Maybe new pieces

So, this morning, I posted on Twitter about "Wedding day at Troldhaugen," a piano piece by Grieg. I've heard it a number of times lately (on my Pandora station and also on the Sirius Pops (popular classics) channel I listen to in my car.)

I had always thought that Troldhaugen was somehow etymologically related to 'trolls' and I pictured it as some kind of fairy-tale piece. Then this morning, I got curious, and looked it up.

The etymology IS from "troll" (and "Haugen" has to do with a knoll or small hill), but Troldhaugen is where Grieg and his family lived.

And so I posted something like, Knowing that makes the piece make more sense.

And one of the people who follows me remarked: Oh, are you working on the Lyric Pieces now?

To which I immediately responded something like, "Oh, no, no I'm not that far advanced yet." (I am currently working on Für Elise, which is coming along, but slowly. The chromatic bit towards the end is still stymieing me as I can't play it fast enough yet.)

And then my Inner Cheerleader (who shows up rarely enough - usually my Inner Critic seems to shout her down) popped up and said, "Hold on there, sugarcube*, you don't KNOW you can't play them without looking at the sheet music."

(*Yes, my Inner Cheerleader sounds rather like Applejack. I don't get it, either.)

So I did a quick search, since the piece is Public Domain, there's a pdf file of it available. So I took a look at it, and upon brief inspection...yes, with some work, I probably could play that at this point. (Unless there are some more-than-an-octave-reach required some places: I have small hands and have found that sadly, there are some things (like the "classic" arrangement of The Christmas Song) that I will never be able to play in their as-written form because I cannot get my "1" on a C and my "5" on the E in the next octave up. I can (barely) stretch over nine keys, but the likelihood of my reliably hitting that in the middle of a piece is small).

I was placing an order via Amazon anyway, so I decided to check to see if they had a cheap bound copy (the score I looked up is 15 pages, and I'm at work, so I can't print it here....) They did, a Dover reprint (Dover reprints tend to be nice, if economically made) for four bucks.

So I think I will attempt (at least part of) Wedding Day at Troldhaugen. Or bring the book sometime to lesson when my teacher is casting about for new things for me to work on - mainly she's had me work on Bach and Beethoven, and while I like both of them a lot, it's nice to have a little variety.

Also, I guess this is partly how my mind works? It makes me happy to know what Troldhaugen looks like (a photo is up on the Wikipedia page I linked to). I suppose that's nothing more than curiosity: caring about something and wanting to know about it.