The Quiet Prodigy

He was born in a small village in Warsaw, in 1810.

He was the second child and the only son of Justyna and Nicholas.

His first piano teacher was his big sister, and he gave his first concert at the age of seven.

He traveled to Paris, hoping he would stumble upon more opportunities as an aspiring musician, with a handful of his native soil in his pocket, in 1830.

But he was gone for good, because the rebellious Poland army was pulverized by the large and powerful Russian army, just a couple of weeks after his departure from Poland. Coming back home, returning to his homeland was, henceforth, not possible.

His lover broke up with him by writing a novel in which the female character (symbolizing herself) left the male character (our musician) for someone else, and sending our musician the novel.

He gave little less than 30 concerts in his short-spanned life. He was not a big-hit back then, as he "failed to fill the concert hall"; he was too quiet.

Compared to Liszt's and Berlioz's mighty compositions spilling over with fortissimo's and hammered chords, he was simply too soft for the audience in Paris.

His life was ended prematurely by a demanding disease, most probably tuberculosis.

This man is Frederic Chopin.

Most of his works are for the solo piano, and he is my all-time favorite composer.

Why, you ask?

It's because of the feelings inside his pieces, locked in tightly by the staves and the written, simple notes, waiting to be released by an understanding and passionate pianist.

Every single time I play his Nocturne No. 20 in C-Sharp major, I find something different in it, another feeling, another thought.

And every time I listen to this incredible piece of work, it takes me to a different place, stirs up different memories, different emotions.

His piece called Adieu, a waltz in A-Flat Major for the piano, conveys the emotions of farewells and goodbyes and departures better than any painting I've seen or any novel I've read. It is hard to keep your eyes from brimming with tears, to stay standing behind the sand bar the waves of memory build up in your mind. It is hard not to feel, it is hard not to live the music.

Frederic Chopin, the quiet, emotional, master of the Romantic Era, quite different from his fellow composer friends, manages to prove everyone who thinks that music can only express so much wrong. Now, if you will listen to his waltz L'Adieu, you will understand what I mean. The silent prodigy makes up for the lack of volume in his pieces with overflowing feeling and just simple, plain, beauty.

 

Survivor

The thing I do most Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights is to watch the TV show Survivor. What the basically is that they drop 20 volunteers on an island and let them starve, while they dangle food in front of them to motivate them to play several games requiring condition, concentration and coordination.

Although the morals of this competition is questionable, it is surely fun to watch and is very exciting.

The goal in this competition is pretty clear; survival. Although they start out as teams, it all comes down to individuals and who appeals to the public the most, because, I don't know about the other formats of the competition, but in Turkey, who goes and who stays is determined by the votes of the audience.

This competition seems fit for the Turkish audience, thanks to all the drama and the sadness, but I guess there is always an audience ready for emotional exploitation in every nation.

In the end, it entertains the common audience (one of them being myself), but I'm watching the show of survival, limited food, almost no shelter and loneliness with a bowl of strawberries in front of me and my iPad and family next to me. It may not be so "entertaining" to someone who has bought the TV they're watching the show in by giving up eating red meat for three months. Just saying.

Books

The doors swung open, creaking creepily, and there I was. The smell was overwhelming; an incredible medley of the smell of paper, dust and ink. Rows, shelves, spread all over the place, as far as you could see. Signs indicating where specific genres are placed, and that feeling, that feeling you get when you see the sign you're looking for, the genre you read all the time and start walking towards it, is nonexchangeable. Then you come across the shelves and shelves of the thing you're looking for, so many of them that you don't know where to begin. You feel happy and excited to go through all of them. You pick one that catches your eye, flip to the back, glance, then flutter the pages, and the smell hits you again, and you know you have to buy that. You are anxious to get home and start it, bend the cover neatly for the first time, crease the spine, "en premier", read the opening paragraph and get introduced to the world that lies beyond the neatly designed cover. And the moment you open the cover, pass through the copyrights, the short intro by the editor, sometimes, the table of contents, and reach the first line, read it, and comprehend it, you have been introduced into a whole, new world. A make-believe one, maybe, but just as real as the life you're living when you drop down the book.

The actions, feelings and senses I described above can be related to one, single object: books.

Books can never be replaced, not by "e-books", not by Kindles, not by PDF's, now by "audio books". They have their own special place in our hearts, well, at least in mine, and are probably one of the greatest inventions of man kind.

It was a big mistake of mine to download Stephen King's novel, It, which is nearly 10 cm thick in paperback, to read it on the Kindle. Sure, you can easily find the definition of a word, don't need to keep a bookmark, and don't need to haul the brick-like book around with you, but these advantages of the Kindle do not make up for the real-deal; paperback books.

Seeing the percentage you've read at the bottom of the screen of the Kindle is not the same as turning the book sideways and flipping the pages to see how long you've got to go.

