January 7 was the day of the year that George Gershwin completed his Rhapsody in Blue<\/i>. I had been taking piano lessons since I was seven, but when I learned that piece at the age of fourteen, suddenly playing the piano really mattered. I remember practicing it for hours on end, really trying to understand it, to get it right, to dig under the surface. I had always liked the piano, but after Gershwin, it was true love all the way.<\/p>\n
The first book that had that kind of effect on me was The Once and Future King<\/i> by T.H. White – which made the saga of King Arthur more accessible to modern readers. When I was twelve the kids in our class at school were assigned, on a Friday, the first few pages of it to read by the following Monday. I started reading, and kept reading, and didn’t sleep, and kept on reading, all through that weekend. By Monday morning I had finished it, all 632 pages. I showed up to school that Monday completely bleary eyed and overwhelmed, having just lived through the life and death of King Arthur, the wars, quests, loves, betrayals of a lifetime. And I couldn’t really discuss it with the other kids, because they had all read just those first few pages. They had no idea<\/i> what was coming.<\/p>\n
Has anything like that ever happened to you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
January 7 was the day of the year that George Gershwin completed his Rhapsody in Blue. I had been taking piano lessons since I was seven, but when I learned that piece at the age of fourteen, suddenly playing the piano really mattered. I remember practicing it for hours on end, really trying to understand … Continue reading “When everything changes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}