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: