Day One Hundred and Fifty-Eight

The next few will be catch-up posts, since I have been DOING the 101 Things project, I just haven't been TELLING you about it. The last two weeks have been so insanely busy that today when a musical colleague asked me how yesterday had been (since he'd missed my frantic phone call asking how to reach a mutual student to tell her I needed to reschedule since my daughter was feeling sick) ... I stood there in some confusion, saying, "Yesterday ... yesterday ... I can't remember." I went to a concert a week ago that feels for all the world like it was last year. The only reason I will have the faintest idea when the next few list items actually occurred is that my camera (bless its little electronic heart) records the date each picture was taken.

So, without further ado - and what kind of word is "ado", anyway? - here is the successful completion of Item #65, sort all my sheet music and books.

I have a lot of music. This isn't too surprising, given that I have been playing the piano for 31 years and I am terrible at throwing things out in the first place. Throwing music out always seems vaguely sacrilegious, so when I started this project I still had pretty much every piece of music I'd ever been assigned, from "Toy Train Choo-Choo" (age five) right up through Mendelssohn's Variations Serieuses (college senior recital). Unfortunately, my filing system left something to be desired:


And this is the NEAT version. See that pile of papers next to the two white boxes on the desk? That is a stack of photocopied music which needed to be sorted out and filed, and I think it's pretty self-explanatory why that particular chore had not leaped to the top of my to-do list at any point in the last four years of professional accompanying.

See all those papers and books on top of the filing cabinet? Thousands of pages of music, some loose, some in books, all dusty, which included two elderly Baptist hymnals, several recital programs, the sheet music to "A Wink and a Smile" (you know, that really cute little tune in "Sleepless in Seattle"), a few Legos, large quantities of random Beethoven, countless books which promise to improve my scale technique, and an autographed program from a Carol Channing show.

See the filing cabinet? The inside wasn't TOO bad - hanging folders with my most-used books organized somewhat loosely by composer, plus a few hanging folders in the bottom drawer after Schubert and Tchaikovsky, and who KNOWS what was in those.

See the other filing cabinet? Well, no, because the camera wasn't big enough to take in the full scale of the mess, but it had music in it too. In stacks, not folders. It was all the stuff that was so disorganized I couldn't even stand to look at it, so I put it in that drawer and hid it under a stack of the kids' random baby pictures. (Well, isn't that what EVERYBODY does with their old music?)

Now turn around, and you'll see the piano itself, the entire top covered with teetering stacks of music. This is where I kept anything I was "currently working on", a definition which gradually expanded to include "any and all books containing music I'm working on, played for fun at any time in the last six months, or got out because I was looking for that one song which turned out to be one of Grieg's Lyric Pieces, plus all the accompaniments for anybody who has a performance coming up this semester." It was not pretty.

Step one was to give the cherry finish filing cabinet to my daughter, since she inherited my questionable organizational skills and hopefully a filing cabinet will help. (Also, the cherry veneer didn't match all the nice oak in my piano room, so it looked messy even when it wasn't.) I replaced it with a larger metal filing cabinet that was big enough to hold all of the books. I started with them, and don't they look lovely?


Step two: Get out every other scrap of music, even the ones in the piano bench and behind the filing cabinets and hidden under the baby pictures (where they had apparently been reproducing like rabbits). Sort by type. Get drink of cold water, sigh, and contemplate torching it all.


Step three: Make nice neat little labels for them (Pop Piano, Movie Themes, Church Music, etc.) and put them in folders. There, isn't that better?


I especially enjoyed doing the classical vocal pieces, which took up most of the bottom drawer since instrumentalists are more likely to have their own books of piano accompaniments, which they keep when the performance is done. Vocalists, for whatever reason, are more likely to disregard any and all copyright laws and hand me a stack of photocopied music with an apologetic, "I meant to hole-punch these and put them in a binder for you, but I forgot." (It's OK. I have my own system, so when you hole-punch them, I have to take it all apart and re-do it anyway.) These are now neatly organized by composer, with each piece paper-clipped together. The idea is that it will save a few sheets of paper down the road, instead of getting a new copy of "Vergebliches Ständchen" every year and using last year's for grocery lists.


And I didn't stop there! Now, instead of stacking everything randomly on top of the piano until it tips over and slides down the front of the piano and lands on my hands and falls all over the floor (not that I would ever let it go that far), I have little wire baskets for my various books. The one on the left is accompaniments belonging to high school students, the middle basket is accompaniments for my college students, and the basket on the right is anything I'm just playing for fun these days. Right now that contains Grieg's Lyric Pieces, a set of Gershwin preludes, and Chopin's Nocturnes.


Ahh. Much better.