Upcoming events:
Sun.
Aug. 25 at Piano Day
Pittsburgh, Heinz Hall, 6 p.m.
Sun. Sep. 15 3 p.m. Violin and organ concert
with
Violinist Devin Arrington
at Heinz Chapel, Pittsburgh
this fall's Osher/UPitt class, "Composers in
Exile: Music in Adversity" will run from October
17 through November 14
register now at the OLLI website |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
"I took my first step before the public in my earliest youth", writes
Moszkowski, "following my birth, which occurred on August 23, 1854. I
selected this warm month for the event in hopes of a tornado, which also plays
so prominent a part in the biography of great men. This desired tempest, in
consequence of favorable weather, did not occur, while it accompanied the birth
of hundreds of men of much less importance. Embittered by this injustice, I
determined to avenge myself on the world by playing the piano...."
Read article |
|
|
When Is a Piano not a piano?
How
most of our greatest pianist-composers didn't know how to write for
their instrument, according to some of our mediocre academicians |
I recently came across an edition of
Nocturnes by John Field whose preface contained yet another repetition of the
idea that many of our most revered composers wrote music for the piano that was
not "pianistic," or well suited to the piano, as opposed to music
written for the piano that would have been better suited to, say, the ukulele. In this case, of course, the editor was saying it to suggest
that his hero, Mr. Field, who was a contemporary of Beethoven, and a generation
after Mozart, may have indeed written the first truly pianistic
music ever, and that his is a major achievement.
All gratitude to Mr. Field
aside (and some of his Nocturnes are quite beautiful, by the way) I have for
years found this kind of statement annoying. It was made by a Doctor of Musical
Arts (like myself) but that doesn't keep it from being a gross generalization,
and in many ways, just plain wrong. Besides, I fear that many of us, because our
time is taken up perfecting our skills in musical execution, do not necessarily
know what we are talking about when it comes to matters of history or analytical
thinking, these matters being reserved for persons in the theory and musicology
departments! Just what does it mean when something is, or is not, pianistic?
read on |
|
 |
The other day I made an
astonishing discovery
that should rock the
scientific community.
You remember how some
computer was supposed to
have passed the Turing
Test last week?
Ok, I'll back up. If you
didn't hear about this,
the Turing Test was
proposed by a computer
scientist named Alan
Turing in 1950 in a
paper in which he
discussed the
possibility that
computers would one day
possess (or be able to
"fake") artificial
intelligence. He
proposed a test. Put
somebody on one side of
a wall and have them ask
questions of two
different parties. One
of them will be a
computer. Based on the
computer's answers to
the questions (written
out and passed on to the
person doing the
"judging") if that
person is fooled into
thinking that they are
conversing with an
actual person, then the
computer has passed the
Turing Test. Last week,
it was claimed (some say
rather weakly) that a
computer actually had,
finally, passed this
test, for the first
time.
|
|
|
