The YouTube Algorithm Knows What Interests Me

 Among the clips that the algorithm recommends to me is a series hosted by two Taiwanese-Australian violinists, Brett Yang and Eddie Chen called "Twoset Violin." They're a bit too goofy for my taste, but they're both knowledgeable musicians and frequently showcase musical prodigies. They appreciate but don't try to explain the almost supernatural abilities of extremely young musicians. 

Music isn't the only field in which young people display astonishing skill and intuitive understanding at an age when one wouldn't think they had had time to acquire it. Mathematics, chess, and Talmud come to mind, as do a number of questions. What's the difference between a bright child and a prodigy? Do the rest of us, the non-prodigies, ever catch up to the prodigies? Interestingly, Yang and Chen trace the development of the musical prodigies they have discovered and show clips of them at various ages, as they turn into mature musicians. Sometimes, I'm sure, they also drop music and go on to another field to excel in.

There must be plenty of psychological studies of the phenomenon, and I plan to check on it.

Along with Twoset Violin, the algorithm often shows me clips about improving one's saxophone playing and about practicing music in general. At my stage in life, I don't expect to improve very much as a musician. I mainly play saxophone and flute to maintain my decent but hardly impressive level, so I can continue enjoying myself as an active amateur.

One exercise I've been working on is deceptively simple in concept but, at least for me, has turned out to be challenging enough to be interesting. The idea is to pick a major scale and move up in it, playing the triad on each step of the scale, then moving down and doing the same thing. The tricky part is the way you group the notes. If you simply play triplets, you get something straightforward like this:

CEG| DFA| EGB| FAC| GBD etc. Then, backward: GEC| FDB| ECA| etc. 

But if you play the notes in groups of four you get:

CEGD| FAEG| BDFA|CGBD etc. Backward: GECF| DAEG| BDBG| CAFB etc.

This gets trickier when you go up and down scales with a lot of flats or sharps.

The idea is to hear the qualities of the chords, major, minor, and diminished on every step of a scale. Also, obviously, as another sax video reminded me, you have to maintain a satisfying sound as you play through this exercise.

I've been doing it for a while, patiently, and I'm gaining fluency at it. Am I maintaining my level or improving?

What Blind Virtuosos can Teach Us

 I strongly recommend the documentary available on Youtube, a two-part interview with the English jazz pianist, George Shearing. He comes across as both a musical genius and a kind, essentially modest person. An equally fascinating documentary was made about Art Tatum, a phenomenal blind pianist of even greater importance. Another great blind jazz musician was Roland Kirk - I haven't seen this documentary yet. There have also been blind classical composers and performers. I looked it up on the Web. However, I don't think any of them was as influential in their field as Shearing, Tatum, and Kirk.

 A number of great jazz musicians purportedly didn't know how to read music like the monster guitarist Wes Montgomery and the pianist and composer Erroll Garner. In Western classical music, I doubt if there were any sighted composers or performers who couldn't read music, whereas in Indian classical music, no one plays from written notes, as far as I know.

The development of musical notation was of huge importance in the history of Western classical music. It's hard to imagine how any of the composers from the sixteenth or seventeenth century on could have composed their works without setting pen to paper. Notation can be a trap, but not for great musicians. Some composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, were also famous as improvisers. Bartok apparently worked on his piano pieces by ear until he was ready to write them down.

The musicality of a musician who plays without written notes is different from that of musicians who mainly play from written notes. I wonder whether musicians like myself, who are enslaved to written scores, could have been trained to be the first kind of musicians, who learn music by ear and play it by ear, if our teachers were interested in teaching us that skill (and possessed it). I suspect that it's not a matter of training but one of personality and talent. If I, for one, had been more independently musical as a child, I would have developed in the way I now wish I had developed. I can't blame it on my teachers.

Authentic Instruments?

I just heard a splendid live performance of Mozart's Serenade for Winds. All the musicians, including the two who were playing the basset horn parts, were playing modern symphonic instruments, not the instruments Mozart wrote for in the late eighteenth century. 

I'm not complaining. It sounded wonderful. However, if the argument for playing baroque music on baroque instruments is strong, why isn't a similar argument, equally strong, made for playing Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, among others, on the instruments of their times (which were not essentially different from the instruments of the mid-eighteenth century)?

A few years ago at a music festival in Warsaw I heard a symphony orchestra that used old-style instruments and arranged the musicians the way they used to be arranged in the nineteenth century, and I was impressed. Obviously if a symphony orchestra today is playing a program with music from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century, it has to use modern instruments (most of which haven't changed all that much since the Industrial Revolution), and, within limits, it can't keep rearranging the players. So we hear what the conductor has in mind and places on the stage.

Incidentally, the Mozart Serenade calls for two basset horns, which are similar in range to modern alto clarinets. Authentic basset horns aren't exactly common, so I assume the two musicians who were playing in the Serenade last night were playing alto clarinets. If a clarinettist wants to own a range of professional level instruments - a B flat and A clarinet, an alto clarinet, and a bass clarinet - he or she has to invest a considerable amount of money, which, in general, professional musicians don't have.