Marcy Prochaska: Hammered Dulcimer

I just finished my business taxes. How funny; my net profit for the year is an even six bucks.

(Partly because I sold a decent number of CDs, which is a deduction in terms of cost of goods sold, and partly because I had to recapture as income prior depreciation from a computer and software that I no longer use much for business. Hey, that sounds like I know what I’m talking about.)

Today Amy and I were playing in the music room. She is almost 15 months old.

First we played with my mountain dulcimer — made from a kit when I was a camp counselor; not very good, but good enough. She knows she is not allowed to touch the tuning pegs. What she likes to do is put her fingers or palms on the strings on the fretboard; she moves her hands around the fretboard, like I do, as if she, too, wants to make different notes on the melody string. Occasionally she tries to strum or pluck, and sometimes hurts her fingers. I showed her how to hold a pick to strum, and she thought that was pretty fun, too.

Then she picked up my soprano recorder (a plastic Yamaha; very nice but also nicely undelicate). Just put the mouthpiece in her mouth and blew, and was delighted to make a pretty sound.

She asked me to play my hammered dulcimer — at least that’s my interpretation of “pway” and pointing. Her attention span for it is very limited, though — maybe once or twice through one tune.

Her own musical toys include some homemade shakers (papier mache over toilet paper tubes and soapboxes), a combination xylophone / piano, a big jingle bell on a necklace, a cowbell from my brother’s trip to Switzerland, and a plastic drum with little beads inside.

I have not played my dulcimer regularly since a month or two before Amy was born last November. I have more or less kept it in tune, and I play a few minutes here and there most weeks.

I’ve found that there are a lot of things I don’t remember how to play, particularly classical stuff. So much comes back in the muscle, audio, and visual memory, but there are gaps.

Since I memorize, gaps mean I’ve got to go back into the sheet music, find the gaps, and learn what’s in them again. And it often means also finding where I’ve rewritten things in my memory and need to learn them again the correct way — at least where I care about there being a correct way or not, like in Bach.

Mark’s new job started last week, and we plan to give him a month or so to get settled into the new patterns and responsibilities before I go out for gigs and such.

But I have plenty of work to be doing just at home, relearning some things, reworking others, and refreshing my memory about more.

Today I took a half hour with a Handel bourree from Water Music — the one the Frugal Gourmet used for his soundtrack, but not at all that fast.

I’m actually sort of glad I’d forgotten so much of this one. Before, I played two voices simultaneously, but didn’t have a good sense of them as separate voices. Now I am working each one separately, keeping one to one hand and one to the other except for one pair of notes that works better switching hands.

Our family has arrived in Plymouth Indiana where we are starting to feel a little settled in our new home. Maybe soon I’ll be able to get my dulcimer tuned and get playing again. Meanwhile I’m ready to schedule some lessons if there are any students in the area.

The Hanshaw Trio had our farewell picnic yesterday at Craig’s house.

First we played, then we ate, then we played some more, and meanwhile the kids turned cartwheels and played on the swingset and swam in the pond.

We played well considering we hadn’t played together since September!

One of the attendees took some video — I’ll post it when I get it!