Meta and Meta

Fiddler on a Goof

Fascinating article in the Washington Post about an informal experiment in music appreciation (or rather, depreciation). Violinist Josh Bell played the role of nondescript street musician at rush hour in D.C.'s L'Enfant Plaza.

The idea was to see how morning commuters would react to the finest fiddle playing with all the trappings of The Concert Performance abstracted away.  The result--not so much:

"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ."

The word doesn't come easily.

". . . ignoring me."

Bell is laughing. It's at himself.

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

I've got to say, when I lived in Germany I got more audience reaction (and money) than Bell when I'd practice tenor sax in the U-Bahn. And I ain't no Josh Bell of the tenor, let me tell you.

(So now I don't know whom to think worse of--the Americans who ignored Bell's playing, or the Germans who paid mine inordinate attention.)

Thank You For The Music

This (via Arts & Letters Daily) is a fascinating case. Pianist Joyce Hatto apparently passed off several recordings of other piano virtuosi as her own. The fraud was uncovered when a critic's computer identified a Hatto CD as one of Lás-zló Simon's. The critic then compared the two recordings and found them to be identical. Subsequent scrutiny of Hatto's discography revealed other such cases.

What I find interesting is that it took the CD identification algorithm, rather than a keen critical ear, to betray such a brazen fraud. Many of the pianists whose recordings were appropriated were fairly well-known: László Simon, Yefim Bronfman, Minoru Nojima, Carlo Grante. Yet despite all the rhetoric in music criticism about this or that player's "distinctive" approach, over several years and many recordings the approaches of these distinguished players apparently went...undistinguished.

Move Over Heifetz

This may be one of the most amusing things I've ever seen. (But then I'm a fledgling fiddle player, so probably biased in unhealthy ways.) Especially noteworthy are the moves from ca. 1:00-2:05. Unreal. (But real, I assure you.)

Keen Prediction

The spectral deconvolution software that iTunes uses to recommend new music to listeners usually seems to do a pretty lousy job of predicting songs I actually enjoy.

Still, even with that in mind, I'd say this is an unusually...exotic inference.

People Like Me

Sure, I'm annoyed at how often mediocrity gets rewarded by the popular music mill. It's really awful.

Still, if pop music required excellence, I'd be out of a gig.

Brahms had a similar thought: "The fact that the public in general does not understand and appreciate the best things is the reason people like me get famous."

Another way to put it: I'm really not very good--so I might as well be a star.

"Talent"

Musical talent may be in your blood. But that doesn't mean it'll come out of your fingers.

"Art" Imitates Art

[Treoblogging] I'm in a charming little coffee shop in a charming little town in Washington. Except that the music they're playing is eerily like that characterless, background needle-drop characters in a B-movie are portrayed as playing on their stereo (or dancing to in a bar, or...). A sort of reverse mimesis of musical mediocrity. Or something.

It's like I'm in a B-movie.

Tuning the Devil's Instrument

[Treoblogging] The violin is an unforgiving instrument to learn. For the average student, it takes months to get anything resembling a musical sound out of it, and intonation will be unsure for years. Whereas on, say, the piano, you could have that same student playing a musical phrase after the very first lesson, and tuning is never an issue at all.

Well, almost never. One of the benefits of violin, is that when you get good you can play even more in tune than on the piano. This may seem counterintuitive, but pianos are actually tuned according to a compromise scheme known as equal temperament. The compromise is a good one from the standpoint of harmonic modulation (i.e., you can "cycle" through all the different keys and they will all sound pretty much in tune with one another). But the downside is that a class of melodic and harmonic intervals are noticably (and in some cases frustratingly) off.

The violin is particularly well suited to demonstrate this phenomenon because of its open strings can be combined with stopped notes to compare different tuning regimes. If you're interested in hearing what all this means, Kurt Sassmannshaus' superb site Violin Masterclass has a perspicuous demonstration and explanation of the issues. Go here and start at the "definition" files. (Other fun stuff abounds on the site, so make sure to surf around.)

Music Theory From Dummies

[Treoblogging] I'm reading Songwriters on Songwriting (1997) by Paul Zollo. Zollo's interview with R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe and Mike Mills contains this precious, pretentious goof by Mills (at p. 635):

Well, C# [c-sharp] minor is what "Moonlight Sonata" is in. It's a very, very beautiful haunting [sic] key that lots of classical composers use, because it has a lot of flat keys in it. [Emphasis added.]*

Mills also extols the virtues of the mezzo clef, the dynamic marking coda, and the time signature 4/7 (because it has a lot of semibreves in it).

Side Note: In fact, c-sharp minor was only very rarely used throughout the Classical period. E.g., of Mozart's 600-plus works, I believe only one is written in that key.

* Explanation for nonmusicians: As a rudimentary definitional matter of music theory, sharp keys do not contain flats (and vice versa). Somewhat in the same way as the set of even numbers greater than 2 doesn't contain any primes.

UPDATE: Of course it's also possible that Mills said "black keys" and that the "flat" is a transcription error. But the entire line of thought is nonsense in any case, and the less charitable hypothesis is much funnier besides, so I'm going with that.

More Eclectic Than Thou

[Treoblogging] I don't usually do this sort of thing, but it seems like it's "in," and otherwise I got nothing, so here are the 10 most recently played on my iPod:

Lux Aeterna (Ligeti [RIP])
You and Me (Lifehouse)
Mathis der Maler (Hindemith)
Tristan und Isolde: Vorspiel und Liebestod (Wagner)
Pavane, Op.50 (Fauré)
Meditation from Thais (Massenet)
Wonderful Tonight  (Eric Clapton)
Trois Pieces Pour Orchestra (Berg)
The Hymn (Charlie Parker)
Synchronicity II (The Police)

Truly a weird list. It may seem preposterous, but I really do like all these pieces/songs/works. Still, I don't suppose I would suggest playing, say, the Clapton and Berg one after the other in the same sitting--at least not without a couple of carefully chosen Tom Waits tunes in between as bridging material.