Category Archives: Thoughts

10 habits of successful musicians

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Generally I’m not a big fan of articles with the above phrasing, but some of this might be helpful, especially points 6 and 7.

American cellist David Finckel embarks on a series of seminars – entitled Being a Musician – at Stony Brook University, New York on 3 February. Here, he identifies the important habits of those musicians who have built and maintained successful careers

From The Strad

1. Know thyself

2. Be an artist

3. Keep learning

4. Work on your performance

5. Make friends

6. Visualise possible lives

7. Ask not what the industry can do for you…

8. Lead by example

9. Give back

10. Stay the course

 

Touch Wood in a Japanese Forest with Bach

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Go to the woods of Kyushu, Japan.

Engineer a massive  marimba to run down the slope of a forested hill. Take a wooden ball, place it at the top of said instrument, and push it. What do you get? Bach’s treatment of a traditional church hymn! Namely, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

and here is how it was done-

A spectacular feat of engineering and creativity. And just guess what inspired its making?

Some time ago, I had the idea of having a railing which you could run a stick along, which would play a tune in the same way, and the railing turned into a maze. (You would be able to find your way out by “playing” the tune. Managed to get the local council interested and even had a park lined up, but alas, the funding fell through!
This is just a lovely idea and brought to my attention by Eli Kassner – thanks Eli!

PS If your Japanese is up to it, here is a TED talk from the creator behind the project. Shake your mind!

Practise practising-more from Stephen Hough

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Hough BBC

“There is a well-worn saying: practice makes perfect. I don’t believe this, at least in reference to playing the piano: abstract “perfection” is rarely what we seek; but good practising makes it more likely that we will give a good performance. Its attention, its concentration, its tightening of the screws enable the concert experience to take wing in freedom.”

The following article by Stephen Hough appears in the November/December issue of International Piano magazine. For full, free access to the other articles in that issue see here. It is reprinted in the Daily Telegraph’s music column.

More on the BBC website – Thanks to Oren Myers for this

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Christopher Lee presents a heavy metal version of the Little Drummer Boy

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But first, a Christmas message from the man himself: he’s 91, the same age as my Mum, who is visiting me from Hong Kong this very moment…

Thanks to Open Culture for the following-
“It’s a cliche for an aging actor to release an album of seasonal chestnuts, but the 91-year-old Lee’s A Heavy Metal Christmas is a thing apart. His take on The Little Drummer Boy is the sonic equivalent of Rosemary’s Baby.”

Heavy Metal Christmas – Jingle Hell – thank you, Sir Christopher!

Link to full article

The world sends us garbage… We send back music – the children of Cateura and their “Garbage Instruments” – Los Reciclados

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Mozart played on oil drums!

Just outside the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion sits Cateura, a massive landfill that receives 1,500 tons of new rubbish each day. The dumping site’s surrounding neighborhoods are home to several thousand families who make a living by sorting through its rotting waste, and separate out whatever can be sold to the local recycling industry. According to UNICEF, Cateura is a community marked by extreme poverty, illiteracy, and pollution.

It’s also home to an orchestra—one made up of local children whose instruments are made entirely from recycled garbage.

This is an article in TakePart amplifying my earlier post on Cateura’s collaboration with Berta Rojas.

It’s an intriguing story of a musician, Favio Chávez, who got together with a rubbish collector, Nicolás Gómez, to make instruments together using packing cases, oil drums and old bottles.

Sondheim and Slonimsky

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To continue the little digression on invective –

Some time ago, composer and playwright Stephen Sondheim wrote a book called  Look, I Made a Hat which amongst many other wry observations contains the following paragraph, which I find expresses exactly what it is I enjoy about reading uncomprehending criticism. It might also be comforting for those who feel “unfairly trashed” (and who hasn’t?)…

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The Song of the Sirens

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It is easy to forget that the great epics of classical Greek poetry were originally sung. Since the 16th century, scholars have been trying to reconstruct the songs of Sappho, Sophocles, Euripides and Homer from their signature poems.
Now research carried out by Armand d’Angour at Oxford University is bringing us several steps closer to hearing how this ancient music sounded.

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Great Guitar Pieces Nobody Plays

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Some of the harmonics on the series would be quite out-of-tune if played on a regularly tuned, equal-tempered guitar.Tenney obviates this problem by retuning a couple of strings on the guitars responsible for each harmonic—and restricting the musical material for that guitar only to those notes that can be sounded accurately in tune.

The repertoire of American composer James Tenney (1934-2006) is among the most diverse and stimulating in experimental music.
He studied with, amongst others Chou Wen-Chung and John Cage.Tenney’s work deals with perception (For Ann (rising), see Shepard tone), just intonation (Clang, see gestalt), stochastic elements (Music for Player Piano), information theory (Ergodos, see ergodic theory), and with what he called ‘swell’ (Koan: Having Never Written A Note For Percussion for John Bergamo), which is basically arch form.

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