Media: Master or Slave?
June 12, 2010
One could — and I would — debate some of Alain de Botton’s points or their consequences, but a fact like this is striking to someone who carries around a small machine that lends access to literally millions of writings in seconds:
A wealthy family in England in 1250 might have owned three books: a Bible, a collection of prayers, and a life of the saints—this modestly sized library nevertheless costing as much as a cottage.
Al Giordano comes at it somewhat differently.
I shot off an e-mail to Schopenhauer to ask what he thinks about current media, and — like a lot of guys who sit around thinking a lot — he got right back to me with this idea:
The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public… A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
One of Giordano’s readers is thinking extra-hard:
A media kibbutz?
Yes, that’s one of the ideas I’ve been playing with. Not the antiquated pick-oranges and dance-the-hora stuff and not Jewish either, nor in Israel, but a modern community somewhere in América where people live and produce media, be it books, a newspaper, photography, film, TV, whatever. It would also be a more permanent version of the J-school. There are agricultural kibbutzim, there are those that produce electronics or chemicals, but I’ve never heard of such a set-up that produces and educates media.
I’d gladly live in that kibbutz if it was also full of communicative performing musicians.
Pianos Planted on the Street
June 9, 2010
So very Barcelona: “Play me, I’m yours,” it says.
UPDATE: Barbara Kerr points me to this report on the fact that New York is getting its own pianos in the same campaign. Yea!
ANOTHER UPDATE: At 5:06 P.M. on June 21, I find this on Columbus Circle:
“I Made That Sound”
June 7, 2010
While she’s talking about actors, she speaks clearly to the mission of musicians as I conceive it.
Tip of the hat to Catherine Pisaroni
A Reverberation, Not an Echo
June 2, 2010
Sitting down to review a concert in St. John the Divine and then complaining about its spacious acoustics is about as helpful as writing about water and emphasizing that it’s wet or blaming ice for being too cold (New York Times: “A Chorus of Echoes, for Better and Worse“). Banal in the extreme.
But surely anyone charged with writing about music needs to know the difference between reverberation and an echo — that what she was hearing was not echo but seven seconds of admittedly massive reverberation. An echo of course repeats a sound, whereas reverberation has the effect of sustaining the sound. Having spent much of my career making music in reverberant churches, I have cheerfully pointed out the difference to people who asked how much “echo” there was. It is galling, however, to find that a music writer for the New York Times is in need of such an elementary explanation: except for very special effects, an echo would be musically disastrous, whereas much of the music devised in history depends to a large degree on consistent reverberation for its full effect. (Rock musicians know this perfectly well as they add digital “reverb” — not echo — to their amplified or recorded effects.)
It is perhaps graceless for a humble blogger to point this out, but the continuing decline of newspapers with their claim to special expertise, editorial control, and accuracy would be truly disastrous for music were it not for the at least counterbalancing presence of online media.
Happy Birthday, Frederica von Stade
June 1, 2010
From New York, Via London
May 31, 2010
My friends Stephen Hough and Robert White have been mentioned (favorably, of course) here before, more than once. Now they are together in an interesting and typically insightful post on Stephen’s London Telegraph blog. (And I note that he is now Americanized enough to call the wireless a radio!)
UPDATE: Hear Stephen in a fascinating, if short, BBC feature on mathematics and music.
Viva Italia!
May 30, 2010
Oh, to have been there!
It’s Just an Illusion
May 27, 2010
It’s such a commonplace that we may not much think of it. In music performance we count on making things seem evident that simply aren’t objectively true. Some of them are so present that we hardly notice them: the piano, with its fast-dying-away tones is physically incapable of legato. But thanks to the artistry of good players, we have the impression of smooth, connected, cantabile piano-playing. Piccolo players, playing high arpeggios, sometime seem to place shimmering high chords above an orchestral texture, when those evident chords are really individual, sequential notes.
Last night, after a relaxed dinner with an old friend that I had not seen in some months, I played a couple of harpsichord pieces for him. He’s an educated musician who, however, knew nothing about how a harpsichord works. In answer to his queries, I removed the jack-rail and showed him how a jack functions: plucking the string as the key causes it to rise, damping the string as the key is released and the jack falls. “How then,” he asked, “are you making some notes louder than others?” That’s one of the greatest compliments a harpsichordist (or organist) can get — playing, as we do, an instrument on which there is no direct control over the intensity of the individual note. Having a listener confirm that the illusion of varied volume is getting through is a real affirmation.
I then gave my friend a little demonstration of how the illusion of comparative dynamics is created, but all the time I was glorying in that question he had asked.
It was ever thus. Illusion is everything in art.
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