A Fleeting Feeling: Musical Satisfaction

There are moments when it seems that the random, disorganized path of my lifelong musical learning is in fact progressing and that my cumulative knowledge is increasingly at my fingertips and on my lips in performance. Last night's gig was a case in point: I felt as comfortable as if I was in my living room, albeit with a spotlight on me. One song in particular, to which I have been recently practicing the piano accompaniment, scrolled by in my mind's eye as if I was reading the chart while I sang it. I really felt that rhythmic matrix my piano teacher has talked about, a sense of where everything -- chords, the guiro half note pattern, my voice -- fell in the metric system. Another example: Just now I was stumbling through Chopin's Minute Waltz and realized that the opening riff is Lydian. I have known the modes intellectually for probably 20 years, but perhaps I am beginning, for the first time, to hear them. Amazing. Here's hoping I didn't just jinx that progress by writing this.