"Chase" (2015) for violin and piano

Time to give you a listen to some of the music we recorded in Toronto this month. The shorter piece, one I wrote in 2015, is rather like an encore.

Some background: I wrote this piece over three years ago for a couple of friends who were about to appear in a concert a few days later. Without much thought at all, I sat down and wrote the piece in a couple of hours. There are some typically Latin American syncopated rhythms and a lyrical middle section. The piece was rather a hit at the concert as lots of people came up to me afterwards with compliments (which rather surprised me). Afterwards, looking at the piece, I decided it was a bit too short and rewrote it, extending the middle section in particular.

Several months ago I organized a recording session in Toronto for my new piece for violin and guitar, "Dark Dream" so it seemed a good time to do a recording of "Chase." The violinist is Valerie Li, first violin with the Afiara Quartet and one of the finest chamber musicians in Canada and she is accompanied by the very excellent pianist Todd Yaniw.

The video clip is mostly of the performers and the studio, but it begins with a photo of the exterior of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto where we rehearsed the piece before going into the studio. The recording took place on the 9th of December in the Glenn Gould Studio at the CBC Broadcast Centre. This is one of the finest recording venues for classical music in Canada.

Chase (2015) by Bryan Townsend

UPDATE: Sorry for the "unavailable" link. I think I have it fixed now, so let me know if the link is working.

Friday Miscellanea

Let's open with this very invigorating arrangement of the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor for brass quintet:

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The Guardian is doing the usual end-of-year lists: Classical CDs of the year: a year for lieder, piano recitals – and remembering. Here is critic Andrew Clement's list of top releases:

1. Stravinsky: Perséphone/Esa-Pekka Salonen

2. Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 2 & 4/Daniil Trifonov

3. Rossini: Semiramide/Mark Elder

4. Hindemith: Das Marienleben/Juliane Banse

5. Ferneyhough: La Terre est un Homme; Plötzlichkeit/Martyn Brabbins

6. Bach: B Minor Mass/William Christie

7. Schumann: Frage/Christian Gerhaher

8. Messiaen: Catalogue d’Oiseaux/Pierre-Laurent Aimard

9. Reich: Pulse; Quartet International Contemporary Ensemble/Colin Currie Group

10. Tippett: Symphonies 1 & 2/Martyn Brabbins

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I have sometimes made the point that all the hand-wringing about the aging and just loss of audiences for classical music is more a North American phenomenon than a European one. Case in point, in the past year the Finnish Radio Orchestra, featuring series of concerts devoted to Witold Lutoslawski and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, had a 97% attendance. Slipped Disc had the report.

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Speaking of Slipped Disc, here is a post of Norman Lebrecht's top stories of the year. Follow the link for the links.

10 Gatti is fired by Concertgebouw

9 International soprano is killed in glider crash

8 Anne-Sofie von Otter is tragically widowed 

7 Principal oboe: Why I had to leave Chicago

6 Steinway to be sold to Chinese

5 Berlin Phil loses US principal horn

4 Why Peter Gelb fired Uncle John Copley

3 Top conductor breaks skull in bike crash

2 NY Phil fires two musicians

1 John Williams leaves his scores to Juilliard

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A hat tip to Slipped Disc for unearthing this rare clip of a young Pierre Boulez rehearsing with Yvonne Loriod, the wife of Messiaen. There is no mention of what they are rehearsing at the YouTube clip, but from the interview in German later on we find that it was Structures II by Boulez.

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Skipping over a zillion stories about misogyny in opera, boys choirs and which record store just went bankrupt we find an interesting article in the New York Review of Books on Bach as recycler. Apparently he was adept at separating plastics from organics and glass. No, wait, sorry, I misunderstood! What he actually recycled was earlier music into later compositions.

Around 1730 Johann Sebastian Bach began to recycle his earlier works in a major way. He was in his mid-forties at the time, and he had composed hundreds of masterful keyboard, instrumental, and vocal pieces, including at least three annual cycles of approximately sixty cantatas each for worship services in Leipzig, where he was serving as St. Thomas Cantor and town music director. Bach was at the peak of his creative powers. Yet for some reason, instead of sitting down and writing original music, he turned increasingly to old compositions, pulling them off the shelf and using their contents as the basis for new works. 

