anonym comments on Open Thread: October 2009 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: gwern 01 October 2009 12:49PM

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Comment author: anonym 06 October 2009 06:44:38AM 0 points [-]

Well, I like Bach most of all, and I find that as I've learned to hear more, sometimes by following along with a score and doing a bit of musical analysis and kind of hacking away at the piano and butchering parts of the works, I enjoy them more and get more from them. Sometimes it seems that the enjoyment is proportional to how much of it I can keep in mind at the time as I'm listening, how much I can pay attention to (both of which are facilitated through knowledge of the work), as well as how much the distinction between me and the experience disappears and I lose the sense of being a person listening to the music. I enjoy having a kind of high-level cognitive/emotional/musical blueprint of the work as a whole and feeling how the moment relates to the whole, knowing where it's going and remembering where it came from. Just as we can have a greater appreciation for a moment or portion in the life of a historical figure or in a movie by thinking about the future consequences that we're aware of, I think we can have the same kinds of reactions to music where the pieces mean more as a whole than as just the sum of the parts, and on multiple levels. I don't hear that much in Bach relative to what a great and well-studied performer of Bach would, but I hear more than I used to, and far more than I did before I had studied music at all. I think it is probably a matter of personality though, and that many would find my approach would detract from their experience.

Comment author: DanArmak 06 October 2009 12:32:50PM *  1 point [-]

Puts me in mind of this quote from Pratchett's Soul Music:

Lord Vetinari, the supreme ruler of Ankh Morpork, rather liked music.

People wondered what sort of music would appeal to such a man.
Highly formalized chamber music, possibly, or thunder and-lightning

opera scores.

In fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got

played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crotchets, all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit dribbling out of the end of their oboe ... well, the idea made him shudder.

[...] Then he picked up the third movement of Fondel's Prelude in G Major and settled back to read.

I wonder if anyone does this with music they've never heard played before?

Comment author: anonym 07 October 2009 04:58:12AM 1 point [-]

Glenn Gould was said to sometimes analyze and completely memorize works from the sheet music alone before playing them at the piano. His father recalled an instance of him learning an entire concerto from the score alone and then playing it from memory the first time, and Bruno Monsaingeon saw him play an entire movement from memory of a Mendelssohn string quartet after hearing it once on the radio (quoted in Bazzana's book on Gould).

That pales in comparison though to the fourteen-year-old Mozart transcribing from memory after once hearing the secret Miserere of Allegri, a dense polyphonic work that was performed only in the Sistine Chapel and was forbidden by the Vatican to be transcribed or reproduced under penalty of excommunication.

Comment author: CronoDAS 07 October 2009 05:59:07PM 0 points [-]

I sometimes found piles of sheet music sitting around in my high school's music room, and I'd read them once in a while.

Comment author: pdf23ds 07 October 2009 05:48:02AM 0 points [-]

I'm by no means an expert at the piano, but I'm probably halfway there, and I can without too much trouble get the general gist of complex unfamiliar piano music, and I can easily read simple music. I'd say it's pretty much analogous to the ability of expert chess players to play blindfolded, which is definitely a well-attested ability. (The record for simultaneous blindfold matches is around 50, played by Janos Flesch in Budapest in 1960.)

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