Just shutting down the Kindle without marking your place is not the same as putting your "bookmark"- very seldom a real bookmark though, most commonly a receipt from a store, a note paper with numbers scribbled onto it, numbers which have now lost their meaning to you, maybe, if you come across one, a Post-It note, or just the ripped corner of a piece of paper-and skimming through the next couple of pages to see where the chapter ends.

Most importantly, holding the Kindle in your hand, so light and thin, is not the same as holding a paperback book, with the shadows of the pages on the left cast upon the pages on the right.

Electronic devices have replaced many everyday objects in our lives today, from scales to stock markets, but there is one thing they will never be able to replace: real, paperback or hardcover books which you can flip through the pages, actually turn the pages, feel them, and be caressed by the soft wind they generate and be mesmerized by their smell which takes you back down "memory-lane".

 

Walking Down the Hallway

Thursday was Poem in Your Pocket Day.

So, we went around reading poems to random people in our school, you know, just to make their day a little different than the previous one or the next one.

Here are the responses I got after I read my poem to different people:

"Wow!"

"Very deep, very meaningful."

"Good."

"OK..?"

My poem was Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

I met a traveler from an antique land 
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, 
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; 
And on the pedestal these words appear: 
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: 
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” 
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Yes, I read this beautiful poem and the answer I got was "OK..?". I guess people didn't really understand it because they could not read it over and over again, underline the rhyme scheme, dig out the connotations of the words, identifying literary tools, alliterations, symbols, like we usually do when we have a poem at hand. We plunge so deep into the stanzas, deep into the lines, deep into the words and deep into the letters, that we forget what the poet and the poem is really trying to say. We say that the capital M in the word "ye Mighty" reflects the poet's beliefs and puts an emphasis on the word, while, simply, it shows how the great Egyptian king, Ozymandias, lived his life trying to compete with a so-called divine being. It shows how desperate he is for power, it shows his ambitions - and how now "nothing beside remains"...

But that's what happens in real life. Unless we have a task we have accomplish using the piece of art, we simply glance at it, pass our eyes over it, hear it for a few seconds and return to our business. When I play the piano at my house, my family usually listens to me and compliments or criticizes my playing, but yesterday, I probably played a Chopin Nocturne the best I've ever had for the past 4 years I've been playing it, but when I finished the piece, with the two C-Sharps, 5 octaves apart, softly humming and slowly disappearing into the silence, no one said anything. They were busy playing games on their computers or cleaning up the kitchen.

We usually don't have to analyze a piece of music we hear in everyday life and determine its musical, structural and contextual features.

We usually don't need to write an essay on "how the poet conveys his thoughts and feelings..." when we come across a piece of literature; a sonnet, a Haiku, a slice of prose...

We usually don't need to publish a two-page review on an artwork we pass by when we walk around the hallways of our school.

So, we don't care about them.

But we should.

We should listen to that piece of music like it is the last thing we are going to hear, we should read that piece of literature like it is the first thing we ever read, we should "see" that paintings, not just look, but actually "see", like that is the last thing we will ever see. We should appreciate life's beauties, one of which is called art, at whenever possible, not when it is Poem in Your Pocket Day, not when you have to write a 350 word essay, not when you have to post a blog post by Friday night about it, not matter what. Because, life is walking down a hallway with paintings on the walls, music playing in the background and people talking to you, and if you don't stop and "hear", don't listen, and "look", don't see, you might as well be walking in a desert, with no food or water.

 

Imagining Some Fear

"...Ben walked slowly away, his heart a thudding drum in his chest. Yes, he was sweating; he could feel it trickling down from his forehead, his armpits, matting the hair on his chest. He looked up and saw Pennywise the Clown standing at the top of the lefthand staircase, looking down at him. His face was white with greasepaint. His mouth bled lipstick in a killer's grin. There were empty sockets where his eyes should have been. He held a bunch of balloons in one hand and a book in the other. Not he, Ben thought. It. I am standing here in the middle of the Derry Public Library's  rotunda on a late-spring afternoon in 1985, I am a grown man, and I am face to face with my childhood's greatest nightmare. I am face to face with It. 'Come on up, Ben,' Pennywise called down. 'I won't hurt you. I've got a book for you! A book . . . and a balloon! Come on up!"

This exquisite passage you just read is by Stephen King, the great author of horror novels, and is from his fiction work, It.

As I read this passage for the first time, in bed, with the lights turned low at late in the night, with the house creepily living on around me with no intention of falling asleep, I felt the same as Ben Hanscom. The sweat, the fear, the anxiety, the horror; and this was all thanks to the incredibly vivid descriptions by Stephen King, fruits of his teeming imagination.

