Anxiety nightmare comes true for pianist at competition
inquirer.com
inquirer.com
When the rest of the team was done, our commander calmly said “MIDN X, fix yourself.” He bent down precisely, threaded the strap and snapped back to attention.
Then we moved forward with the drill card. We got first place among 150+ teams.
It’s what happens amidst the unexpected that defines success.
I found it, here it is: https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61640&cid=5792772
PIANIST: "I can't try it. Everything is at home. I didn't take this with me."
CONDUCTOR: "You played that last season. You will probably succeed. You know it so well."
Perhaps I’m missing some nuance though.
Of course, actually playing those notes while you remember them is harder...
Where I think it tends to fall down for a modern listener (assuming good recordings, which is not a good assumption) is that it mostly dates from a pre-recording period, so it tends to draw out all of its ideas because it expects the listener can't just rewind and listen to the last few minutes again, and this is the only such music they may hear this month; in modern times this results in a lot of pieces overstaying their welcome. Sometimes by a lot.
For instance, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a masterpiece. No question. But... the first movement has a repeat bar around the entire thing. Straight up. Not even a bit of variation in the last couple of bars as often happens. Now, of course, a good conductor and orchestra will play it with some variation even so, it won't literally be simply the exact same sound twice. But even so, it's not something a modern composer is likely to do. (Modern music does do a lot of repetition, but not on this this timescale. Trance a bit, but even then I'd say, it's different; modern trance artists know the modern music playback setups and handle it differently, even if I couldn't exactly describe it. Plus the 5th is definitely not "trance".)
I've sometimes fantasized about going into some of the classical oeuvre and editing it a bit for more modern sensibilities, by doing things like taking out the repeat, and maybe even incorporating some repetition with variation back into the piece, but generally shortening it. Or just generally toning out the repetition in some of the pieces, like, the Moonlight Sonata. Brilliant piece, masterpiece, no question. And the first movement is about 7 minutes to play. In modern times, it's unnecessary long and repetitive. I just listened to it here before posting, and it's not even like it's constantly mutating and changing or anything... it's just, repeating its ideas several times. For the time, great. No sarcasm. I mean that. Today, a bit tedious, because we don't need our repetition built right into our music, we add it with our playback technology if we want it.
I criticize neither classical music, nor modern listening practices in this. I merely observe a significant mismatch. Both have their reasons for what they do.
Also when a lot of people think "classical" what they actually pull up in their mental inventory is "chamber music", which is actually generally designed to be flat and unobtrusive and perhaps even, yes, a bit boring, because it's literally designed to be background music.
One option I like is to listen to music by artists who have clearly been classically trained, but are not producing classic/academic music. Even when such an artist is in the depths of the most electrotechno music possible, seemingly as distant from "classical" as you can get, I still find there's a depth that an non-classically trained artist has a very hard time reaching. (Sometimes they do, but it's rare. Though when they do it's awesome, because that's a truly unique musical experience.)
(In this post I use the slang meaning of "classical" to include all the time frames and almost all uses of dedicated "orchestral" music. I'm not even trying to be precise about "Baroque" or "Romance" or arguing about modern orchestral music.)
A very few examples of some great chamber music (I've linked to some fun parts): Beethoven String Quartet #10 (The Harp) - take a listen to a minute of the coda from the first movement. This music is exalted! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exMaWKVcCEs&t=490s
Schubert String Quartet #14 (Death and the Maiden). So tuneful and heartfelt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otdayisyIiM
Shostakovich String Quartet #8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tby5aMrMu6Q&t=316s
Mendelssohn String Quartet #4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4cankQnobU&t=1180s
I wish I had more time to link more here, but everyone should know that the best chamber music is thrilling, concentrated, joyful, ecstatic, anguished - just the best! Certainly not written as boring background music!
By dissing chamber music in that way, GP was falling prey to an unfortunate Hollywood stereotype that usually involves rich people and this piece of music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSV8NnA3B74
But what about this one, also by Mozart, also performed by the Hagen Quartet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBMpD5ldrWU
So Mozart had a lot of emotional range, even in a period where sharp dissonances and tangled counterpoint were out of fashion.
A group of us chamber musicians has had a lot of success playing for people that don't usually listen to classical music simply by doing it in intimate bars and cafes. (Primarily, the Revolution Cafe in the Mission District of San Francisco.)
The fact that the music is long doesn't matter at all if you find people where they are and play with emotional conviction.
It's a loose collective called Classical Revolution, plays 1st & 3rd & 5th Mondays, been going since 2006. I'm only there occasionally these days; I might show up August 19. Starts at "8:30", often actually later, goes till 11:30.
