3 measure? As in 12 beats if it's 4/4 time?
I had no idea piano pedagogy was a major. I do like that they all got a pencil. I assume they are writing the letter of the notes on each line of the staff.
No, they were stabbing themselves with it when they made mistakes, for punishment.
It takes way too long if you have to think "every good boy does fine," even if you don't stop to think about all the injustice in the world.
Also I have some additions to Heebie's experimental protocol: the researchers should summarize a few methods for practicing, based on this first study. Then they should have test subjects learn one easy and one hard passage for each type of practicing. What if some ways to practice work better for easy things and some ways for hard things? OR (the way reality always seems to turn out) some ways work for some people and some ways work for other people?
Plus they should do it in a variety of environments (distracting, quiet, hot, cold, underwear that fits, underwear that is too tight, sober, drunk, high) to control for those factors too.
I've no idea how that study is supposed to compare practicing strategies, as opposed to, say, competence or learning aptitude. Why are they just getting a bunch of people to do whatever it is they do rather than having the same people use different strategies?
1 - Yes, but it's three measures of Shostakovich. Depending on which three measures were chosen, that's some seriously difficult stuff.
I learned it as Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge
English boarding school version (heard at my own school): Every Good Boy Deserves Flogging.
Hawaii's teacher has WAY TOO MANY mnemonics. So besides Every Good Boy, she does FACE for the spaces in the treble clef, (me at home: just use Every Good Boy plus the order of the keys. But then Hawaii has to, um, code-switch at her lesson, which she does just fine (like every good boy)) but then for the bass clef, her teacher uses All Cows Eat Grass for the spaces and Good Boys Do Fine Always for the lines, and en toto it drives me nuts.
I did all of those. They helped me pass any written music test.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, traditionally.
We got The Music Parents' Survival Guide out of the library, it has some interesting stuff in it. Really rams home how, with the near total elimination of musical instrument instruction in US public schools, becoming a competent instrumentalist on anything outside of garage band instruments is pretty much the exclusive preserve of the UMC these days. The optimist in me likes to think it will lead to glorious popular music led by generations of underprivileged self-taught obsessives, but then I remember how fucked up the economics of pop are. And the pessimist in me on a bad day thinks classical music deserves its fate if it can't reproduce itself outside of the coddled confines of leafy suburban hothouse music instruction. We've still got a couple of generations of ferociously scrappy Russian immigrant families to mix things up, at least.
Predictably, based in the consensus "best practices" in the book we're doing some things pretty well and others completely contrawise in a mix likely to result in a 17-18 year old with a musical education that doesn't really fit in anywhere.
I don't think the mess public schools are in can entirely be laid at the feet of classical music.
Hasn't word got out that the surest way to get a good college scholarship is to learn to play the bassoon?
en toto it drives me nuts
I learned all four of those, plus Big Elephants Always Do Good Counting Flats and Father Charles Goes Down and Eats Bread for the order of flats and sharps. I still know them all, despite using this knowledge maybe once a year nowadays, so I'd say they were successful.
Very true, neb - I did say it was in my pessimistic mode! To me though the loss of general, widely available and usually reasonably competent instrumental education in your average middle class public school system is emblematic of the loss of faith in well pretty much all public goods.
In high school band, we did marching stuff in the Fall and concert-band stuff in the Spring. Which meant come Spring, all the drummers had to re-learn how to play the timpani (bass clef) and the mallet-percussion instruments (xylo, vibraphone, marimba—all treble clef). I always cheated for the first few weeks by way of "all cows eat grass" and "every good boy does fine."
We've still got a couple of generations of ferociously scrappy Russian immigrant families to mix things up, at least.
Let's not forget the Koreans. (That might be racist, but in a good way, right?)
I went to the symphony last night and heard four pieces whose combined estimated lengths were 65 minutes. The concert started at 8 and ended at 9:50, and then BART timing meant I didn't get home until 10:50. You want to know why classical music is dying, it's absurdly long intermissions, long pauses for applause, and between-piece shuffling around. There, I said it.
||
My department finally got around to doing my two-year review (just shy of three years; they had forgotten about it). I now have an official letter that says what everyone has always implied: they think I'm doing great but I better come up with a "major breakthrough" or they'll kick me out.
|>
How many major breakthroughs are even left?
If there aren't any left, I guess the department will just shrivel up and die in a few decades.
If you build the long-awaited death ray, you could shrivel up and kill the department faster than that.