Without King's imagination, there would be no horror in that passage. I would not start to look at clowns as I've never done before. I wouldn't close my eyes and see Pennywise the Clown, probably completely different from what King had in mind when he wrote that passage. Because as I read the passage, I blend that description with my own imagination, and create something totally different. Still horrifying, but in another way; horrifying for me.

This is why I believe it is safe to agree with the greatest mystery writer of all time, the inventor of the logical, arrogant, neat, socially-awkward "consultant" Sherlock Holmes; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, on his saying,"when there is no imagination, there is no horror."

We cannot be afraid of something that does not exist in our minds.

Can a 3-year-old be afraid of a nuclear war starting, or an earthquake?

They are more likely to be horrified by the idea of slimy, forever-famished, hideous creatures, "monsters", I believe that's what they call them, hiding under their beds, sneakily waiting until they fall asleep, into the deep and wondrous world of dreams, and just linger their arms over the edge...

The moment we think of something, it spurs into life, instantaneously, and, unfortunately, you cannot hit "delete".

What the monster in It does is that it reads the minds of the children and takes the form of the thing they're most afraid of. The thing they imagined would harm them. The thing they think is hiding in their closet. For Ben, it was a mummy. For Eddie Kaspbarak, it was a werewolf.

Shakespeare wrote, in his play A Midsummer Night's Dream, that a lunatic, a lover and a poet all have different imaginations and comprehend the world differently; while the lover sees "a gypsy as the world's most beautiful woman", the madmen sees "hell" and "devils", all the while the poet "shapes" what he sees into immortal words, seeing something to write about in "airy nothing". And all of these people, with their crazy imaginations colossally different from each other, can easily perceive a "bush" as "a bear" in the night, by "imagining some fear".

Without our imaginations, we wouldn't have anything to be afraid of; we would not have a great machine behind our wondering eyes, restlessly imagining and recording things; spawning horrible thoughts, scary animals, worst-case-scenarios. King "imagines some fear" of his own, and puts them on paper masterfully, allowing us to "imagine" some horror for ourselves; people who read the passage in the beginning of this blog post fear completely different things. Now that you've read the passage, and imagined your own fear,  it's up to you to decide whether you are the lunatic, the lover, or the poet.

Time for Summer

The sun glistened upon the beautiful landscape of Antalya, the Mediterranean Sea shimmering under the sun's tentative rays, the sand on the beaches sparkling here and there, and, finally, the first customers of the year, the hotel owners, the bellboys, spilling out onto the streets and beaches, ready, ready for some hot weather, ready for a big bowl of summer.

The trees are now not bare, not frozen solid from the harsh winter, but are embellished with leaves of green and flowers of all colors.

These are the times in which we need to turn on the AC.

These are the times in which we walk on the other side of the street to walk in the shadows of the cumbersome buildings.

These are the times in which we don't carry the burden of coats, scarfs, hats, and heavy boots.

One whole year has passed since the apple tree in our backyard last blossomed. One year of fun, stress, sadness, one year which only remains in our minds as memories, memories, memories, otherwise completely disappeared, gone with the wind. Now we have another spring, another start at the best times to go to school, to go outside, to take a walk, another chance to do things differently this time. A new season, a new beginning.

The time of ice cream, the time of sitting on the grass under the sun, the time of late sunsets, the time of beautiful fruits, the time of sand, sea, sun and everything good, the time for relaxing, being happy, and simply enjoying life to its fullest has come; the time for summer finally arrived.

Scales & Sonatas

"Hello, what part of the test would you like to take first?"

"The scales and arpeggios, please"

"Very well then, would you play an E Major scale, contrary motion, 4 octaves, followed by an F # Major scale, hands a third apart, four octaves."

The British examiner sat in a wooden, antique desk at the corner of the room, with sheets of paper in front of him; blank forms waiting to be filled up either with positive remarks of "good musicianship" or remarks of "failure". The pointy insulation material which covered the room's walls made the not-so-small exam room look like a dungeon. The piano was clearly new, the keys had a peculiar touch to them: they have not yet faced great pianists, intent accompanists, challenging, finger-blurring Liszt pieces, touchy Chopin pieces in which they were touched with delicacy as much as emotion... A hard, fresh piano; the hardest to play on. 

On Tuesday, I took the ABRSM piano exam for the first time. I had prepared my pieces as well as I could have with all the time I had left after the excessive time that IB requires was spent of lab reports and studying. The aural test was a "no worry" one, I was pretty confident in my ear for music, that probably comes with playing the piano for 13 years. The part which worried me the most was the "Scales and Arpeggios" part. Every applicant who wants to take the Grade 7 piano test had to memorize 60-something scales and arpeggios, from a scale in F# Major, which has 6 sharps, and the most number of sharps one can have is seven, to diminished sevenths starting from A, both hands, four octaves.

