The music of Alkan

Here's a story about how I made a spur of the moment purchase which led to various things happening.

I went down to Liguanea yesterday to go cash a check. Before heading to the bank, I went to this pharmacy in the plaza across from the bank, and discovered that they were having a sidewalk sale. In this sale, they had two thriller-type novels going for less than $10 US a pop. I haven't read a good story in a while, and they both seemed interesting so I picked 'em up for the heck of it. I started one of them last night called "The Book of the Dead" by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and am currently just past the halfway mark. While the story has engaged me thus far, I freely admit that it is a totally weird story. It's taking a while for the connections between 4 seemingly disparate plot lines to come together (right now I can see circumstantial connection but I'm still reading on to the grand reveal) and it seems that this novel builds upon events in previous novels which I never knew about. Lack of knowledge about these events isn't crippling me TOO much, but the characters are currently acting in a vacuum to me. I have an idea of WHAT the previous events are from dialogue, but I don't know WHY the events happened. Still, I've gone too far to turn around. I'll look it up on Amazon after I finish it.

However, the point of this blog post comes from a throwaway reference by the tale's chief villain. Think of a twisted cross between Frasier Crane and American Psycho, and that's him. In the book, he is full of high class tastes, drinking absinthe, reading all manners of books and authors I've never heard of because they'd be "out of my class and intellectual level". Snob to the MAX. I took a pause when he mentioned this composer called Alkan, the "forgotten musical genius of the 19th century" and said "few pianists are up to the challenge" of playing his pieces. I've never heard of the man, and if I hear "forgotten musical genius", i'm all over that. So I took a gander at Youtube (:drops on knees: "Oh Lord, thank you so much for inspiring whoever it was that created Youtube. May they truly enjoy the money they get from selling out to Google, because they've damned sure earned it." :rises from knees:) and searched to see what clips I could find.

I've heard Chopin's Revolutionary, and while it's difficult, I could play that with a whoooooole lot of practice. I did Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# minor on my own time, and did it pretty fairly. I can get back up to speed and finish it to performance level if I include it in my new practice routine, which I will probably do. I plan to try Rachmaninoff's Prelude in B flat in the near future; while it's just as hard as (or harder than) the Revolutionary, I like it more and that's enough motivation to keep me working at it when I get the score. But there is NO WAY, no way at all, that I could ever hope to play this fellow's work. A wise man knows his limits, and I believe I just met mine. Take a look at this, y'all.




I'm going to see what else I can find from the composer (and maybe the artist) on tha tube and on Amazon/iTunes. I suppose it's not surprising I never heard of him, since it's not everyone who'd be able to play this. You can't write music that no one can play, 'cause who will listen to it? On the other hand, we all should aim for the stars, eh :) Here's to Alkan, that forgotten virtuoso.