The Pianobabbler has many pithy babblings to share
February 14 2011
- Voltaire: The perfect is the enemy of the good.
The Pianobabbler: The bad is the artist's friend. The arts visit off nights upon their practitioners, to teach artists what they need to do to grow. Pain. Gain.
- Music has not deteriorated, as inert current thinking would have it. If anything, music has attained unimagined heights of invention and skill. The problem lies with mass-market McMusic. It has raised the noise to signal ratio, making the quality music harder for us to hear.
- 1400 years ago, Aristotle in the Poetics identified spectacle as the antithesis of the poetic art. Music today owes much to spectacle.
- On the other hand, one has many reasons to use the techniques of spectacle to enrich music. Opera has always done so.
- La Bande Magnetik. The glittering, joyous, über-musical québecois a cappella group. Another example of under-recognized talent.
- Is it just me, or do many of the musicians who decry sterile invention and academic headiness in music today display in their own music sterile invention and academic headiness?
- Practice: crucial. There is such a thing as too much practice.
- Technique: crucial. There is such a thing as too much technique.
- When you find yourself saying that music today is inferior to the music of your youth, know that you have become your parents, and you're missing out on the music that will form the stuff of your children's future nostalgic harrumphs about the music of their youth.
- We complain we can't find great quality art in popular media. But even in the "good old days" of classical concerts on television, we never had the abundance of brilliance now widely available. I never saw Sviatoslav Richter play until the Net came along.
- Genius does not exclude failure. Shakespeare, Brahms, George Eliot and Take Six all experienced stillbirth creations. We need to work for the best in our art. But we are allowed to fail.
- Comparing: every artist's leghold death trap. Its teeth sink in progressively draining the artist's blood but leaving the bile in place.
- Life in the arts is impossible. Life out of the arts would be impossible.
- I look forward to reaching a stage of success where I make many enemies.
- At once frustrating and gratifying: I feel myself bumping into the limits of my creativity.
The Pianobabbler has babbled.
The Pianobabbler is a RonDavisMusic production. The Pianobabbler's blog posts appear weekly at pianobabbler.com. Please remember to leave your comments and thoughts below. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And subscribe to RonDavisNews by clicking on the Mailing List link, above right. And follow us on Twitter.
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