spinning beachball is displayed large and in the very center of my screen and it is hard to concentrate.

The place inside my neural net that knows it is valuable and creative and educated expressed itself just now in all three of the mornings lessons.   New insights, less apologizing about why I made suggestions, more willingness to follow hunches out on a limb through thin air and down a fruitful new avenue of investigation led to some breakthroughs for each student.

Wanda and I untied a very thorny knot inside Ravel’s Oiseaux Triste;  Veronica and I found a way for her to comfortably play two voices in the right hand of her Bach fugue,  and Paul and I discovered how to sense the radius and use it to unify the movements of the forearm. Exhilarating, but also calm and grounded.

The mother finch has continued building her nest behind the outdoor speaker, up against the support for the back door roof overhang.   She is just as startled and annoyed with me every time I go in and out of the back door, in spite of the fact (fact? really? ) that I am now an internationally recognized pianist who will play in Carnegie Hall.

(Student’s names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Altered State, May 14th, 2013

May 14, 2013 By Rebecca Bogart

It is less than 24 hours after finding out about the competition results.  I have spoken to my teacher, my mother, my sister, and a colleague.

Sometimes I felt normal today and almost forgot what had happened yesterday.  But tonight while at Zumba class,  I felt for several minutes in a row  that everything was o.k.  That I had become someone I have wanted to be for a very very long time.  Or, more accurately,  that the someone I hoped I was but feared that I was not actually did exist somewhere inside my skin and neurons and had been invited to Carnegie Hall to do something I had always dreamed of.

After dinner I checked the website to see if my name was in fact listed there.  A flash of joy and excitement 0- there I was, right after James Behr and before the other residents of the rest of the alphabet.    Who are these other people, I thought?  So I googled them.

Now my nerves are going crazy again.  This one played in Vienna.  This one studies at Indiana University.  This one is a professor. This one has composed all this cool music and released 4-5 CDs.  This one lives in Italy and has been winning contests for 8-10 years.  One is a young African American man who lives in North Carolina.  His site is mobile friendly.  One is a Korean American woman,  or maybe a Korean Woman,  can’t tell,  too many different women with similar spellings of her name.

But anyway, they all seem more experienced and with more visible means of support than I.

I wonder if  the river of emotion I am rafting down alone with no trained guides, full of boulders and white water, is similar to Kubler-Ross’s grief process? Maybe I am losing something here?  A self image?

To be continued.  Hope I can sleep tonight.   I bumped my toe badly this morning,  and hit my head for the thousandth time while vacuuming the studio.  Clearly I don’t know my shape and size anymore.

To be continued,  thankfully.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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