Music in Trains

There were a lot of inspiring talks given at the Mississippi College Piano Performance and Pedagogy Conference this weekend, but I was particularly struck by Jonathan Henriques’ “Addressing Performance Anxiety in Piano Class” perhaps for no other reason than that this is a not-all-too-often-discussed topic that affects nearly every musician. His take posed the problem as reactive coping in place of what should be proactive pedagogy. He had a lot of great comments on this that got me thinking, but I also became interested in the question of why we put ourselves through such anxiety-producing activities in the first place. Is it all necessary?

What is it that makes “pop” music popular? Why does the vox populi “man on the street” find Classical music “boring”? How is it that the popular music of one century could become the “impenetrably stuffy” music of the next?

Pretend music is books.

“Instead of mindlessly extracting—data points for statistical analysis, Clio intelligently adapts its attention to key aspects… —just like you and I do.”

If this is truly “just like you and I do,” then the study of music should at some level be a honing of “intelligently adapting [oneself] to focus on the aspects most critical to the mood.” Perhaps I could make this more explicit in my own teaching. (June 11, 2011)

These were my initial thoughts in response to first reading about Clio from a blog post about how a computer might model the way we listen to music.

While I usually prefer to not dwell on the profitability of artistic production, I also find its economic peculiarities fascinating.

On the one hand, there is MPA fighting hard against IMSLP to protect the ideals of copyright protection; on the other, the realization that the entire music industry is hardly worth Google’s effort to even put up a fight.

Every once in a while a topic will come up in two or more contexts of my awareness that I would probably not notice without the reinforcement. Two articles addressing issues of copyright law recently appeared in the New York Times in as many weeks:

1. Would the Bard Have Survived the Web? (14 February 2011)
2. Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note (22 February 2011)

The first might be considered more of a philosophy of copyright law, whereas the second deals with practical issues. If not for both sides of this same coin, this might be a much easier issue to ignore.