The roots of this change can be traced, perhaps, to the summer of 1726, when Bach decided to incorporate instrumental music written earlier in Cöthen into his third Leipzig cantata cycle, refashioning concerto movements for violin or oboe into a series of inventive sinfonias (orchestral introductions), choruses, and arias featuring solo organ.

 The article is a review of a new book on Bach by Daniel Melamed:

In the end, Melamed’s book is about Bach the craftsman, the astonishingly inventive but pragmatic composer who compiled monumental choral works by blending styles—old and new, secular and sacred—and by appropriating, revising, and even abridging preexisting pieces.

A while back I wrote a post about two fundamentally different kinds of composers: the innovators and the synthesists. Bach, along with Mozart, was a synthesist while Beethoven and Haydn were innovators and Stravinsky was both at different times in his life.

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Here is why I prefer CDs to digital files. You don't actually own music if it is a digital download. Slate has the story:

Ever bought a song or an album on iTunes and, after a while, decided you didn’t like it? Did you wish you could sell it somewhere, to someone, for something, the way you might have done with an old vinyl record or CD? In 2011, a company called ReDigi figured out a novel way for iTunes music purchasers to do just that. But for the past few years, it’s been tangled up in litigation. In what may prove to be ReDigi’s death knell, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has all but shut the business down.

Follow the link for the whole story.

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 A commentator once mentioned here that a composer has to learn how to hate. I agree with this sentiment and have found myself explaining it on various occasions. Thankfully someone else has written an essay on the topic: In Defence of Hate.

We have forgotten how to hate.

This may seem like a counterintuitive—or even gallingly stupid—assertion in a world rocked by partisan political infighting, by global-scale ideological conflict, and by a renewed activity in formalized hate groups. Indeed, in 2018, the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center reported that the number of hate groups in the United States has swelled by 20 percent since 2014. On the face of things, the problem would not seem to be too little hate but far too much of it. Hate is a boom industry.

So let me clarify: we have forgotten how to hate well. We have forgotten how to hate rigorously and virtuously. This is, I believe, because we have forgotten how to distinguish between hate’s negative and positive iterations. In the former camp is racial hatred, religious hatred, and other forms of intense, frothing, violent dislike inflamed by malformed ideological doctrines and blind prejudices. The latter, more productive, form of hating is conceived as a form of rigorous, ruthless critique. Anger, says my therapist, inadvertently summoning the spirit of ex–Sex Pistols/Public Image Limited singer John Lydon, is an energy. And this energy can be productively harnessed.

Yes, exactly! Part of one's evolution as a composer is a series of winnowing distinctions that go towards forming your own style. You have to start deciding, not only what kind of music you like, but more importantly what kind of music you hate. Liking actually doesn't get you too far because what you are looking for as a composer is something new, something fresh, not something already done. And you get there partly by moving away from music you dislike which may take you into places that have not been too much explored. Call it a via negativa for musicians.

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One of the works discussed in the book on Bach is the Confiteor from the B minor Mass which was one of the few sections that was newly-composed. The conductor is Philippe Herreweghe:

One Year in the Studio, part 4

Now we come to the year in the studio. In the fall of 1973 I decided not to continue at the university even though it had been a marvelous experience for me. The reason was that they had no acceptable guitar teacher, instead insisting that I take piano lessons and play lute in a Medieval ensemble. Yes, one of my earliest experiences in ensemble playing was Machaut! I dropped the piano after a while as it was quite painful for my right hand--I'm not the only guitarist to have experienced this. My decision was also sparked by the advice of my guitar teacher in Vancouver (with whom I started studying after the end of classes at university) to travel to Spain to study. So I started work with the Ministry of Education in order to save money. Then, in January of 1974, I flew to Spain. First time outside Canada. Actually, first time West of Saskatoon! No discernible Spanish.

I had a little Spanish phrase book, but soon discovered the limitations of that. As soon as I got there I wrote a letter to my parents to let them know I had arrived. Yes, this was pre-Internet and trans-Atlantic phone calls were very expensive. I hadn't seen a mailbox anywhere (in Canada they are bright red) so I consulted my phrase book and came up with "¿Dondesta el buzón? "Where is the mailbox?" The doorman at the hotel, very helpful, responded with a flurry of absolutely incomprehensible Spanish while pointing in several directions. I responded with one of my few Spanish words: "gracias" and set out to find a mailbox. It turned out that they were grey with the colors of the Spanish flag in a narrow band around the middle. That was then, now they are bright yellow.

Several months previous I had ordered a guitar from the shop of José Ramirez, the great Madrid guitar builder. Prior to that I was playing a hundred dollar student guitar:

This was taken just before I left for Spain. What surprises me about the photo is how good my hand position is. I think that starting on the electric bass guitar was likely quite advantageous for my left hand as it forced a good hand position and developed a lot of muscle.

So off I went to the guitar shop. When I visited Madrid two years ago I dropped by the shop just for nostalgia and took a photo:

Click to enlarge

It seemed different from my recollection. Apparently they changed location quite a while ago, so it isn't even on the same street. When I arrived there in 1974 and explained that I had a concert guitar on order (they also make student models) they first showed me to a chair in the back of the store and brought out a guitar. After tuning, I started trying it out and began with a prelude by Manuel Ponce. After they heard a bit, they showed me to a studio in the basement where I could try several different guitars. On the walls were several glass cases containing old guitars that used to belong to Andrés Segovia. After deciding on the guitar, I paid off the balance and set out on the train for Alicante, on the Mediterranean coast where José Tomás lived. The folks in the Ramirez shop provided the address. Oh, and the cost of that instrument? As fine a guitar as could be purchased in 1974 (as far as I knew)? $654 Canadian. I later sold it for two thousand dollars.

I first stayed in a little pension owned by a couple of brothers from Argentina. That was an interesting experience. They were really hospitable people. One time when there was a great abundance of smelt (a small fish the size of a sardine) they knocked on my door and handed me a big plate of freshly fried fish. Another time they came with the welcome news that another Canadian was staying in the pension. I popped around, but when I knocked on the door I discovered that it was a couple from Quebec who spoke not a word of English! At that time I spoke almost no French. Spain back then was a different place, much less modern with a lot of old customs. Returning to the pension one evening in company with a Canadian guitarist he made the enigmatic comment: "see you, I've gotta go down to the corner and clap my hands." ?!?!?!? The custom then was if you returned to your apartment late at night you would find the street door to the building locked. On every block was a watchman (here in Mexico we call them veladores) who had the keys to all the buildings. You went to the corner of the street and clapped your hands and he would come around and let you in.

Soon after I arrived I went by José Tomás' apartment which was on Taquigrafo Marti street. My teacher in Vancouver said not to bother trying to contact him in advance. He didn't have a phone and didn't answer letters. So I just knocked on his door. He was a fairly tall man with a head of glossy black hair, of calm temperament and dignified demeanor. I explained that I had studied with his student in Vancouver and wanted to study with him. He was delighted to hear his student's name and asked how he was. He then asked me what repertoire I was currently playing. I told him the Etude No. 8 by Villa-Lobos and some other pieces which seemed to satisfy him that I was advanced enough. Then he said he was leaving for Japan in a few days to give some master classes there, but we could begin when he got back.

So having my lessons all arranged I decided to go to London for a few days to buy some music and attend some concerts. I was hungry to hear live music and Alicante, being a small regional capital, had no significant concert scene. London was a marvel with numerous orchestras, ballet companies and a host of great musicians playing in wondrous venues like Wigmore Hall. It also was the location of the famous Foyles bookshop. Back then it was in two multi-storey buildings with a little street in between. The, I think, third floor of one of the buildings was entirely devoted to the arts. I recall walking through a room filled with inexpensive editions of the classics to get to the room with all the musical scores. This was the first time in my life where I was actually able to view a wide selection of music for my instrument. I stayed there six hours, delving into every drawer where the scores were kept, finally staggering out, lugging a big bag of music in search of a restroom!

Back in Alicante, I moved into a flat near Tomas' apartment, sharing it with an Irish guitarist. We had four bedrooms, fully furnished, linens and kitchenwares included and we even had a maid. All this for the princely sum of $75 a month. Not each, shared. Across the street was a little bar where one went for breakfast. The first time I was there the fellow behind the bar enigmatically said: "you're a guitarist." Yes, ok. "A classical guitarist." Uh-huh. "You study with José Tomás." Right again! I later realized that Tomás was one of the most famous residents of Alicante and that he had a community of young guitarists studying with him was common knowledge. But how did the bartender know I was one of them? I was obviously foreign, of the right age and I had the fingernails longer on the right hand.

So I settled into a long period of intense concentration on mastering the instrument. I had my room in the apartment. It was nearly bare with a bed, a little table, and a chair. That, plus a music stand, was all I needed. I am reminded of a painting of Van Gogh of where he lived in the South of France:

No allusions here to my similarity to Van Gogh!! Just that these little rooms in little towns on the Mediterranean coast were a bit similar.

All I did for month after month was practice guitar. The routine was to start with technical exercises to build agility, control and speed. I would spend at least one or two hours on slurs, scales, arpeggios and studies. I don't recall the details at this distance in time as I have changed my approach a few times since then. I also don't recall Tomás ever giving me any particular exercises to work on. Lessons with him were purely about repertoire. He started me off on the fairly simple pieces in Emilio Pujol's collection of music from the vihuelistas. I still have that book:

Apart from tone and consistency, one of the obvious things you learn from this kind of repertoire is how to handle independent voices. I continued to work on the Villa-Lobos etudes, particularly the first one, a formidable arpeggio study that it took me years to master. I used to have a little book that I noted down every piece that I learned in, but sadly, I lost it years ago. I recall learning a couple of Venezuelan waltzes by Antonio Lauro, some Bach, the English Suite by John Duarte, Preludes by Villa-Lobos and lots of other music. The editions and fingerings by Tomás himself were particularly sought after and we either made photocopies or wrote them out by hand. I still have a hand copy I made of La Burgalesa by Moreno Torroba which is to be played in E major, not the published key, which I think is F sharp. I would memorize pieces fairly quickly. I think I memorized all three movements of the English Suite in a little over a week. I also was working on the Studies by Stephen Dodgson.

It is safe to say that all I did for the eight or so months I was in Alicante, was to practice guitar four or five hours a day, read Russian novels and go for lunch with other guitarists. My most frequent companion was Klaus Helminen, from Finland. I found a little bookstore that had the Penguin translations of Russian novels and I read Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Sholokhov and Turgenev. I guess I was in a rather removed state of mind. On one occasion my Irish roommate had a friend staying with him, a California blonde, quite voluptuous. As I came out of my room after a couple of hours of technique with a lot of scales in dotted rhythms she came up to me and said, "we're going to go skinny-dipping in the ocean tonight, want to come?" I blearily consulted my watch and said something like, "I dunno, I really have to practice." Excessive practicing of scales can do that to you!

For an envoi today, I have La Burgalesa by Moreno Torroba in my recording:

No Art Was Possible

I'm still reading Simon Leys' collection of essays The Hall of Uselessness in which I found this delightful paragraph (p. 501):

Sometimes it takes a poet to deflate effectively the windy pronouncements of a philosopher. To Theodor Adorno, who declared that, after Auschwitz, no art was possible, Joseph Brodsky replied: "Indeed, not only art, but breakfast as well."

Yes, art has continued on quite well since WWII. What did seem to perish in the gas chambers and concentration camps was the more mystic fantasies of German idealism. And good riddance. I suppose that was what Adorno was mourning.

This might be a good time to re-listen to the String Quartet No. 8 by Shostakovich, a good example of the kind of art still possible after the war. This is the St. Lawrence String Quartet.

One Year in the Studio, part 3

After high school I was really at loose ends--it was one of the worst times of my life, so pointless that I would sleep in until noon and get up not having a single goal. I worked sporadically at weird jobs like digging clams ( eight cents a pound as I recall), and picking salal, a small ornamental shrub that grows wild in British Columbia. It is used in floral arrangements.

As I recall, a friend and I spent a whole week gathering the shrub and earned a splendid $40. So, not a promising career! Actual jobs were limited to planting trees in the mountains of Vancouver Island, which builds strong legs at $4 an hour, and working as a laborer for a stuccoer which paid about the same, but was closer to home. Planting trees means you are an eight-hour drive on logging roads from the nearest traffic light.

The only two things in my life of any promise were the discovery of classical music and a slowly awakening interest in philosophy. I recall at one point I was bunking on a small ship anchored in one of the inlets on the Western side of Vancouver Island, planting trees during the day and reading A Hundred Years of Philosophy in the evening.

The summer I was working for the stuccoer I decided I had to make a change in my life. Some friends who attended university had got me thinking that might be an option. I managed to save up $1,000 and there seemed to be three ways to spend it: go to university, buy an upright piano and do some composing or buy a secondhand Jaguar automobile. I noticed one in the paper for $1,000. I ended up at university, likely the best choice. I remember the first time I visited the library, six floors not counting the basement where the listening library was. I stood there looking around in amazement thinking to myself "I will NEVER read all these books!"

Due to advice from various people, I enrolled in the music education program. An audition was required, which I wasn't aware of, so when I showed up at the music department without my instrument the conducting professor dragged me into a practice room and tested my musical aptitude. "Sing this note. Sing this note. Sing this interval. Is this a major or minor chord?" That was about it. If you know what to listen for a simple little test like this can tell you a lot. Music education didn't really work for me so in second year I switched to the music department proper as a music history major. They did not have a guitar teacher, so I had no real choice.

My real goal was still to become an accomplished classical guitarist so I did not go on into third year. Instead, after working for six months for the Ministry of Education (a desk job in statistics), during which time I was commuting to Vancouver on Saturdays for guitar lessons, I decided to go to Spain to continue my studies. This was on the advice of my teacher in Vancouver, a fellow from Holland who had done the same. The place to go was Alicante and the maestro was José Tomás, a student of and assistant to the great Andrés Segovia.

A fairly young José Tomás playing his eight-string guitar

I made the trip, my first outside Canada, in January of 1974 and stayed there for most of a year. That year is the One Year in the Studio that the post title refers to and it has shaped my life.

As an envoi, here is my recording of a vals venezolano by Lauro with some photos from around that time.

Friday Miscellanea

Thanks to Ann Althouse for finding this brilliant little satire on clichés of musicals. You have to follow the link. The thing is that you could do a similar satire for a lot of popular genres: 60s psychedelia, ragtime, Viennese waltzes, hip-hop, sensitive ballads, Irish laments and just about every other genre!

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Continuing in a whimsical vein, the Husak Quartet perform the theme from Friends, courtesy of the Violin Channel.

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The New York Times has an excellent musicological article on Bach's Brandenburg Concertos: There’s More Religion Than You Think in Bach’s ‘Brandenburgs’ What makes it musicology rather that just journalism is that it tries to describe and critique a common view, that "One of the most persistent myths about Bach is that his work is marked by a fundamental conflict between the sacred and the secular." Instead, Michael Marissen shows that, to the contrary, even his secular music has a religious subtext:

Those today who view religion negatively sometimes go even further and view Bach’s church cantatas as essentially instrumental concertos, with the religious texts more or less extraneous. But historically informed interpretation suggests the opposite: Bach’s instrumental concertos, including the “Brandenburgs,” are essentially church cantatas with implicit (and therefore harder-to-read) “texts” that do have real meaning. 

Accepting the idea that the “Brandenburg” Concertos harbor social and religious designs needn’t involve downplaying the magnificence of Bach’s artistic gifts. But insisting on exclusively aesthetic contemplation of his works — or implying that in the “Brandenburgs” he was freed from the perceived burden of including religious content in his music — pales their meanings, diminishes their complexity and reduces their stature.

Good article with lots of musical examples in the form of sound clips. Mind you a lot of these same points were made by Richard Taruskin in the Oxford History of Western Music.

