THE WORKMAN’S GENIUS - On the way home I was listening to NPR. I don’t listen to their radio/talk/news shows because of their crazy Lefty politics, but if I’m in the car I often listen to their music and opera shows, which are often excellent. Anyway tonight I heard a show about Brahms. Seems Edison (yeah that Edison) sent a guy to Europe to make a hardened wax recording of Brahms playing part of his own composition, in the year 1889 (if I heard correctly). A Stanford scientist got a hold of the recoding, he had heard it as a young guy, and he and a research student developed a mathematical algorithm to separate the noise from the music, playing, talking. Which was great because you couldn’t hear anything on the original recoding it was so bad and degraded. Then he took the cleaned recording, transcribed it, and wrote it onto a player piano roll for four hands rather than two. That was bloody ingenious enough, to be sure, but then he played it back as Brahms would have played it on the original recording, had there been two Brahms and completely clean of all the background noise and bad recording techniques of the original wax roll. Brahms himself had played it originally in a reverse long note/short note style. This made it sound partly like something from the age of Mozart, partly almost Romantic, and partly very modern. Absolute genius, he had improvised on his own composition in an impromptu reverse playing style. Then again, to me, Brahms always was a workman’s genius when it came to composing and playing. To me he is the equivalent of what Raphael or El Greco were to painting. Ingenious, experimental, (seemingly very conventional and staid but really quite radical, but in a conservative style, not anything easy to pull off at all – a genius can be entire experimental like Leonardo, or entirely radical like Michelangelo, but it is a very, very subtle thing to be both conservative and radical all at once), and yet cloaked in seeming convention. Absolute genius. I really enjoyed hearing that and it gave me a lot of new ideas for compositional techniques. I just wish I could play a tenth as well as Brahms.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 01:15:10 +0000
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