22 is correct. I hope the program was better than the one I had to review on Saturday, which may have been the worst I've heard in years. Music directors, some pieces fall into obscurity for good reason.
I went to the symphony last night and heard four pieces whose combined estimated lengths were 65 minutes. The concert started at 8 and ended at 9:50, and then BART timing meant I didn't get home until 10:50. You want to know why classical music is dying, it's absurdly long intermissions, long pauses for applause, and between-piece shuffling around. There, I said it.
Is this not part of what's expected? Like how at every rock concert, the first band starts 30 minutes after the show was supposed to start, and there's 30 minutes of interminable sound-check between acts, and the headliner always starts exactly 15 minutes after I've gotten exhausted of standing and want to go home?
28: There's a local venue that's Mussolini-like about start times. So if the show starts at 9, it really does start at 9. And they sound check all the bands before the show, in reverse order, which minimizes the gap between bands.
I really like it as a performer, but I've heard complaints from fans. "What, I missed you? You guys really started at 9? I figured since it said 9, you'd start around 9:30 or 10."
The soundcheck really gets to me. It seems like we should have been able to speed up that process, due to the somewhat improved audio technologies that have developed since the Jimi Hendrix era.
30: those fans should be shot, as should the venues that give rise to their expectations.
AISIMHB, when I was a dj at WHPK there was a noise musician guy who'd occasionally use the mailing list to advertise his shows (he was also a dj), and he'd always point out that they would be going by "noise time" (i.e., the advertised time would actually be adhered to), rather than "indie rock time" (who the hell knows).
The "indie rock time" concept leads us to the conclusion that these shows are put on for the benefit of people who just love hanging around rock clubs no matter what's happening, rather than people interested in any specific band. How many people in a typical audience are this sort of "regular"?
28: I thought I was the only person who did that.
I wonder how much of this reaction is a matter of societal attitudes towards entertainment changing: we've had three generations of TV, and eight years of on-demand stuff online (at least eight, Hulu was launched in 2007, but some older stuff might be worth counting; iTunes was launched in 2001). We expect our entertainment to be more individualized and convenient than people did 50 or 100 years ago.
But then again, it's probably just that we're getting old.
At the last rock concert I went to, at a cafe in Oakland, we made the mistake of getting up from the seats we had been sitting at along the side of the cafe to stand more toward the stage when the headliners came on. This was a mistake because we were immediately surrounded by people who had apparently paid the cover charge to be able to shout at each other over a live band. I really do not understand this and never have in all my concertgoing years.
28 makes me realize how spoiled I've gotten going to shows here. I don't remember the last time I had an experience like that. And shows always end reasonably early so I don't get home utterly exhausted.
We must go to different shows, Josh.
(And before you say anything snarky, the more "out" stuff tends to be better about time, for whatever reason, so I don't mean those shows! I mean at like the Hemlock or the Rickshaw Stop or the former Cafe du Nord or whatever.)
NRA events really do start on time. Or at least the one I went to, with a start time of 6 AM an hour outside of Tucson.
37.2: Right. I'm more likely to go to the Fillmore or the Fox or the Warfield. Which are all great about making sure the shows run on time.
Yeah bigger venues do tend to be better about that IME.
I can only read 23 as a plea for crackpot emails.
Dear Esteemed physicist,
I have RECENTLY come into possession of a SMALL QUANTITY of the DARK MATTER that is believed to have been involved in the extinction of some SPECIES. However, I am unable to pay the shipping costs to send it to a proper facility for testing...
Maybe I can haggle them down to "moderate breakthrough" or "pretty big breakthrough". Mostly I'm surprised they put it in writing.
32: noise shows around here are famously for starting hilariously, pointlessly late.
It did always seem surprisingly incongruous that "noise time" would mean "punctual".
How close is what you're doing to what the rest of them are doing? If it's not too close you could just pick your next paper or two and declare that you have made a major breakthrough on answering question X and just kind of let them assume that X is a really significant question where the answer would have serious repercussions throughout that particular debate, rather than a completely normal/unexceptional one.
27: it was good! Two Stravinsky pieces for string orchestra, two Bach keyboard concerti. My gf sniffed at the use of piano rather than harpsichord but it's all fine by me. I'd even say: "Jeremy Denk, showing himself to be as adept before the 88 keys of a piano as fans of his blog and essays know him to be before the 101 keys of a computer keyboard, pulled off an impressive feat of prestidigitation indeed, pulling such sweet music from the Symphony's venerable Steinway one could hardly doubt but that Bach, were he in the audience, would have approved the use of the instrument."
