![]() “That a young pianist has come along who can seemingly play anything, and easily,” he notes, “is not the big deal it would have been a short time ago.” Tommasini goes on to list several of the current superpianists who are able to leap over tall pieces like Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto and the Ligeti Etudes with a single bound. “Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen” was his recent declaration on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section. In the world of classical piano, the geese are cackling up a storm, according to New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini. When every goose is cackling, would be thought The nightingale, if she should sing by day, The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark, As the Bard expressed in “The Merchant of Venice,” But as we shore up the chinks in our aural armor, we also sew shut the portals of mind that are empowered, indeed transformed, by access to the deepest levels of musical expression.Įven in Shakespeare’s time, people weren’t listening. Moreover, in our era, the population’s musical insensitivity has been cultivated gradually by several factors: less substance in pop music, the ever-upwardly-creeping volume level, the proliferation of recordings and internet music, and the competition among every type of media for the attention of the consumer.Ī person has to block out most of the Universal Soundtrack in order to function. Sound is with us even in a completely soundproof chamber, where John Cage reported two pitches that could not be eliminated: the whine of the nervous system and the drone of the blood in circulation. Our refrigerator, dehumidifier, lamps – all of them run at 60 cycles per second, which is about a Bb. In our homes, our bodies hum along to our electrical appliances. It’s hard to do when one is immersed in the Universal Soundtrack: that collective din of talking, laughing, crying, traffic, machinery, Muzak, nature sounds and broadcast media that surrounds many of us, especially in the city. ![]() A place and time where it’s easier to perceive and appreciate the more subtle layers of music. Sometimes I wonder why I wasn’t born in a place and time like that: a place and time in which the true nature of music is understood, respected and valued. Rather, the prize will go to the musician who can make the mountains tremble by the purity, depth, emotion and intention present in the music. The winner will not be the one who can play the fastest, or the most notes, or the hardest piece. In the opening scene of Peter Brook’s film “Meetings With Remarkable Men,” tribespeople from miles around gather at the base of a mountain range to witness a contest of musicians.
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