The evening typically starts with a group that actually rehearsed and then devolves rapidly into the closest thing you can have to a jam session when you're playing notes off a page. Whoever shows up decides what to play on the fly from our collective piles of sheet music. It's a risky format—some nights are great, some less so. :)
That's a really interesting take. Nice
> Moonlight Sonata...
Funny you say that, it's on my inspiration list that I want to turn into trance.
I think the trouble though with using non-repeating classical piano into trance is that the intensity and syncopation is just so widely different. As an example, check out Chopin's Etude Op. 10 No. 12 "Revolutionary"... one of my favorite pieces, but how the hell do you turn that into dance music? It's just so wild and chaotic.
It's wild and chaotic, but it doesn't need to be. Chopin has these wild scales to drive the piece along, but you've got a beat.
Yeah I won't be giving up on Chopin... it's angry and energetic, just how I like my EDM to be :)
What a great point, I hadn't considered this before though it's completely obvious. A lot of fans of classical music though (like myself) still prefer a live performance, where I certainly don't mind hearing a da capo of Beethoven's Fifth at all!
> Classical music played and recorded correctly will use some intensity cues rarely used by modern music like dynamic range.
A little context here. People sometimes make value judgements that classic music (or recordings of) is "better" because it uses a greater dynamic range.
The reason popular music uses less dynamic range is because we listen to it in noisier environments. Classical music is intended to be listened to in quiet rooms with a lower noise floor. There, even when the music gets very quiet, you can still hear it. Popular music is designed to be enjoyable in a car, at a party, while banging pots and pans and cooking dinner, through earbuds on the subway. In those environments, if the song gets quiet, it gets completely drowned out by the ambient noise. So producers compress the dynamic range by making the quiet parts louder. That way you can always hear it.
But, if you push the low dynamics up above the noise floor, by definition, you have reduced the dynamic range.
> is that it mostly dates from a pre-recording period, so it tends to draw out all of its ideas because it expects the listener can't just rewind and listen to the last few minutes again
I think the other half of this is that when you rely on the brains of human performers as your storage device, repetition becomes a lot more valuable. It's much easier for a group of performers to play an hour of music if that's six ten-minute repetitive pieces than if it's twelve distinct five-minute works, each with its own melodies, motifs, etc. The former just compresses into less data in the brain.
> modern trance artists know the modern music playback setups and handle it differently, even if I couldn't exactly describe it.
A big part of how dance music "works" is that it uses a lot of timbral variation throughout a song. So even though it may be the same melody you heard earlier, the sound itself will be different. Classical music does this by changing dynamics and rhythm. But, to be danceable, those need to be fixed. So, instead, dance music changes the tone itself, which is easy to do since the sounds are synthesized. This is why you have all of these filter sweeps, LFOs, etc. going on.
That's a different kind of redundancy, since it's not just repeating the same words. But writers of the period tended to emphasize things for an audience who wasn't always paying attention: theaters were noisy and busy.
Shakespeare also tended to expound on themes in a way modern audiences enjoy less. Not every word Shakespeare wrote was gold, and audiences use to the timing of movies prefer that you move the plot along in two hours rather than three to four.
I can tighten focus on themes that are important to me, and cut out things like jokes that aren't funny any more or references that are lost. Audiences greatly enjoy the result, without having to be extensively taught to like Elizabethan theater.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dlg1moFsss
Also now producing for Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper.
If you read further, however, you discover that the pianist had actually prepared to play both songs, but that their order had been switched, which is a significantly less dramatic story.
The pianist had less than a second to figure out that the orchestra was playing Rachmaninoff instead of Tchaikovsky, and make his big entrance. He didn't react quickly enough, and he missed his entrance. This may have cost him the prize. Afterwards, the organizers offered to let the pianist repeat his performance, but he was too upset to do so.
If it had been the other way around, and the pianist had been expecting Rachmaninoff but the orchestra had played Tchaikovsky first, it would not have been as serious. In Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, there's a long introduction by the orchestra before the piano enters.
> he soon felt at ease in the Rachmaninoff, which he had prepared but did not expect to come until after the Tchaikovsky, in the final round of the competition [emphasis added]
It's a bit ambiguous, but it sounds like he had prepared to play it in another round of the competition, not in the same performance. There's a significant difference between having practiced a song and being fully (and mentally) prepared to play it in a specific performance.
I know that clickbait sells and all, but even "Wrong song played for pianist..." would be better and mostly accurate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOUSFNgEy7c
Still an unpleasant situation, but not THAT bad.
Only a day before the competition we were told a mistake was made and it actually was "ecology" competinion and not about economy at all.
We still beat most schools in the region and finished third, including beating a school that had a class specialized in ecology.