Planning day, pianos and Prince
Today was planning day at work.
We work in two-week cycles. The first day of the cycle is planning day. The team gathers. We review, frame and prioritize the cycle's work. If the effort is part of a project just beginning, we discuss overall goals, and we demarcate the first chunk of work. What pieces do we address first, we ask, and how well do they put us on the road to completion?
Riding to our offices this morning, the following passage turned up in a story from a couple weeks ago. Pianist Jeremy Denk was writing about the experience of recording a piece in a studio. He described the initial moment, of seeing all of the pieces, knowing their interaction potential:
The microphones and the piano face each other like enemies. The piano is a very finicky instrument to record, with an existential problem: attack followed by decay, every note a death. You want to capture the ping, the clarity of the beginning of each note, but you also want to get the ephemeral singing tone that remains. It's a complicated balance: the souls of the piano and the pianist hang in it. The microphone's distance from the piano is a key variable, affecting the roundness of the sound, and how much room you get versus how much piano. And since the piano is harp-shaped, tapering from long, thick bass strings to teeny treble strings, the precise angle of the microphone determines the sound's shape — fatter or thinner, squeakier or burlier. Finally, the microphones themselves are not absolutely neutral; each one is like an ear, with its own propensities.
I dog-eared that passage's page this morning because the description felt like the day ahead. Looking back tonight, the writing was spot on.
The piano was the Internet, attack followed by decay. Whatever things we set out to create today, future notes eventually replaced them. We had to capture newness but also sustainability, all of which had to die.
We each also sat at difference distances from different sections of our piano. However solid, unified or clear any communication was, we each by nature heard slightly differently. And we each had our propensities.
By day's end, in each of the projects I'm on, we completed most of our planning for the cycle. There were frustrations, but we reached strong blueprints and levels of understanding for the days ahead. We weren't world-class pianists yet. But we were ready to begin playing together.
If we hadn't finished ready, if we hadn't reached understanding, video that found my stream tonight would have helped. The footage showed Prince performing a 13-minute, pre-album version of Purple Rain, so raw and intense I stopped my multitasking tonight to watch it. He of course wasn't on a piano, but he played the guitar like one, every note bound to die yet so individually important, the origination of the sound crucial in relation to the pick-up, the resulting shapes part of the full journey.
Depending on what kind of day you had — fatter or thinner, squeakier or burlier – the song could help you too, imperfect but arcing forward.
