Bragatyr wrote:But speaking of the augmented fourth, with a screen name like that, how can you not like The Rite of Spring?! Surely a more devilish piece of music has never been conceived, based on the contemporary reaction to it!
I majored on the bassoon in college. (I already played the piano and the saxophone before then as well; I didn't want to have to memorize my pieces to audition on the former, and the latter is FAR more competitive than the bassoon.) This is the story of my life:
Person: Oh, you're a musician! What instrument do you plan?
Me: Lots of them, but the bassoon is my primary instrument.
Non-Musical Person: *blinks* What's that?
--or--
Mildly-Musical Person: Oh, that's the one from that piece, Peter and the Wolf!
--or--
Moderately-to-Very Musical Person: Oh, you must really love Stravinsky, then! There's that crazy bassoon solo right at the beginning of The Rite of Spring!
Me: No. No, I do not. That solo is an abomination.
There's an old legend that says when Stravinsky was alive, he would personally audition the bassoonists for that solo. Allegedly, if the bassoonist played those "stratosphere" notes
too well, Stravinsky would reject him, because he wanted it to sound like the bassoonist was straining to convey the suffering of humanity at the dawn of time, or something like that. There's enough suffering when it comes to playing the bassoon as it is. I resent Stravinsky for making it worse.
(I am indifferent to Peter and the Wolf.)
Anyhoo, regarding the two hands doing different things - that is one of the many reasons my future children will be required to take piano lessons for a couple of years. In addition to musical skills, the piano teaches so much in ways that a lot of the other instruments can't, like that sort of coordination, spatial relations, and so on. When I took my college conducting classes, we'd sometimes have to do exercises where our two hands would be doing
completely different things. It helped later on when I realized I could sign hall passes with one hand and continue conducting my middle school band with the other at the same time.