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Here is a piece about an executive at Deutsche Bank in New York gave up a successful career to become executive director at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, rescuing them from near-insolvency: 

Two years ago, after a 16-year Wall Street career—and with the blessing of his wife, fellow Stanford Business school graduate Claire Ellis—Cooper, 45, walked away from all that to take the executive director’s job at the nearly insolvent Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. In doing so, he willingly stepped off his chosen career path and into a subterranean office that doubles as instrument storage space in the conservatory’s five-story Victorian building. 

Since Cooper took the reins in August 2016, the 121-year-old nonprofit institution in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood has seen a 71% increase in individual donors over fiscal 2016 and a fivefold increase in attendance after shifting its development model from a single annual gala to a handful of special events. Assets have shown a net increase of $400,000 over fiscal 2016. Attendance at its flagship Community Music School is up 19%.

Music education should be an integral part of people's lives, I feel. Sadly, in a lot of places what is available is rudimentary at best.

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The Toronto Star has a story about what happened when radio stations, including the CBC, decided to ban the popular Christmas song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" because of a purported endorsement of sexual coercion. The response from listeners? 

While 6 per cent of listeners appreciated the stations’ enlightened stance against rape culture, radio polls indicated up to 94 per cent thought they were nuts and wanted that song back on the air, pronto, before their heads exploded.

It's beginning to look a lot like sanity is breaking out!

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Are they talking about the Music Salon? In a world of ‘algorithmic culture,’ music critics fight for relevance.

Music critics are lamenting the possibility of a machine-driven world that rewards artists not for their originality, creativity, or emotional authenticity, but for their ability to replicate proven, predetermined formulas. Studies show that pop music and lyrics have grown increasingly repetitive and homogenous over the past few decades, and there is a whole graveyard of startups mining streaming and social data to predict the next big hit. Research initiatives like Google Magenta and Sony’s Flow Machines are even training machine-learning algorithms to compose songs on the spot, aiming to be indistinguishable from human songwriting.

Go to the original article for several links in that paragraph.

Because of its inherently passive nature, algorithmic curation has also made one core function of criticism defunct. Traditionally, critics acted as trusted tastemakers and, in the words of Larson, “consumer guides”—drawing upon their decades of subject-matter expertise to convince music fans about which CDs and vinyl records to buy at their local store. Now, streaming algorithms arguably have more influence over consumers’ listening habits, but in a rather different way: they don’t serve as tastemakers so much as “taste-reflectors,” serving up music with the highest quantifiable chance of reflecting a user’s already-existing preferences.

One of the things that annoys me about purchasing online is that as soon as you buy something, you are immediately hit with ads for numerous other examples of the same thing. But immediately after you buy a toaster, you certainly don't need to buy another one. Why isn't the same thing true of music? If you have just bought an album of soppy Andrew Lloyd Webber musical excerpts do you really need more? Don't you need some diversity in the form of Javanese gamelan or Haydn string quartets as a palate-cleanser?

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Let's listen to the lovely Brandenburg Concertos by J. S. Bach as our envoi today. The performers are the Freiburger Barockorchestra.

Most Popular Posts of the Year

I'm probably doing this as much for me as for my readers, as it is interesting and useful to review just which posts attracted the most attention over the past year.

Blogging this year has been less frequent than in past years. The most posts I have ever put up was in 2013 with a total of 430 posts, more than one a day. Next most productive was 2012 with 382 posts. So far this year I have put up a paltry 219 so I will be lucky to make it to 225 for the year. There are a number of reasons for this, foremost of which is that I have decided to devote more time to composing and less to blogging. I also have other work responsibilities and if I am to record some of my own music, I have to set aside time to practice guitar. So, less blogging! There is also a faint possibility that I am running low on topics.

The most popular post this year, surprisingly, was the one on Sviatoslav Richter way back in March. This drew nearly three times as much traffic as other popular posts. One of the things I learned from the book of notebooks and conversations was that there are people, Richter being one, who are simply enormously talented. He never seems to have devoted a lot of his life to practicing technique but despite this he was a giant among pianists.

I've never practiced scales. Never. Nor any other exercises. Never, not at all. Czerny neither. The first piece I played was Chopin's first nocturne, followed by his Study in E minor, op. 25 no. 5. Then I tried sight-reading Beethoven's sonatas, especially the one in D minor.

