Friday Miscellanea

Our kickoff this week is "Enter Sandman" the tune from Metallica's Black Album, performed on toy instruments by Metallica, Jimmy Fallon and his band The Roots:

It's ok to find that deeply disturbing. Stay tuned, we will have a better version a bit later.

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This is a quite interesting little video by Adam Neely on how classical and non-classical musicians feel rhythm differently:

Mind you, I think that his picking on a single moment by that string bass player might have been a little unfair. We classical musicians can do three against two pretty reliably. In fact, we can even do five against four, though I confess that five against three is pretty tough.

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This is kind of fun: The Musician's Thanksgiving Survival Guide:

 Even for musicians, Thanksgiving Dinner is a conversational minefield just waiting for you to take the wrong step. You’ll be passing the yams when you’ll hear yourself say, “Guatemalan Balsa? Now there’s a tonewood. I could wear mittens and make that guitar sound good,” – Boom. Triggered.

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Now here is an interesting example of criticism: David Goldman offers a critique of the use of rhythm in rap by going back to St. Augustine's treatise De Musica and working his way up via Keats and Coleridge:

The kerfuffle over Vice President-elect Mike Pence's run-in with the cast and audience of "Hamilton" provokes me to raise another issue: I won't go to see "Hamilton." I don't like rap in any form, even in the sterile, commercialized version in the popular musical. Poetry elicits powers of mind more intense and elevated than quotidian thought, and it does so by forcing us to think of poetic rhythm at a higher level. By contrast, rap imposes an unchanging sing-song rhythm that does nothing to provoke us to think in this way.

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How about Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini playing "Michelle" by Paul McCartney?

Or is this a clever hoax?

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Let's have a Fine Art Moment. This is "The Bagpipe Lesson" by Henry Ossawa Tanner:

Click to enlarge

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In the annals of stuff we already knew is this Chinese study: New research finds we respond intellectually to classical music and physically to pop music:

‘The sub-cortical reward region was more sensitive to popular, while the cortical region was more sensitive to artistic music,’ reported the study. In addition it was found that ‘cognitive empathy regions’ of the brain responded more favourably to classical, implying a richer and more complicated level of engagement.

‘This study gives clear neuronal evidence supporting the view that artistic music is of intelligence, while popular is of physiology,’ concluded the researchers.

In related news, Beethoven late string quartets are newly discovered to be more aesthetically profound than Beyoncé and pasta should be cooked al dente.

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Developing a theme today, here is Korean gayageum virtuoso Luna with her arrangement of Metallica's "Enter Sandman":

Soembody buy that girl a wah-wah pedal! Isn't this a blatant case of cultural appropriation, though?

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Ok, too much Metallica today! So for our envoi, let's have a Metallica antidote. How about some Emil Gilels? This is the Fantasia in D minor, K 397 by Mozart: