Playing the organ is odd

I was planning to post something this morning – another thrilling technical article, no doubt – but it’s Advent this coming Sunday (at least, in college it is) and preparations for that have sucked up all my free time. Fortunately, while writing detailed technical articles requires research and effort, ranting mindlessly doesn’t. Yay.


The thing with playing the organ is that if you’ve done it right, nobody should notice you’ve done anything at all. Now, that’s true of quite a lot of things in life – flying a plane, removing an appendix, baking a soufflé, packing a parachute, preventing a terror attack (don’t even get me started) – but playing the organ is different in that it’s something I do every other week so, you know, I care about it n’that. You’ve got two or three keyboards, a board of pedals which, for the uninitiated, act as another keyboard for the feet, and a whole pile of buttons, and for up to five minutes at a time all you have to do is put both hands, both feet, and all ten digits in the right place at the right time (to within, say, 5mm and 0.25 seconds).


So this week, I’ll mostly be practising. I’ll be playing the same few difficult bars over and over again knowing full well that the chances of them being right on the night are slim to nil, and that even if they’re right nobody will notice. I’m really not sure what the appeal is except to say that there’s something so much more fun about making music than listening to it and that all the practising and rehearsing is … err … fun, I guess. Personally, I prefer it when nobody’s listening, but I’m a lazy man and if it weren’t for the fact that I’ll have to play in front of 50-100 people on Sunday I’d probably never learn the pieces of music that I have. That and I don’t think I could justify the 10 hours a week of practise if it was every week and just for my own enjoyment.


Anyway. That’s why I’m not posting anything useful this week. Mr. SEO will no doubt berate me, complaining that the audience of Debian-using software-writing web-developing MySQL-administering geeks was niche enough before I made it about organ-playing as well, not to mention the fact that I’m (heaven forfend) writing about myself. He can bite me.