That's a quote from the book that I included in the post. I did a lot of sight-reading when I was a young guitarist, but in order to become technically proficient I had to devote long hours for years and years to technical development. Violinist Valerie Li told me that when the Afiara Quartet were in their early years they would practice together for four hours every day.

A semi-satirical post I did on guitar apps, or instructional programs on the Internet was quite popular.

The truth is, and this comes from forty years of teaching music, that the learning process is really in the hands (and ears and mind) of the student. Course materials and high quality personal instruction can certainly help, may indeed even play a crucial role, but learning happens within the student and only their energy, curiosity, initiative and capacity for concentration and work will advance them. Yes, a good instructor, or well-crafted materials can certainly save the student some time and help them to find the right path. But only the student can walk that path.

This is all in manifest contrast to the happythoughts we read about in books by Malcolm Gladwell that propose that nearly anyone, if they devote 10,000 hours to the task, can become a master of a particular skill. That's only true if you have a natural gift.

Another popular post was one I did on defective strings:

The problem arises with the mass of the string. With the wound strings, this is pretty easy to control, but it is different with the treble strings. If they are not exactly the same diameter throughout, the pitch will not be clear and defined. Nowadays most trebles are reliably consistent, but you can still get a defective string. Amazingly, some guitarists don't even notice but just struggle a bit with tuning until they replace the string. But it is easy to detect a defective string. Just pluck it and watch closely how it vibrates against the dark background of the sound-hole. A good string will show a smooth band of vibration that grows narrower as the vibration ceases. A bad string will have a jerky, jagged vibration because it is trying to vibrate in more than one frequency due to the variation in the mass or diameter. It will not sound good and you will never get it in tune!

Another one of my semi-satirical posts was on a fantasy fee schedule if I were to be a performing artist today. All kidding aside, there are probably in the world today three or maybe four guitarists that can actually command fees in this range. And that's about it.

A couple of my posts on guitar repertoire received a lot of visits. The most popular was a list of the best shorter pieces and another was a list of transcriptions for guitar. Each of these posts is much more than just a list as I go into a lot of the surrounding context.

A non-musical post that got a lot of traffic was one on Understanding Psychology in which I describe my odd relationship with the field and why I have recently changed my mind.

I have had a strange relationship with psychology for most of my life. I think my first encounter was with a counsellor when my parents were getting divorced. I was around fifteen or sixteen at the time. I was interviewed and then given a test which in retrospect I think was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. I just thought it was peculiar and no, the counseling didn't help my parents who got divorced anyway. The counsellor suggested that I was kidding around when I answered the questions! Then there was some kind of career aptitude test administered in high school. I did the test but never went to the counsellor's office for the results. I guess you could say I was aggressively uninterested! Later on, in my late 20s and 30s, I got interested in Zen, Chinese philosophy and Carl Jung, which led me to Karen Horney, a neo-Freudian who specialized in neurosis. I read a few of her books, but I seemed to get more neurotic with every one, so I developed an interesting theory about modern psychology: it's all crap!

The most popular recent post was the one where I did a favorable review of a Chromebook.

At the very end of last year, and therefore not mentioned in that year's popular posts, were two I did on Russia: the first on Sofia Gubaidulina which I wrote not long after first discovering her music:

I'm going to start a new series of posts devoted to a single composer, the, as Wikipedia describes her, "Tatar-Russian" composer Sofia Gubaidulina (1931 -). What fascinates me about her music is what often draws me into a new piece or new composer: there is something about the music that keeps my attention, keeps me listening and, I have no idea how this music was composed. Yes, I love and am fascinated by the music of, say, Joseph Haydn, but at this point in time we have a fairly good idea of how the music came to be, even if imperfect and incomplete. In the case of Igor Stravinsky, that I just spent dozens of posts discussing, we are starting to have an idea of how his music came to be. But with Gubaidulina we (or at least me!) are stumped.

The other post was titled Two Russias? and it explores the odd contradictions of a country with a wealth of creative individuals in fields from music to literature to mathematics to design that seems to have always had a really horrible political system.

For an envoi let's listen to Sviatoslav Richter playing the first book of preludes by Debussy: