This is the first of a number of blogs I hope to publish in the near future.
Why in English?
The use of English will help to reach interested people that don’t understand Dutch.
What about are these blogs?
Being a composer and performer of music implies music will be the main subject-matter of my blogs. The content will not be restricted to one kind of music, because next to being a composer of so-called contemporary music, which means writing for instrumentalists and vocalists in the field of chamber music symphonic music and opera, I write for jazz musicians as well. I mention this last maybe unexpected category, because this is the music I played when I was a teenager, and it is the music I continued to play the rest of my life parallel to my development as a ‘ serious’ composer. The reason I write in English is obvious; my mother tongue being Dutch, a language spoken by hardly 20 million people in the Netherlands, South Africa, (speaking Afrikaans, a derivation of Dutch) and some elderly people in Indonesia, as I experienced once in Djakarta, when some ladies of a certain age could sum up the railway stations from Groningen to Amsterdam. Hilarious remnant of Dutch colonialism. In the last weeks of 2014 I dropped the saxophone for medical reasons; since then, while continuing composing, I concentrate on playing jazz on the piano. Great fun to do so. In these years I improved indeed my piano-technique by practicing a bit every day, and I discovered something very interesting. After working as a composer at the piano all my life, in these few recent years I tried to improve the dexterity of the right hand, because that is the main focus when playing a jazz solo. To my amazement the dexterity of my left hand too, improved a bit in this period. This discovery was confirmed by the results of experiments I read about in recent months in which people were restricted to use only one hand for physical action and surprisingly appeared that the other hand, not being trained in this way, too, enhanced t’s facility to manipulate objects! Apparently the brain stimulates parts of the body that are not trained to be a bit
in balance with the parts that have continued to be trained. That’s not much to do with music, but by playing the piano I discovered the same phenomenon. This is a positive way of starting the first blog…….and ending it.
Musicians of all countries!!!!
When temporarily handicapped because of wounds or fractures in one arm or leg, continue to improve your ability in the other one.
Probably it will even help you to recover sooner!
THEO LOEVENDIE