2024 review

Lucy Keer -

OK, I finally feel like doing this.

I’ll keep the normal categories, but there are two other new things that feel important. The first is that I fell into maybe the most intense internet rabbit hole of my life, where I went from idly typing "galant music" into Google Scholar to a full-blown attempt to learn piano out of an 1801 rulebook in the space of a week. I'm still going on the rulebook, and partimento practice in general, and it's completely transformed how I understand classical music. It's sort of transformed my piano playing too, though I do feel like I should be better by now given the amount of work I've put in. I think it just takes ages to build fluency unfortunately.

I already wrote about this new obsession in Improvising like it's 1799 and Minimal viable music.

The other new thing is that I started Alexander Technique lessons with Peter Nobes, who runs the South Bank Alexander Technique Centre (where Michael Ashcroft trained). Unlike partimento practice, where I’ve bored on at length about it to anyone who’ll tolerate listening, I’ve been pretty quiet about the Alexander Technique, particularly in writing. That’s because it’s weird and subtle and I have no idea what's going on most of the time, so it's hard to talk about. It's really working though.

The effect of both of these is that after a couple of rather stuck years I feel like I’m back in an open world with interesting new things in it. I don’t know where I’m going but at least I’m going somewhere.

Notebook

Nothing major happened here, but I still like it and write the odd post there. I also still read it back a lot – something about the design seems to really work for that. I think it's mainly the high density list of posts.

Variable names as handles or sigils got a bit of interest at the beginning of the year. I'd like to revisit that topic at some point and do a less half-arsed job. I also like Three pass writing.

Newsletter

I wrote about a pretty random set of topics this year. As well as the partimento post I covered Deleuze's "body without organs", Hasok Chang on realism, C. S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism, Tantacrul's YouTube video on music notation and special relativity.

I'm not sure it adds up to much but I had fun.

Physics

I've slightly lost track of what I did here. At the beginning of the year I was in a phase of reading about relativity. Then I think I just dropped physics for a few months until the old negative probability obsession returned. In the last couple of months I've been trying to finally write up some of my negative probability stuff properly, which has been slow and frustrating. I'm currently procrastinating by reading some quantum foundations papers I've been meaning to get to for ages.

I'm struggling a bit with being so isolated from any community of practice. I'm still in the physics society but it's been fairly quiet recently and I don't feel particularly connected to it.

Reading

Here's what I can remember (I never keep a list but I like to try and figure it out at the end of the year):

  • Alcott – Little Women
  • Austen – Mansfield Park
  • Montgomery – Anne of Green Gables and many sequels
  • Sassoon – Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
  • Rao – Tempo
  • Harrison – Wish I Was Here
  • Nobes – Illusion or reality? Are we teaching what FM Alexander was teaching?
  • Alexander – The Use of the Self
  • Jones – Freedom to Change. Strong recommend for this one if you're going to read an Alexander Technique book.
  • Lewis – An Experiment in Criticism, The Great Divorce, They Asked for a Paper

Plus some of:

  • Gallwey – The Inner Game of Tennis
  • McLeod – Wake up to your Life
  • Gjerdingen – Music in the Galant Style. "Some of" is a bit of an understatement, because I've spent a ton of time at the piano playing through the excerpts, but I haven't tried to read through the whole thing. Instead I work through a new pattern when I start to appreciate it.
  • Mortensen – The Pianist’s Guide to Historic Improvisation
  • Chang – Realism for Realistic People
  • Alexander – Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual
  • White – The Once and Future King

No particular themes, except you can see the influence of my two new interests.

Other stuff

I already talked about partimento practice and Alexander Technique. The other feature of 2024 was trying to adapt to the weird state of the internet. I lost patience with Twitter but haven’t yet found a home anywhere else. Hanging around on discord is nice but I miss the open internet.

Near the end of the year I decided to reduce the amount of time I spend reading stuff on the internet, as it wasn't like I was having much fun there anyway. I tried a drastic minimal internet experiment and some other ideas, but the final thing I've settled on is just to stay off my normal distractions until 3pm. Simple but works. I'm reading a lot of books in a browser tab to satisfy my text addiction, so maybe that reading list will be longer in 2025.

I also gave up with Wordpress for good (only somewhat drama-related, mostly because I had to fix yet more broken formatting and decided I was done there). Any new blog posts will be on Substack.