I had to have some oral surgery, and the doctor said I wasn't allowed to play a wind instrument for a week or ten days, so I've been playing a little piano, very badly, instead.
The piano makes me think of a lecture-demonstration we just heard. Gil Shohat was ostensibly talking about madness in modern Western classical music, but it was mainly Shohat being his charming self (I am a big fan of his).
He started by playing a CD of the first Prokofiev violin concerto, with a mainly sweet and melodic first movement and a manic second movement, leaving me puzzled. How could Prokofiev have thought up that music? How did he plan it out?
Later Shohat was joined by a fabulous pianist, Dorel Golan, whom I had heard before and remembered. Her performances of extremely difficult etudes, entirely from memory, were extraordinary.
So, from piano to piano, there was a clip on the NY Times web site about an eleven yeard old jazz prodigy from Bali (!) named Joey Alexander (check him out), who plays better now than most pianists can ever hope to play.
One can only marvel at such a gift, be grateful for the rejuvenation of jazz, and hope that he develops into a mature artist (or, for that matter, that he takes up theoretical physics or whatever he wants to do).
No matter how wonderful these musicians are, both the prodigies and the products of long, disciplined practice, they don't make one's own meager efforts to produce music any less valuable to ourselves. One can't have a world where only one in ten thousand does what he or she does on the highest level, and all the rest of us sit in awe.
True, a lot of modern music (actually since the beginning of the nineteenth century) can only be played by virtuosi, and this might be a flaw in it - hard to play and hard to listen to. Last month I heard a performance of a string quartet by the Israeli composer, Tzvi Avni, much farther away from the conventions of classical music than Prokofiev's work, and I wondered how the musicians learned their impossible parts separately and then put them together, a truly astonishing feat - to say nothing of the composer's work. How did he hear the music in his mind and notate it?
We humans are capable of such wonderful things, and just a few hundred kilometers north of where I am, in Syria, we are treating our fellow humans with ferocious cruelty, and "the world" (whatever that is) can't or won't put a stop to it.
The piano makes me think of a lecture-demonstration we just heard. Gil Shohat was ostensibly talking about madness in modern Western classical music, but it was mainly Shohat being his charming self (I am a big fan of his).
He started by playing a CD of the first Prokofiev violin concerto, with a mainly sweet and melodic first movement and a manic second movement, leaving me puzzled. How could Prokofiev have thought up that music? How did he plan it out?
Later Shohat was joined by a fabulous pianist, Dorel Golan, whom I had heard before and remembered. Her performances of extremely difficult etudes, entirely from memory, were extraordinary.
So, from piano to piano, there was a clip on the NY Times web site about an eleven yeard old jazz prodigy from Bali (!) named Joey Alexander (check him out), who plays better now than most pianists can ever hope to play.
One can only marvel at such a gift, be grateful for the rejuvenation of jazz, and hope that he develops into a mature artist (or, for that matter, that he takes up theoretical physics or whatever he wants to do).
No matter how wonderful these musicians are, both the prodigies and the products of long, disciplined practice, they don't make one's own meager efforts to produce music any less valuable to ourselves. One can't have a world where only one in ten thousand does what he or she does on the highest level, and all the rest of us sit in awe.
True, a lot of modern music (actually since the beginning of the nineteenth century) can only be played by virtuosi, and this might be a flaw in it - hard to play and hard to listen to. Last month I heard a performance of a string quartet by the Israeli composer, Tzvi Avni, much farther away from the conventions of classical music than Prokofiev's work, and I wondered how the musicians learned their impossible parts separately and then put them together, a truly astonishing feat - to say nothing of the composer's work. How did he hear the music in his mind and notate it?
We humans are capable of such wonderful things, and just a few hundred kilometers north of where I am, in Syria, we are treating our fellow humans with ferocious cruelty, and "the world" (whatever that is) can't or won't put a stop to it.
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