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I’m writing this after completing 64 concerts: one quarter of the way through the project. (A quarter of 252 is exactly 63, but I need to play the four gores and grants too, as I discuss here, which makes 256.)

For months, I’ve been looking forward to this landmark as the appropriate moment to post an initial statistical summary, breaking down the first 25% of concerts by venue type (church, former church, town hall, performance center, library, etc.) and variety of piano (age, make, model) and audience size and town population and donation total and collaborator repertoire and demographics and all kinds of groovy things, maybe even throw in some 4:3 color glossy jpegs, with circles and arrows and a paragraph underneath each one explaining what each one was...

And I’m still gonna do a post like that. Sometime soon I hope. 

But this has turned out to be a different kind of milestone than I expected, and one which prevented me from doing the legwork for that summary stats post just yet: a high-water mark of burnout. 

As I’ve posted before, motivational ebb and flow is natural in any long-term project. It's not the concerts. They keep going well, and I keep getting better, and it’s still fun to meet new collaborators and new pianos and new audiences and see new towns. 

It’s the preparation, not just logistical but musical. It’s too much. I need to pare back how much I customize each program to its locale. The resident collaborations are one thing, but I’ve also taken to playing music written in key years of a town’s timeline (e.g. the year the town was founded, the year of its first meeting, the year the venue was built, the year the piano was manufactured) plus pieces thematic to town history, like “Magnetic Rag” in Brandon where the electric motor was invented, “Steamboat Rag” in Fairlee where the first steamship launched, “Atomic Power” in Vernon where I played at the site of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant, “Beets and Turnips” in Wardsboro where the state vegetable, the Gilfeather Turnip, was developed, etc.

Lately at least a handful of pieces on each program have been keyed to the location, on top of the collaborative repertoire. Audiences like this, and I enjoy the serendipity: it’s fun to build programs around pieces I “have to play” for reason of some theme or arbitrary chronology. But it’s getting to be a too much of a good thing—too much music to learn. (And too much time looking up pieces to fit the bill!) And of course there’s the new Scarlatti sonata each time. 

I’m not about to quit the project, though. Whenever I wonder if it's worth it, I run into someone who enthuses about it, or I get an appreciative email or card or comment. In the course of my performances, I’ve already run into two musicians who were part of (separate) ensembles that aimed to play in every town—endeavors which petered out long before completion. I don’t want that to be me! As Scott Ross said about recording all 555 Scarlatti sonatas in just 15 months: I’m not patient but I’m stubborn.