If you made it through my 2000-word Disney post, you might have noticed something. I didn’t mention any Bach listening.
This year I’m embarking on a project of listening to all the works of Bach. This has involved following a calendar (that I created) which assigns me 2-4 “BWV” numbers per day. This totals about 30-40 minutes of listening.
I assigned myself BWV numbers for Feb 15-19. I did some of my other daily things (I kept my time log for instance). I had time most days where I could have listened (usually in the evening, like when I was back in the hotel with the little boys, or perhaps in the morning when I was getting ready, usually earlier than everyone else.). So it’s not like I couldn’t have listened.
But the honest truth is it just totally slipped my mind.
The whole time in Disney, I didn’t even think “oh, I’m supposed to be listening to Bach today.” There wasn’t a sense of failing to do my resolutions, because the resolution itself did not come into my active consciousness.
Looking back, I’m not 100 percent sure why this is, though perhaps it’s simple cognitive overload. I was thinking of other things — what’s our schedule for tomorrow, is it going to rain, whose poncho is ripped, does everyone have their Magic Band, etc. I was outside my usual rituals and routines. I had worked ahead on my sonnet for the week so I wasn’t thinking about that ritual, which might have triggered a reminder that I had other rituals. Who knows.
In any case, I woke up on Tuesday morning and for the first time in five days remembered…Bach!
But the good news of a big project that’s broken up into 366 small pieces is that each day doesn’t feature too much listening. So it’s entirely possible to get caught up.
I decided to spread my catching up over a few days. So on Tuesday I listened to Thursday, Friday, and part of Saturday’s music. On Wednesday I listened to Saturday, Sunday, and part of Monday. Today I’m listening to Monday, Tuesday and at least part of Wednesday. Tomorrow I’ll be through to the end of Friday.
I don’t think I’ll completely forget on future trips, though maybe I’ll listen ahead a bit and set some sort of reminder. In any case, better to get caught up now than decide to give up. I’ve listened to a lot of great music in the last few days, which has inspired me to keep going. Onward…
I assume, Ms. Laura Vanderkam, that you wrote the incident in which you missed listening to Bach for a few days as a price that you will pay for missing your routines – to publicly expose an incident in which you forgot your routine. If that is the case, then I’m going to also expose incidents where I have missed my routines.
I’m also wondering: What would “BWV” numbers refer to?
I’ve looked through the other blog posts that you also wrote about BWV numbers. In this case, Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) is a list of all the pieces of music by Johann Sebastian Bach that are known. It means Bach Works Catalogue.
@Yukun- yep, it’s a catalogue of all of Bach’s works – it makes listening to all of them a bit more systematic, which I have definitely appreciated!
Bach WerkVerzeichnis – the system of numbers that catalog his works (lit., Bach Work-Catalog)