Comments on On An Overgrown Path: See the music

Could your daughter's mind be adding the overtones...

2009-01-09T09:16:00.000Z

Could your daughter's mind be adding the overtones and harmonics that the small speakers on her television cannot reproduce? There is evidence that 'categorical perception' of both pitch and rhythm develops with early musical training. 'categorical perception' means that your daughter may hear a ring tone on a phone playing a cadence or theme, and then simply recognise the cadence as a gestalt, perhaps being able later to 'hear' the theme on her piano.

Have a look at Sloboda's The Musical Mind. Just throwing an idea into the mix!

Not to reduce your excellent post to just one imag...

2009-01-09T06:55:00.000Z

Not to reduce your excellent post to just one image... but thanks for posting that "Rite of Spring" lp cover. It's fantastic!!!

A couple of months ago I went to the movie theater...

2009-01-08T02:42:00.000Z

A couple of months ago I went to the movie theater (a big new one with super sound systems) to see the HDTV film of the Metropolitan Opera's production of Berlioz' La damnation de Faust. The sound was often -- let's say compromised. The balance seemed off, and a grinding scratch was frequently audible. I don't know whether this was a problem with the recording or the replaying, but an opera movie really ought to take its sound seriously. On another point you make, this production made great use of elaborate projection systems. During the great aria for the betrayed heroine, the singer's face was projected, vast, behind her, in real time, surrounded by flickering flames. Well, ALMOST in real time; the inevitable (apparently) fraction-of-a-second lag made Susan Graham (whose singing was absolutely ravishing) seem to be lip-synching herself. It was horribly distracting and suggested that the director, Robert Lepage, didn't actually trust the music and the singer.

So for me this represented a failure both of recorded music quality and of live performance enhancement with projections. (Elsewhere in the performance the projections were more effective.)

This is a very clever post Pliable, and you've hoo...

2009-01-07T18:48:00.000Z

This is a very clever post Pliable, and you've hooked me as a new reader.
I'm 23--so this question as you might suspect has occurred to me on several occasions, though I've never written it out as succinctly as you do here.

Why not take classical music to the visual? As a filmmaker friend once explained to me (while we were watching another student's project, in which tchaikovsky's romeo and juliet was the soundtrack to a series of related but aleatory visual scenes): "The film is explaining how the music works".

I thought this was a brilliant comment. I've just seen a video by Ake Falck of Alexis Weissenberg performing Stravinsky's Petrouchka. The camera moves and dives into the piano, the lights shift, it's like adult fantasia. What the visual does here is drastically enhance an already breathtaking piano performance. In that same vein, fantasia, and for that matter (though more simplistically) Looney Tunes en'light'ened classical music for several generations of children who wouldn't otherwise touch the stuff. Lastly, I recently saw a recording of the Yo La Tengo / Underwater films of Painlevé performance that happened last year at Lincoln Center. Amazing, and the same affect. Rather than simply providing a soundtrack for the visual happenings, what a successful "combine" does is inform both: the visual is certainly enhanced, but it's fascinating to hear how the music changes, becomes fuller, saturates, is too informed.

Synesthesia shouldn't be withheld as a lofty gift of a few crazies (Scriabin and many other artists desire to assume proprietary rights on the syndrome). We all have it--you can't separate dance from music or vice versa. Orchestra directors should consider this as they try to find a middle ground between programming more of the same into each season, and resorting to playing concerts of XBox 360 tunes to sell houses.

Email received:I too decry the poor quality of sou...

2009-01-07T17:47:05.305Z

Email received:

I too decry the poor quality of sound these days, and the inability, even the disinterest, in the listening public to demand better sound.

They are dazzled by gizmos, surround sound, etc., and therefore don't realize the QUALITY of such product has diminished greatly. How, then, do we expect them to appreciate delicate sounds such as the tremolos of the strings in Pini di Roma, or the wonderful whispers emanating from Stockhausen's DG recording of Stimmung, or the intimacy of the clavichord. At the other end, how can they properly feel the bass drum in La Valse, or the menacing double-basses in Elektra if they are only used to the boom-boom of distorted speakers playing equally-distorted-in-recording house-music.

I still enjoy "wowing" friends and relatives who have surround sound systems (bought from Wal-Mart or Future Shop so you can well anticipate the quality) with my simple and quite inexpensive, but still higher-end, PSB speakers, Bryston amp and pre-amp and a simple, 20 year old Rotel CD player.

Cheers
David Cavlovic

I guess a good example of a recent sort of this is...

2009-01-07T17:20:00.000Z

I guess a good example of a recent sort of this is Richard Einhorn's oratorio written for Dreyer's The Passion of St. Joan of Arc. In performances (in which Anonymous 4 has performed), the movie is shown on a back screen, while the symphony, chorus and soloists performed.

From what I understand, all the performances of this were completely sold out, and it was a very popular concert for several years. I would have loved to see it myself.