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?
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