Somehow, this test managed to make me have to play the piano and do it without enjoying it. I used to practice the piano because I had fun doing it, but when preparing for this test, I dreaded each minute of practice. Yes, playing scales improves a pianist's skills a lot, but when you're not doing something because you enjoy it, I don't think there is any point in doing it. I think that playing 40 scales from memory, allegro, with both hands or separately, is just a way of fitting art into forms, molding music to a shape in which it can be criticized...by numbers.

I played a Gershwin piece, one of Tchaikovsky's Months, and one Beethoven Sonata.

I am also preparing for a piano competition, and I need to learn a Kuhlau Sonata.

Hey!

Sonatas!

The most boring forms of music for the piano, at least for me. Pearls of the classical era. Twists, trills, clean, expected, totally predictable chord progressions, clear dynamic markings, and the left hand working like a machine. Every kind of test for the piano involves a sonata, because the sonata itself is "grade-able". There is not a way for you to show yourself through it, no emotions, no room for interpretation, every one plays the sonata exactly the same way. This way, it is easier for the examiners to give grades to the pianist, based solely upon how you play the stuff that is written in front of you on the piano, exactly like it is written. They judge you on similarity, not individuality.

These kinds of exams and strict, demanding teachers and parents make the little pianists believe that the only thing to play on the piano are boring, mechanical pieces.

They make them believe that they have to play exactly what is written in front of them.

They make them believe that you cannot enjoy playing classical music.

They don't tell them that you can play the rock songs you listen to everyday on the piano, or that you can change the pieces you play, interpret them yourself, even if it is a sonata or a nocturne.

They don't tell them you can actually enjoy classical music, both listening to it, and playing it on the piano.

Fitting music into standards and rubrics and forms is the worst way to decide how good a person is in playing that instrument. Because of this insane compulsion of humans to measure everything and prove they're the best in that subject, they are killing the joy of playing classical music, by reducing the colorful, wondrous, melodic, beautiful and incredibly varied world of classical music which could be played on the piano, into simple, arid scales & sonatas.

 

 

Opportunity Cost

One of the most basics concepts in economics is the concept of "opportunity cost". An opportunity cost is a cost you pay when you do something instead of another, and this "cost" is not always, actually most of the time is not, a monetary value. For example, they're selling my favorite cereal in the grocery store near my house, store A, at a higher price than the grocery store on the other side of town, store B, let's say two dollars more. The opportunity cost of not going to store B is two dollars, but the amount of time and gasoline I would waste if I had gone there, which are the opportunity costs of going to store B, are greater costs than two dollars. So, instead, I prefer buying the cereal and give two dollars more than usual.

This problem of opportunity costs comes from the very problem of economics and the reason why a science called economics exists: scarcity. When there are limited resources, and unlimited wants.

Opportunity costs are everywhere in life, and we face them every, single, day.

To park the car in a very, very, small gap in front of the house and spend 15 minutes trying to do it, or to park it 4 meters up the street easily, and walk the way?

The most typical example in economics; to produce 20 tons of butter and 10 million guns, or to produce 5 tons of butter and 40 million guns?(here, the opportunity cost of producing 1 ton of butter is half a million guns).

The reason I have not been writing blog posts for the past six days, I have not been able to play the piano or the guitar, I have not been able to watch the new episode of Supernatural, is, simply, that the opportunity cost of doing these is very, very, big.

Economics tells us and teaches us how the real world works and functions. Not just markets and GDP's and how to lower unemployment rates, but what to do, how to do it, and to do it at what cost. Basically, we answer two of the three basic questions of economics, what to produce and how to produce, in our everyday lives, trying to allocate our own resources as efficiently as we can. Maybe I am not a factory and land owner, and I don't decide, to increase production, let's say, whether to buy 50 million dollars worth more capital and reduce my labor force, or to keep my capital the same and purchase more labor. But what I do, and what everyone does every day is the exact same thing. My "limited resource" is my time, from when I get home from school until I go to bed, my "unlimited wants" are to play the piano, to write blog posts, to watch TV, but also to do my homework and study for the physics test, and the way I allocate may resources is through being organized and trying, although most of the time not succeeding in, time management.

Just to get the concept of opportunity cost clear, here is a thing which happened to me four days ago: It was a Tuesday night, and I had a physics test the next day, but I could also play the guitar and sing at the Art Show hosted at our school, for an hour that night. The opportunity cost of playing the guitar was perhaps and hour of studying physics or an hour of rest, but the satisfaction and the utility I would get from playing the guitar and singing in the Art Show with my friends, would be much, much more valuable than an hour of studying physics. So, I decided to go to the Art Show and study physics when I come back, and thinking back to that Tuesday night, and the test I faced on Wednesday now, I know for certain that I made the right decision, no matter what grade I may get from the test.