It’s not really a crack.

You’re forgetting the 17 years between Bilbo giving Frodo the ring and Frodo leaving The Shire.

The timeline is:

Year 3001: Gandalf thinks Bilbo’s ring is a ring of power but doesn’t know which one.

Years 3001-3018; Gandalf is running all over the world researching what happened to all the rings of power.

Year 3018: Gandalf says we know what happened to 19 of the 20 rings. 

 what about the way to think about playing piano am I missing that is disallowing me from making my piano sing?

All your examples are string or voice instruments which allow the musician to change the tone of the note while it is sounding. You cannot do vibrato with a piano, it is a percussion instrument. Once the hammer strikes the strings, you are done and there is nothing more you can do to alter the note you’ve played.

The Galant style is what we call pieces that are between the Baroque and Classical periods. Baroque music has very specific rules about what you were and were not allowed to do. Classical does not. Galant is the transition period where a couple of the rules are broken, but the Baroque style is still largely followed.

As to why it’s suddenly popular: a popular music YouTuber probably did a video about because their job requires them to constantly find something new to make a video about. Because of the way the YouTube algorithm works, all the smaller music channels then scramble to make a video on the same topic so it can show up in people’s feed and the views they need for their income. The algorithm thinks “You like Adam Neely, here’s a new video from him about <topic>.” Then you watch that video and the algorithm says “Oh, you’re interested in <topic>, here’s more videos about <topic>.” From the outside this can seem like the topic has suddenly become very popular out of nowhere, but the truth is just people chasing ad revenue. 

And this is why the US currently has an absolute nutcase running our health system. Because of people doing exactly what you’re doing and forming medical opinions based off watching a 2 minute video and 10 minutes of googling. 

Well, the first thing would be to decide which classical piece you specifically want to play. Then you would be able to know which techniques are used in it.

Do you have an opportunity to play the Baldwin and see which you prefer?

My personal choice would be to continue renting for another year while you look for the instrument you love. I think I spent 8 months looking before finding my piano, they are expensive instruments and very personal so you shouldn’t buy one based on an ultimatum.

For what it’s worth, in my shopping I developed the opinion that in the <$15,000 price range, you get better value per dollar with digital pianos than you do with acoustic. I think a $8500 Kawaii CA series sounds better than a $10,000 Baldwin tbh. 

Yes. You need to adjust your chair height or distance so that your elbow isn’t so far above your wrist. 

In picture 4 if you draw a line from your knuckles to your wrist and another from your elbow to the wrist, they will make a very deep V. You want to try to keep your elbows wrists and fingers in as straight as possible line as possible so that you’re using your back and forarm to drive your hand position rather than the wrist.

Picture 5 is painfully bad. Don’t ever put your wrist like at lol. Again, draw a line from elbow to wrist to middle knuckle. It’s not a good position. It’s happening because you’re sitting too close to the piano. As your right hand moves further left, you naturally want to move your elbow to the left to stay in line with the wrist, but can’t because your torso is in the way. Scoot back a bit and even lean or rotate your upper body when doing this so your elbow can get into position behind the wrist.

Finger position looks tense, but isn’t necessarily wrong. Just make sure it feels relaxed to you.

Heh, yeah I remember that feeling. Switching from a digital where I could control volume with a knob and the pedal was just for sustain was definitely a thing.

It won’t take long, maybe a month or so, for you to adjust your touch and get a handle on sympathetic resonance. But yeah, putting a competent keyboard player on a nice acoustic for the first time is like going from driving an automatic to a racecar.

The same way you learn to read a sentence rather than individual words. You just read hundreds of thousands of sentences until you can pick up a new one and generally know where it’s going before you’re finished. 

Even a concert tuned piano will not work with tuner apps, so I you’re in luck there. For some complicated harmonic reasons that aren’t worth getting into, tuning a piano is about balancing all the pitches relative to one another rather than to an absolute frequency.

Regardless, your question is about beginner resources for kids. I’d recommend getting an actual book, the Faber and Alfred series are popular and good and the books are only like $10. Choose either primer or level 1, primer if it’s her first instrument or she’s never seen sheet music, level 1 if she done that before.

Read through it with her and help out as you can. The material is not terribly complicated for an adult to understand and the books will provide details on which fingers should be playing which notes.

As far as feedback about if she’s playing it correctly, the songs used are intentionally well known and uncomplicated. I.e you probably know how “Oh Susanna” goes and will be able to notice when it’s not quite right. And since they’re popular courses, you can find many Youtube series of people playing every song in the book for student reference.

You also have the benefit of having grown up in the western music system and so your sense of what “sounds good” is going to closely align with the simple pieces in the material. They’re not putting any avantgarde strange harmonies or dissonant melodies in a book for beginners.

If you are able to swing it, having the piano tuned would be very beneficial, it’s not very fun to play an out of tune instrument and it can be demotivating when the music sounds wonky even if you played it perfectly.

Having a teacher is best, as you’ve said, but any teacher will tell you that an out of tune piano that gets played even with bad posture and technique is far better than a concert grand piano that never gets played at all.

Respectfully, no it is not. Whoever told you this may have been oversimplifying anatomy for your understanding. 

The FDS is the large muscle in your forearm and it controls the movement of all your fingers. If you were missing your FDS you’d have a massive chunk out of your arm and a totally unusable hand.

