More on "Soft" Practicing

I realize that my post the other day was too short to really address this. The basic principle relates to the idea of balancing two different elements, in this case energy and control. A lot of the technical problems guitarists have stem from inadequate control of what the fingers are doing. If you don't have good control, then you can't build a solid technical foundation. One of the things that always impressed me about John Williams was that once he learned a piece, he was pretty much rock-solid every time he played it. This shows how great his control was.

So how do you get this kind of controlled technique? Well, you do have to start young, past a certain age it is doubtful that you can achieve a really great technique. But the daily issue is that you have to balance your energy and your ability to control this energy. The problem students typically have is that they have enthusiasm and energy, but lack control so when they practice they are, essentially, practicing sloppiness.

The solution is to reduce the energy to an amount that you can control. Then, as your control develops, you can increase the amount of energy, being careful not to put in more than you can easily control. This is pretty much the secret of good practicing. Well-controlled movements repeated until they become automatic. Every time you allow an uncontrolled movement, it sets you back and you will have to practice to remove that muscle memory.

A violinist once told me that he couldn't teach a concerto he was about to perform because he might recall the mistake a student made!

So this was why I talked about "soft" practicing: the idea is to soften the movements and energy in your hands down to levels that you can easily control. Most guitarists probably know this instinctively, but it doesn't hurt to be consciously aware of the principle.

Musings and Public Service Announcements

One of the tv shows I quite enjoyed was Angel, a spin-off from Buffy the Vampire-Slayer. Wesley was a character in both series. He first appears as a comically inept watcher on Buffy and then as a "rogue demon hunter" on Angel. But his character undergoes an interesting transformation into a much more serious, darker one. Why? As he says because "my throat was cut and all my friends deserted me." Yep, that'll do it. As an expert on demon lore he expresses the principle that the first and most important rule is to distinguish truth from illusion. Now that's a pretty good thing to keep in mind these days as we are inundated with waves of very questionable information and ideas.

Is your gas stove dangerous? Will we all be driving electric cars by 2030? Is democracy in danger? Are developed societies over-regulated? Are there any problems with public school systems? How much do big political donors like George Soros and Sam Bankman-Fried affect government policy? How much influence does China have over North American government policies?

I hesitate to get too specific as I don't want to start an argument, oops, I mean "discussion," I just want to recommend that everyone do their own research instead of just absorbing the interpretation fed to them by the media. But let's take one example. Here was the initial story from a couple of years ago: Grief, sorrow after discovery of 215 bodies, unmarked graves at former B.C. residential school site.

Sorrowful reaction is pouring in following the discovery of more than 200 children in unmarked graves at a former residential school in B.C.’s Interior.

On Thursday, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in Kamloops announced that ground-penetrating radar uncovered the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

That sounds really awful! And in Canada, no less. The residential school program for indigenous children was in place for a number of decades and you might look up the details. In any case, the story prompted an hysterical reaction, but just how true was it? Not very as this followup reveals: New archeological evidence contradicts unmarked graves narrative.

Aerial photography and historical documents show that the site where the graves were alleged to have been discovered has been subject to decades of archeological digs and other excavation activity which did not turn up any human remains. 

The most significant of these digs took place in 1958 when a plot of over 100,000 square feet or 30% of an apple orchard just outside of the residential school was excavated for a sewage retention pond.

The odd thing about this story is that since it appeared there have been no excavations to determine the truth of the initial claims. Perhaps it is a story just too good or too useful to contradict. Here is another story: ‘Biggest fake news story in Canada’: Kamloops mass grave debunked by academics.

“Not one body has been found,” Jacques Rouillard, who is a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, told The Post. “After …months of recrimination and denunciation, where are the remains of the children buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School?”

Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc spokesman Larry Read confirmed to The Post this week that no bodies have yet been exhumed from the Kamloops school and no dates have been set to start excavations.

This is one example out of thousands of an instance where illusion has triumphed over truth, at least in the general perceptions of the public.

So how do you do your own research? The first thing I recommend is switching your default search engine from Google to duckduckgo. Why? Google buries results that are inconvenient. To pick a very pertinent example, if you search for The Music Salon on your iPhone with Google, it will not appear in the first several pages. If you use duckduckgo, it is the third result. You might have some fun by comparing results of other searches. Interestingly, in many browsers it is almost impossible to get rid of Google and make duckduckgo your default search engine.

Other random advice: whoever you are, you should think about becoming an investor. Save 10% of your income and when you have a significant amount saved up, open a brokerage account. Here are some caveats:  the vast majority of the articles and advice you read in the media, the financial press in particular, is directed toward trading. Unless you are very savvy or very dedicated I recommend that you NOT be a trader, but instead an investor. A trader tries to identify specific stocks or strategies that will deliver good returns. Oftentimes he or she guesses wrong or is stymied by market conditions, unusual events, trading costs and a host of other things. Every time you make a trade you should remind yourself that the person on the other end of the trade is probably smarter and better informed than you are. So don't be a trader. Instead of buying a stock, buy a business. This is good advice from the long-time investor Warren Buffet who has made a lot of people a lot of money over a lot of years. The very best thing you can do is simply buy the index of the 500 biggest and best companies in the US, the S&P 500, and just hang on to it. The symbol for this is SPY. That's it. Oh, as you get older, sell some of it and buy a bond fund. That's it. You might do your own research as to why this is a good strategy.

Explore alternatives to the mainstream media. Instead of getting all your news from the New York Times and the New Yorker and the Globe and Mail, have a look at the National Post or the Wall Street Journal or City Journal. You might be shocked at how different the narratives are.

And while we are on alternatives, let's take a look at an alternative to YouTube. Here is the Shostakovich String Quartet #8 on Rumble:

https://rumble.com/vxqfdv-march-18-2022.html

Rumble is a loooonnngggg way from being an alternative to YouTube, but who knows...

RIP Paul Johnson

 From the Wall Street Journal: Paul Johnson, British Historian and Polemicist Against the Left, Dies at 94

During his long career, the ginger-haired Catholic from Manchester with a combative streak became one of the most prominent leftist intellectuals who drifted to the right during the 1960s, moving from editor of the leftist New Statesman magazine to a regular columnist for the Spectator and eventually the right-wing Daily Mail tabloid. 

Along the way, he wrote more than 50 books on topics ranging from Socrates to Queen Elizabeth I, as well as dozens of tomes on religious history, art and architecture, novels, memoirs and travel. His histories of the modern world, Jews, and Christianity were among the most prominent.

I usually avoid items on who died, who was fired and who got what orchestra job, but Paul Johnson was a particularly important thinker and he wrote a quite good book on Mozart that I have mentioned here. He also wrote an excellent history of art that I have also mentioned. But his wider influence came in the form of books on the history of the 20th century, history of the Jews, history of Christianity and of the United States.

Many decades ago I read a seminal book on historiography by R. G. Collingwood in which he made the comment that there are two fundamental ways of looking at history: one of them emphasizes the dislocations of wars, revolutions and cultural innovations while the other emphasizes the continuity of history, how events are shaped by customs and traditions and how innovation is always in relation to tradition. Taruskin wrestled with this idea in all five volumes of his Oxford History of Western Music.

The crucial value of Paul Johnson was that he was also very aware of it and did not let the doctrines of modernism affect how he viewed history. This is particularly evident in his Art: A New History in which he does not overvalue, for example, 20th century painters like Pablo Picasso, but instead sees how much their innovations were a kind of artistic fashion. In music this is sometimes called "patent office" innovation.

I just watched a clip on YouTube about the Rite of Spring in which the commentator shows just how much the structure of the work relates to certain traditional styles like folksong and hymn. Of course, the title of Taruskin's masterful work on Stravinsky is Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. All art is in a tension between tradition and innovation.

So you might have a look at some of Paul Johnson's books. For a fresh look at recent history I recommend Modern Times.

Friday Miscellanea

Let's start with a quote:

Compared to Bach, we all suck!

 --Pat Metheny reported by Rick Beato.

* * *

And here is something from the prolific Ted Gioia: How I Got an AI Theme Song for My Substack, Or why AI music in 2023 isn’t about innovation or creativity—it’s just a crude cost-cutting tool.

“The real leverage point for AI is cost savings. That’s because the music itself isn’t very good. Sure, there’s a certain novelty factor here—but that will wear off very soon. The real hook is that AI works for cheap, it’s almost like slave labor in the band.”

AI doesn’t ask to share publishing rights or composer credits. You don’t even need to buy it a drink or take it out for lunch. Even more important, AI doesn’t even know what the words union scale mean.

I have been taken to task in the past for calling a lot of pop music nothing more than an industrial product.

* * *

Staying with Ted for a moment, he reports on the top ten most performed classical composers.

This is from Bachtrack and there really aren't any surprises, right? I have a long-standing complaint about Bachtrack: their list of the top ten pianists does not include Gyorgy Sokolov who every year plays a large number of concerts on the European continent in all the leading concert venues--many more concerts than other artists on the list. But he is never mentioned. When I was in Salzburg in 2020 he played the Grossefestspielhaus which was full and gave six encores. Evgeny Kissin played the same hall and gave three encores and Igor Levit played the much smaller Haus für Mozart and played one encore.

* * *

More about that movie: Marin Alsop offended by depiction of cruel woman conductor in ‘TÁR’

Marin Alsop, the world’s foremost woman conductor, is no fan of “TÁR,” the acclaimed film about an unscrupulous woman conductor.

“I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian,” Alsop said of the movie, which stars Cate Blanchett as Berlin Philharmonic leader Lydia Tár.

“There are so many men — actual, documented men — this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men. That feels anti-woman. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy, insane is to perpetuate something we’ve already seen on film so many times before.”

So according to Marin Alsop, it is offensive for a woman conductor to be a villain in a fictional narrative? Or maybe it is just impossible? To tell the truth, I find this attitude, that only male conductors can behave badly, offensive.

* * *

From the New Yorker: The Warm Glow of the Blog-Rock Era 

Counterfactual history is tricky, but it feels safe to say that Voxtrot found a bigger audience––or found its audience faster––than it would have otherwise thanks to the Internet phenomenon referred to as “blog rock.” By the mid-aughts, starting a blog was easier than ever. Streaming hadn’t yet taken over our listening habits, but Web connections were speedy enough that, if a blog posted an MP3, a reader could be hearing the song a few minutes later. It was exciting, hopping from blog to blog as though you were reading a large, collectively authored, and constantly updated zine, with samples of the gushed-over music just a click away. And it was free! Optimistic thinking about the disruptive, democratizing potential of the Internet was everywhere, and it seemed like blogs had become––at least for fans of certain faddish strains of indie rock––the new A. & R. departments, the new radio, the new Seattle, a tool for wriggling free of the bias and influence of stodgy old gatekeepers.

Well, it didn't take long for Big Tech to step in and fix all that!

* * *

It has been a long time since we have had an envoi from Ravel, so here is Ivo Pogorelich with a fine performance of Gaspard de la nuit:

 

Marin Alsop conducting the Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich:

And here are Ten Cello Preludes by Sofia Gubaidulina:

"Soft" Practicing

I'm not sure where I got this idea from--I have the vague recollection that Oscar Ghiglia might have said something similar in a master class--but it is a very useful concept. When you are learning new music or re-learning old music you should make use of "soft" practicing. I mean by this a particular approach to how you use your hands, especially the left hand. You should practice slowly, of course, but you should also practice with soft hands. That is, without any tension in the hand to speak of. Approach the notes not only very deliberately, but also very softly, focussing on touch and feeling. Don't slap your fingers down quickly and inaccurately, do the opposite, place them gently and carefully. If you do this many times, then you will have the passage programmed accurately into your muscle memory. The more speed, inaccuracy and tension, the harder this is to do. Don't play loud! Play quietly as well.

Perhaps the greatest failing of guitar students is that they practice too quickly and are very sloppy. The more you do this, the more you inculcate bad habits that will be hard to eradicate later on. I think it was in an interview that Isaac Stern said it is all in how you practice: it might take two hours of careful practice to make up for one hour of bad practice. This kind of practicing does take a lot of focus and concentration and when you feel your concentration going, you should take a break. But I am quite sure that soft practicing will improve your playing!

Musical Charity

I offer the following article not because I necessarily agree with all of it, but because it might spark a useful debate: Strategic Charitable Giving.

Many years ago, I decided to focus my donations exclusively on classical music, since it is the most important thing in my life and is struggling to survive. My primary criterion for donation is whether an organization programs music outside the stupefyingly repeated canonical repertoire, a repertoire that probably comprises at most 100 works, out of a tantalizing musical universe of hundreds of thousands of unknown gems. I attend only those concerts now that expand my musical knowledge, absent a strong countervailing reason to the contrary. The canonical works are being played to death, and I am not afraid to admit that my 33rd experience of Don Giovanni does not produce in me anything like the astounded ravishment and obsession that followed my first or even tenth exposure to the work.

A couple of posts back I expressed a similar view and mentioned that the place you are going to find interesting opera programming out of the usual canon is in Europe these days.

Contemporary works may draw me to a concert—I will attend a few New York Philharmonic concerts this year to try, inter alia, to figure out the Thomas Adès cult, having been repelled by the literally dog-whistle writing in his Tempest. But the new music I usually seek is either lesser-known works by canonical composers—instead of The Four Seasons, Vivaldi’s operas; instead of the Rhenish Symphony, Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri; instead of Orfeo ed Euridice, Gluck’s ballet music Don Juan—or works by lesser-known composers: Christoph Graupner, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Nikolai Medtner, Andrea Zani, to name a few. Program C. P. E. Bach, and you have guaranteed my attendance at your concert (logistics permitting) and put yourself in the running for a donation.

Again, while making different choices (except maybe for C. P. E. Bach), I agree with the general sentiment.

After that initial new-repertoire cut, my giving to classical music organizations is inversely proportional to those organizations’ embrace of racial-justice rhetoric. I am all for racial justice, as it once was defined. But classical music does not at present have a racism problem. It is colorblind in its pursuit of musical excellence, or was until the post-George Floyd meltdown. No black or Hispanic musician is being denied opportunities today because of his skin color. To the contrary. (The same can no longer be said with confidence regarding white male performers.)

Now that paragraph is likely to lead to some vehement disagreement. Certainly if you read the New York Times you will be convinced that classical music is still heavily biased against, for example, black composers and performers. But how true is that? Does anyone have any relevant data? Bear in mind that just citing the percentages of black musicians employed by symphony orchestras is not necessarily probative any more than citing the percentages of white athletes in the NBA indicates a prejudice against white athletes or, for that matter, the relatively few white hip-hop artists. There are overarching cultural forces at work here.

 

What I'm Reading Now

A couple of years ago I decided that I was spending too much time online reading very ephemeral stuff like newspapers and blogs (heh!), so I decided to put a little more fiber in my diet. I started with Shakespeare plays and read a few. Then I read the Odyssey, which went surprisingly quickly--one book a day. Oh, and I do my serious reading first thing in the morning, with a cup of coffee. Next I took on a really big challenge: re-reading the Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. I just finished volume four, Music in the Early Twentieth Century. Then I decided to take a pause before finishing with volume five, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. I'm about to rebuild my stock portfolio so I read a real investing classic, Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy Siegel, one of the clearest distillations of decades of investing wisdom, supported by a lot of data. I had put the Michael Kurtz monograph on Sofia Gubaidulina on the shelf so I took a few days to finish it. That will lead to a summation post on her fairly soon.

Another book that I never finished is Getting Started in Technical Analysis by Jack Schwager, so I am finishing that one now. Technical analysis of what, you ask: the movement of stock prices. I used to think that technical analysis was voodoo, but it does have its uses though I suspect the discipline is still in its infancy. The major work in the field is Technical Analysis of Stock Trends by Robert Edwards and John Magee, originally published in 1948. I guess that will get back on my reading list in the near future though it is a dauntingly hefty volume. Once I finish the Schwager I will go back to Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations which I have tried to finish before on a couple of occasions.

Speaking of long-term reading projects, the big one I had planned when I moved to Mexico was Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, well over three thousand pages, making Tolstoy's War and Peace seem like a short story. I only got around to it last year and after slogging through half of it, I decided it wasn't quite worth the effort. Your mileage may vary.

So what's on the agenda for this year? I might re-read A Guide to Musical Analysis by Nicholas Cook and perhaps the Iliad. Maybe something by Aristotle, either the Nichomachean Ethics or the Politics. I downloaded the first volume of The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, so I may give it a shot. Plus there are some books on Stravinsky and Bartók by van den Toorn and Antokoletz that have been sitting on my shelf for a while that I should really get to. Plus, for variety, The Oxford Book of English Verse, the new edition from 1939 of the original first published in 1900. I got a well-preserved second-hand copy through Amazon. 1141 pages of wonderful poetry and the very first one is a famous song: "Sumer is icumen in."

So let's have a listen.