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TwTwTw was coerced by a mate (you know, I actually wrote that! Of course I wasn't. I was at home alone and did it on the internet) into taking the Myers-Briggs personality test. I am ENFJ. I am a giver, a "benevolent pedagogue of humanity." I am amazed by the test's insight and accuracy.
(Although: my "idealism can also be the cause of some distress when [my] assumptions are unable to weather the winds of reality.")
TwTwTw has received an email on the subject of my Hindemith juvenilia:
"The fact that very few masterworks display this congruence of
vision and materialization shows us that even the individual
possessing the greatest gift and the highest technical skill is not
always able to reach this goal."
UGH.
Please don't play with such thoughts in mind."
***
TwTwTw has had a different thought, sparked by the way the Hindemith sonata mostly evokes church architecture, the building itself and what is in and around it.
When I was in Poland, I stopped outside a church to ask a priest some directions. He told me where to find my concert hall, but also took five minutes to chat with me and said something kind about my (awful) Polish.
I have remembered his kindness - it sounds by-the-by, but strangely it wasn't, he sort of radiated deep kindness - and then in Strasbourg, in the cathedral - I think we have to have places where we can go, no matter who we are, or what we have done, and you are met by someone who says, you are welcome in my house.
God's love maybe says, whatever you have done, I will absolve you. Most religions require you to repent to get that, which is the next step. But to be able at the first instance to go inside a building, to be met by a human being, who says, my child, you are welcome in my house -
Well, I think that is important.
When travelling, I always forget one thing: never, to date, essential, but just about important enough to be annoying. I forget this one thing with such unerring consistency, I don't feel right en route until I remember what it is I forgot - the day I remember everything, some disaster will befall me.
Anyway it is all all right, because this time I forgot my plug adapter for my laptop cable and my toothbrush has also made white stains all over my concert black, so now I can relax.
Post concert (loosely translated from the German)
harpist colleague 1: "The Hindemith was super, H, but I can tell you don't like the Spohr Fantasie"
[TwTwTw thinks: "Wot? I put all my most innermost romantic feelings into that"]
Later, TwTwTw fears to harpist colleague 2 that one can tell she does not like, etc.
harpist colleague 2: "Who gives a shit if you like it or not? If I only played pieces I liked, I wouldn't be a harpist. What's important is that the panel like it. If I were you I would just make a bit more of the echo in the cadenza."