Naturally, a decent editor wouldn't let that repetition of "pull" through.
re: 48
Heh. As per a Facebook comment a while back, I actively prefer piano* on almost all pieces that were written for harpsichord and sod authenticity.
I'd probably like them on lautenwerk, but I don't think I've ever heard any of Bach's works for lautenwerk** or keyboard/harpsichord played on keyboards other than piano or harpsichord.
* and not some clunky tinny sounding fortepiano, either.
** often played on guitar, or lute, rather than a keyboard instrument
I actively prefer piano on almost all pieces that were written for harpsichord and sod authenticity.
Agree. Not that anyone should take my views on classical music as being worth anything at all, and I'm not a big Baroque fan to begin with, but I prefer piano-Bach to harpsichord-Bach.
I listen to a fair bit of classical music, although I suppose it comes a close 3rd behind jazz and soul/rnb in terms of the numbers of hours of listening. My taste largely runs to Baroque and earlier,* or 20th century.** I probably listen to Bach more than any other individual composer, though. I have the occasional harpsichord recording I can stomach, but largely, it's the ruination of good music.
I event bought and listened to, for a quite a while to try and get into it, Landowska [on vinyl, no less]. No joy. Still prefer piano.
* Monteverdi, Purcell, Tallis, Dowland, etc
** Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Webern, Bartok, some more 'avant-garde' stuff, etc.
Good thing they aren't strongly competitive. Pianos are so warm and fuzzy and *indistinct*. I even prefer ragtime on harpsichord.
Most baroque pieces are better when being performed by Yngwie Malmsteen.*
*NOT RLY
re: 55
Heh. Black Star. Volume on 10.
If there's one thing I learned from the 80s, it's that you can't go wrong with a synthesizer. It can sound like a piano or a harpsichord or something that isn't dull.
Moby it sounds like you need to get your Wendy Carlos and Isao Tomita on.
That sounds more involved than just playing a couple of A Flock of Seagulls songs.
Really, just the one song. Do they even have two songs?
Now listening to Heindel's lautenwerk recording of Bach's Lautenwerk. Lovely clean attack & gut timbre. (How did they get 8' gut strings?)
I think the gut or wound strings blur too much of the difference between temperaments to be best for music that was really not equal-tempered, but 8-foot horse guts for courses.
The main lautenwerk maker can make harpsichords for *either* 10%-65% humidity *or* 40%-90% humidity.
This is the real origin of the expression "horses for courses".
Aaaah I had it on shuffle nooo.
St Louis' classical station once amused itself with an afternoon of disembodied second movements.
Re: 61.first
Nylgut, maybe. Aquila do it for lutes, guitars, vihuelas, etc.
Well, _now_, sure!
I was told that Delrin is synthetic crowquill spine, which seems too good to be true.
So wait, does 61.2 contain the answer to the question in 61.1 or is it speculation or what?
I'll listen to Bach or really anyone played on anything if it's good, you guys are so hidebound sheesh! Anna Paradiso playing Scarlatti is a current rowdy music favorite of the kid, she puts the io in con brio that's for sure. And Leonhardt in the Straub movie is so great god I love that movie.
don't know why my phone suddenly doesn't know me...
a sheep small intestine is 15m. Lots of gut to be going on with.
Speaking of music neb likes, I just learned about the Sherman Helmsley from The Jeffersons/Gong connection. I assume you all know this already because it seems like the kind of thing you all know about but wow.
the Sherman Helmsley
Ain't that a kick in the head?
My gf
Wat
Anyhoo, the piano v. harpsichord thing isn't even a thing. Despite Thomas Beecham's "skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm" remark and all, it's a delightful instrument, and I certainly wouldn't have piano accompanying recits in Baroque music, but harpsichord purists can fuck the fuck off. Listen to Pletnev play Scarlatti, for example. I heard Angela Hewitt play the entire WTC on a Fazioli a while back, and believe me, that WTC was OMGWTF. (Not everyone likes her cool reserve, though; a friend's mother sniffed after hearing her play, "She needs to get laid.")
What, I get no praise for my reviewer pastiche thing?
But I want praise from Jesus, not the evaluation of a decent editor.
The last piece in this Sunday's Jennifer Koh recital in Berkeley, Bach Sonata in C major, was pretty spectacular. Whole recital good (Berio!) but that was the transcendent part.
why my is writing so epic fucking crap today
Passable, but it would be good to know exactly what was distinctive about Denk's performance, and perhaps to address your gf's (!) perhaps-uptight-but-not-entirely-ridiculous suggestion about the harpsichord and muse over whether the substitution of harpsichord for piano in the Bach would have compromised the integrity of the program that Denk et al sought in combining Stravinsky with Bach.
79 to 73. I rather like Jennifer Koh.
it would be good to know exactly what was distinctive about Denk's performance
That would require actual knowledge, though.
perhaps-uptight-but-not-entirely-ridiculous suggestion
She wasn't really put out by the piano (she did suggest that a musicologist friend who studied baroque performance would have been genuinely put out, but that person wasn't present).
muse over whether the substitution of harpsichord for piano in the Bach would have compromised the integrity of the program that Denk et al sought in combining Stravinsky with Bach.
Again, ignorance, though I'd be happy to read knowledgeable muse about this!
Just did an informal census, aside from all the usual suspects we've got recordings of Bach including:
Lute
Clavichord
Accordion
Guitar(s) (all guitar quartet!)
Viols of various stripes (heated debate ensues as to whether they are all gambas, I have no dog in this fight)
Nyckelharpa (& accordion duet)
Recorder(s)
Saxophones have been weeded out as not being great performances, not on any general anti-sax principle. Vive, comme on dit, la différence!
"Angela Hewitt play the entire WTC on a Fazioli a while back, and believe me, that WTC was OMGWTF."
WORD.
23: John Conway was once in a similar position. He basically told his family goodbye -- that he was going to work all of the time, and that he wouldn't see them until he made a big breakthrough. One day later, he found a new example of a finite simple group. I suggest you follow a similar strategy. If you found a new finite simple group, it would be a considerably bigger breakthrough than when Conway did it...
Nyckelharpa??? WOT? This I must hear. I have or had on one of my phones the most astonishing drunken nyckelharpa recording but the idea of it playing Bach leaves me almost speechless.
82. We have a record of baroque music, including some Bach, arranged for brass band. Euphonia and bass tubas abound. It sounds OK.
I have a recording of two of the cello suites played on banjo.
Brass band could be lovely!
Nyckelharpa is Marco Ambrosino with jean-Louis Matinier on squeezebox, it's a great album, nit all Bach.
Banjo could be a hard sell with the better half, is it good?
re: 88
Which you shelve next to your copy of Mein Kampf, and alphabetised Dan Brown novels?
89.3: As banjo playing goes, it's pretty nuanced. You can hear samples here.
I'm pretty fond of the old Jacques Loussier jazz arrangements of Bach as well.
re: 91.last
I quite like those, too.
Yes, we do too! Will listen to the banjo clips later thanks.
My chief complaint with the banjo samples McQueen links is that they aren't very banjo-y. Compare the banjo Star Wars theme, which both captures the original fairly well, and reads as relatively idiomatic banjo music. Or Sandy Bull's Carmina Burana Fantasy. (I know that I'm being unwarrantedly essentialist about "banjo music" and listen to plenty of music on the banjo that isn't "banjo music"-y, like Paul Metzger or Uncle Woody Sullender, but that's not what I wanted here.)
Whether one would want to subject Bach to that treatment is another question, I suppose.
Compare the banjo Star Wars theme
My immediate thought on reading this was "I want to hear 'The Final Countdown' on banjo" and lo and behold I was able to find this trivially. God bless the Internet.
(That's not my favorite "Final Countdown" cover, though.)
96.2: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
95 is a fair complaint, though I think that the keyboard music would be better suited to the banjo idiom, as the cello stuff is mostly broken (single-line) counterpoint.
Is it necessary for me to say that Wendy Carlos's instrumentation for Bach is great? I think probably not but I lumped her in with Tomita -- who is hilarious but, ah, kind of a different thing -- and I am feeling guilty.
Hmmmm banjo guy didn't really get me but that's on crappy work computer speakers so perhaps I was missing something key.
Better half showed me this last night, visual representation of overtone singing: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UHTF1-IhuC0
So cool! And she has a couple of how to videos that are adorable, fascinating, slightly and delightfully almost creepy and may just be even better than knitting videos. But that last is probably a stretch.
Yes, I've listened to the banjo CD precisely once, for science. Anyway, Bach clearly would have opted for musical saw and ondes Martenot if he'd had them available.
Sir, the link in 102 is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
goddammit I came in here to find out how I should practice.