moonlight sonata for old elephant

abandoned baggage will be removed by security

Moonlight Sonata is one of those handful of tunes you learn early in your piano career. Once you get Heart & Soul out of the way and prove that you can hit the right notes in time they hit you with Moonlight Sonata-- can you play the right notes OUTSIDE the tic of the metronome? Can you FEEL it?? I didn't play piano as a kid (or now) but I still feel like I heard this one a lot, from 9 year olds trying to act ponderous and deep. You will forgive me, Beethoven, if I say I heard this one a little too much, and its attendant baggage fatally strained my enjoyment.

Well anyway I took a break from it for 30 years, which is my right, and now I'm back in the cut to say: it's good. The baggage has been removed and filed away. Here's a nice little performance by Paul Barton, playing for Mongkol, a 61-year-old former logging elephant. He's not over it, and now neither am I.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4AcjvsVn5k

video is 6 minutes long

Full disclosure: I am a human being and not an elephant, so I can't tell you with any measure of certainty what this experience is like for Mongkol. But suffice it to say he seems to enjoy something here-- the music, the setting, the attention, the novelty, who knows. Classical music has a heavy rep, globally, and it can be tough to get into it. But you don't need to be a scholar or even a human to groove on it in some capacity. If you like this and don't know any other songs by Beethoven I'm not going to pull your tail or call you a poser. I'm going to treat you with kindness. That's my promise.

Paul has lots of vids on his channel and 93 of those involve playing classical music for elephants.

Peace everyone :)

If someone sent this to you because you played Moonlight Sonata ad nauseum as a child, or simply because you're a music lover (or elephant lover (or both)), you may enjoy other things I've written. This is Pleasant Realms, an email newsletter about mostly nonstressful YouTube videos.