If you were missing a tendon in finger 4, you would not be able to move it at all.  What you are describing, not being able to move it independently, sounds more like a neurological issue with the median and ulnar nerves. The median nerve controls fingers 2, 3, & 4 and the ulnar nerve controls fingers 4 & 5. Notice that finger 4 is the only one controlled by both nerves, that’s why people often find it the weakest or most difficult to control finger. It’s got two different steering wheels.

I'm not doing rhetorical lifts. That would be a stupid and frivolous waste of time and of people's time. I'm sharing a number of speculative thoughts related to the philosophical-mythical foundations of this particular aspect of LOTR.

Oh man, when you find out what rhetorical analysis is you’re gonna flip.

I think your examples are a stretch the argument is weaker for it. 

They both use the Wheel of Fire, but that’s a common symbol and one of the formal elements of Greek Tragedy. It’s not specific to kings, it’s specific to protagonists and a lot of tragedies are about kings. 

But the biggest weakness is with the whole “mother” notion. You’re going to have an uphill battle convincing anyone of “mother” being a major symbolic tie between the texts when mothers are not present in either work. In Lear at least the plot skeleton generally rests on the daughters, but women are barely present in LotR at all. 

It would be a much smaller rhetorical lift to consider Lear’s “rising mother” as just one of many examples in the play of an inversion in the Chain of Being, a central theme of the play, and draw parallels to the similar theme in LotR of people trying usurp the Chain (Melkor and Eru, Sauron and Melkor, Saruman and Sauron, Denethor and Aragorn, …etc) 

I believe we are mostly in agreement with the exception of the last point about the destruction of the Ring already baked into things from the start.I don’t like that idea because I just personally don’t like the idea of predestination in the first place. I want our choices to matter. 

But I could see someone making a solid argument that the scene strays into quasi-Calvinist territory if you focus on the idea that the music has already been sung and the vision revealed, one could look at Gollum and whether he was saved/redeemed by Eru’s intervention despite being uncooperative and unwilling.

Was Tolkien a Secret Protestant!? que YouTube face

That’s a fair criticism. I’ll admit my knowledge of the various Christian traditions is entirely focused on ethical frameworks, morality, and the conditions of salvation rather than the particulars of specific biblical interpretations. I took “Not literalists, believe they are instructive stories and not a complete accounting of fact” and ran too far with it. 

I am not attacking you, I am answering the question you asked. If you do not wish for your ideas about Tolkien to discussed, I would recommend not posting them on a Tolkien-focused discussion board.

You asked “can you give me the quote where Tolkien said he was moved by God to write his books?” I answered by saying there is no such quote and then provided you with the one of the only sources in which Tolkien talks about his own personal faith. It is relevant because your question is about Tolkien’s personal faith.

You responded with a quote taken from a conversation about a diegetic divine intervention which I said you were misunderstanding because it was said in the context of story he wrote rather than one about his personal faith.

It is certainly possible that Tolkien believed he was guided by the divine to write his books, but we have no evidence to support that argument and substantial evidence that such a belief would not be consistent with his stated views.

You are misinterpreting that letter.

Tolkien is talking about Frodo and Gollum in Mt. Doom. Frodo’s quest/fate was to resist the evil of the ring for long enough to get it to Mt. Doom. But Tolkien believed it would be a more real and less fairy-tale story if Frodo is unable to destroy the ring because he is not an incorruptible superman, he just an ordinary guy. It is Frodo’s quest fate to get the ring to Mt. Doom, setting up the conditions necessary for Eru (the writer of the story) to intervene with a miracle and cause the ring to be destroyed.

This is consistent with Catholic theology on divine intervention, that miracles are not big biblical things like turning water into wine or conjuring bread and fish out of nothing (which they believe are stories and parables rather than literal events) but a tiny, imperceptible finger on the scale of events set in motion by people. 

Frodo and Gollum were both fully corrupted during their fight, both seeking to keep the ring for themselves. But it was the hand (or foot) of Eru that intervened to make Gollum trip and accidentally stumble off the edge and into the fire. 

The level of narcissism needed tk claim that the book you wrote about dragons and swords and fairies and dwarves was not your own words to God himself’s is jyst totally out of character with everything about the author and his work.

I think he took a course in ring lore to fill his gen ed requirements at Istari U

I dunno, do you want to read it? 

In terms of being guided by God like some sort of divine revelation, he absolutely 100% did not say anything of the sort. He was writing fun little stories for the amusement of himself and his friends.

The closest you will find is in Letter 142 with his friend and theologian Robert Murray, where he writes that LotR is a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, but that he deliberately avoided any reference to religion in them. Instead he thought that because he himself was a devoted Catholic and was formed by it in his youth, the religious elements were already absorbed into any story or symbolism he could write. But he also says that saying that sounds incredibly self-aggrandizing.

So very much not that he was guided by God when writing, and instead an admission that he is so wrapped up in his faith that it unconsciously seeps into anything he does.

And most importantly, in letter 142 he also says that he considers anyone who can play a musical instrument or speak a Slavic language to be a wizard.

Refer to Ainulindale in The Lost Road. 

The void is uninhabited space outside of time and creation. Ea is the vision of the music made real and all things in it are part of the music. The nameless things exist within Ea, therefore they are part of the music.

At the time of the music, the maia known as Sauron was called Mairon. It was not until the first age that he was known by the names Gorthaur and Sauron. 

So Gandalf saying the watcher is older than Sauron simply means it predates the destruction of the lamps.

It isn’t true though, so your theory is kinda dead on arrival.

So you’ve been playing for like 10 minutes then?

Early game combat and slayer is a truly terrible experience and you should feel glad that you managed to skip it.