[renewed] carillon fervor

My first official carillon lesson at the school was all that I could have hoped for. Geert changed my entire conception of Ravel's "La Vallee des Cloches" and suggested so many ways of playing the carillon that I had never even tried before that I'm going to have to learn the piece and how to play the damn instrument from scratch again in the next 7 days. He also took my request for repertoire recommendations and ran mad with it. I now have a centimeter-high pile of new music, most of which I am dying to learn and was very tempted to go to the school at 11 pm to delve into. Unfortunately, I can't fully go on a carillon rampage with my audition for Joris Verdin looming on Monday and all of my freakin fellowship applications on the brain. Why does my world never stop spinning too fast for me to concentrate on what I want?

However, I shouldn't complain. I may have no clue where my organ shoes are, be several months out of practice, behind on everything, a little lonely, and exhausted, but the high-stress plane of existence is the one to which I always gravitate. So much for worrying that I'd never be able to keep myself as occupied as I could at Yale, where everything in the world is going on but squashed all into one campus. That concentrated ball of possibility has exploded back to planet size, and I'm not having any trouble availing myself of it.

It's a little unreal to be studying with one of my carillon idols--yes, you'd glimpse a bit of idol worship in my eyes if you watched me closely at a lesson--and to be perhaps his only carillon performance student this year. He stopped teaching performance recently, which is puzzling since he's a brilliant teacher. I come out of every lesson feeling like I've found a brand new way to play the instrument, what a revelation, oh my! And now I'm putting pressure on myself to live up to being that one student. Perhaps that's good for me.

Since my arrival in Belgium, I haven't felt the need to practice earnestly. I expected that my first lesson would inspire that need in me, but in a direction I couldn't predict, and therefore any advance preparation would soon become irrelevant. Strangely, the piece I chose to play turned out to be, in his opinion, one of the most difficult pieces he's ever performed. If Geert D'hollander of all people made the same comment about a piece I hadn't learned, I would have assumed that it was well-nigh impossible to play. If I think I've been playing it, there is clearly much more to it than met my eye... I got way more than I bargained for when I jotted it in as "filler" in my GCNA repertoire list.

The carillon is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I don't know how I ever found it, but I'm fully under its spell, and feeling thus while living my dream day by day is only proof that I'm doomed to remain bewitched.