This is What Total Commitment Looks Like
March 26, 2010
And sounds like. The great Magda Olivero turned 100 this week.
A Composer Whose Time Has Come
March 23, 2010
This from my friend Paul Desenne in Caracas.
Ten Books
March 21, 2010
In his own blog, Tyler Cowen has listed the ten books that have influenced him most and asked other bloggers to do the same. He is also aggregating other people’s lists. I choose to take the seat-of-the-pants approach and am writing the first ten that I think of rather than poring over this. Not the ones that I think I should say or the ones that necessarily would most influence me today.
Richard Adams: Watership Down
George Eliot: Middlemarch
James Alison: The Joy of Being Wrong
C.S. Lewis: That Hideous Strength
Anthony Trollope: Autobiography
Bruno Montsaingeon: Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger
Robert Hughes: Barcelona
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
Dorothy Parker: Complete Short Stories
UPDATE: Looking this over one day later, I’m fairly shocked by one fact: Dorothy Parker is the only American writer in the list.
ANOTHER UPDATE: I’ve been asked why the Bible is not on my list. Because I assume that practically everyone in our society has been influenced, if not most influenced, by that book or gathering of separate books. If you ask me my favorite drinks, should I list water? Or must breathing figure in my list of favorite activities? Even the person in our culture most adverse to its teachings is mightily “impacted,” as the cant goes, by that volume.
Opened, and Well Opened
March 19, 2010
It’s a great pleasure to be able to say that the important spring season of the New York City Opera opened last night not only with a French operetta perfect of its kind, but with a general élan about the place that is greatly inspiriting for the many who have missed the company’s presence near the center of the city’s cultural life. The impression persists from the fall season — and is, if anything, augmented — that this company has a new lease on life.
The largely Gallic cast, and entirely Gallic flavor, of this very well-integrated mounting of L’Étoile by Emmanuel Chabrier (about whom a little more tomorrow) is very fine indeed, but to a New Yorker a special gratification must be a more residential element: the crack orchestra and a chorus that even approached the supererogatory Broadway level of choreographic gameness. For an evening of lighthearted, stylish entertainment, this show — which runs till April Fool’s Day — is a rare treat.
“Musicians’ Brains Are Different from Other Peoples'”
March 16, 2010
A Barcelona neuroscientist has turned her attention from Down Syndrome and cognitive disorders to the brains that musicians navigate their world with. If you’re a musician, the non-musicians around you who think your mind works differently from theirs are right. By the same token, you are on solid ground if you sometimes find others’ ways of thinking somehow organically different from your own. The following is translated on the fly from a new interview in El Periódico de Catalunya:
– Why does music exist?
“Darwin didn’t figure out why humans spend so much effort on an activity with no clear biological function, but in the brain there is an impulse that encourages us to listen to and produce music.”– My drive to produce reaches no further than tapping my foot.
“The brain of non-musicians reacts with the right hemisphere, the more emotional one, which registers the melodic contour. But the left, more analytical hemisphere is activated in musicians. They are preoccupied with the musical syntax, the language.”– Do they perceive it in a different way?
“You could say that musicians have a brain unlike non-musicians. There are also differences between composers and improvisors.”– What makes them different?
“Many conductors and composers have auditory imagery. You can ask them to play without sound and execute all the motions. It is as if they hear with the mind. Also tonal memory, which allows us to remember the sequences of tones.”– Music is in my head!
“There are separate regions of the brain that specialize in recognizing a tone or a melody. Some can always tell a C is a C, thanks to what is called ‘absolute pitch.’ People who have absolute pitch display an asymmetry in the planum temporale, an area of the brain that deals with language.”– And the hands of virtuosos?
“Music sets off distinct and complex skills in the brain. Violinists correct the position of their hands depending on what they hear. Audiomotor adjustment is exact.”– Genes are everything!
“Heredity is a factor. 5% of people are tone-deaf, and 15% don’t sing. Entire families! But don’t be fooled: while there’s something that’s innate, environment is crucial.”– At this altitude she tells me this [or can a reader provide a better translation?]!
“This is shown by studies of twins reared apart. We also know that listening to Mozart improves learning.”
Thanks to José Franch Ballester for pointing out the original article.