Oh what a fraud I have been...

Isaac Albeniz.

Long ago, when the internet was still a novelty and hotmail was nearly new I decided to get me one of them e-mail addresses.  At first I used my real name, but as hotmail was only nearly new it had to be timrobinson_27 or tim_robinson3 or something like that, and after obsessively e-mailing all my friends and wondering why they so swiftly tired of replying I forgot the password and didn't bother again for a while.

The next time I decided that I needed e-mail, I resolved to choose a really cool and original handle for myself: one that reflected who I was and what I aspired to at the time.  Being a fan of the french composer Debussy, and vainly convinced that I looked just a little bit like him too, I decided that I was to be debussy@ hotmail. 

"debussy" was taken, the much less cool debussy27 or debussy36 were  available, but such also-ran alternatives were not for me.

I thought again.  At the time I had been enjoying crashing my way (badly) through a couple of the late piano works of Brahms...

By the way I love Brahms. His music is to me like great pieces of rough-hewn rustic oak furniture: big gestures drawn in big strokes.  Not pernickity like Mozart or Haydn, bigger than Beethoven, but despite all that as finely crafted as Bach.  .. and that reminds me of an episode where I excitedly played one of these pieces at one of our local composers, a man twice my age at the time, and him afterwards massaging his stubby fingers into the fleshy part of my thigh and telling me he thought I'd make a really good Brahms pianist.  I was a little shocked and leapt a little too fast out of my seat.  Perhaps he thought I was flirting when I told him I didn't really like Tchaikovsky as the indulgence of it all made me feel dirty...

Anyway, I digress... I was to be "brahms@ hotmail".  Much better.  Much less girly-sounding than debussy too (not that I think Debussy is girly, ...did you know that the freudian interpretation of L'isle Joyeuse is that it depicts the male orgasm?... just his name).

"brahms" was not available.  brahms27 or brahms_36 however...  you get the idea

Thinking again I remembered I really liked a particular piece of music I had found in a second hand bookstore earlier in that year.  The Godowsky arrangement of the Tango by Isaac Albeniz.  This is it:

That was nice wasn't it.  Apparently Jorge Bolet was a student of Godowsky, so if you think it was too slow or out of time you can (at least according to the comments in youtube) go jump...

Anyway.  "albeniz@ etc" was available.  "Yes!" I thought to myself, and on the strength of one piece of sheet music which I couldn't really play I assumed my hotmail identity for the next ten years. 

Of course that made me look spanish. For the first few years I recieved many joyous "Hola Albeniz!" type mails with photos from people's vacations or of their new babies with all the text in Spanish.  Somehow I got signed up to something called "boletin el plural"  which still arrives weekly in my inbox because I don't know how to unsubscribe.

Worse than all that, when I started using msn messenger I had to always set my status to offline because turkish people would keep messaging me.  "salem" they would say... or "merhaba".. or both.  I would open messenger up and literally ten windows would pop open:

"salem"

"merhaba"

"merhaba"

"salem"

and they didn't understand when I told them politely in English that I didn't have a clue what they were saying to me. 

Eventually one did.  He explained to me that "salem" was a friendly greeting and that "merhaba" was slightly more formal. He told me that Albeniz is a very common turkish surname. Then he kindly posted me the link to the online medical journal in which the young student doctor he thought I was appeared...

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Needless to say I do feel I've misled the good people of Turkey and Spain for misappropriating one of their names for my online use that any number of millions of them have far more right to than me. (I'm not giving it back though.. I was there first!) 

What's far worse is that in all those years the only piece of music I've ever played by Isaac Albeniz is that tango, and that isn't even the version as he wrote it: it's been prettied up by Godowsky.  So when last month I was at the local library and browsing through their small collection of sheet music I found a way to begin setting things right.  There on the shelf was a collection of Albeniz piano music.

I've been looking at these two:

I had thought that one was originally for guitar but no!  twas originally a piano work,  and this one:

which will take me a while to learn.

There.  It's been a while since I posted anything much on here.  I did try, but was thwarted in my minor goal of using pianists exclusively named Jorge. I did make sure the last two were spanish however. 

Perhaps if I learn these pieces I will feel less of a fraud when I use hotmail in future.

all the best

The Gedle