Here’s another reason that I love working at a University with a broad spectrum of activity, in an exciting and diverse city. You get the most wonderful connections between different segments of your life:
After an extraordinarily exhausting week, Friday evening came and I jumped on the Brompton and cycled up Figueroa the 37 blocks to the heart of downtown, where you can find the music centre, and the wonderful Disney Hall. My errand was to somehow obtain tickets for an extremely popular concert. The box office, once I got there, had only a few returned ones, at $120 and $90 each. I could not bring myself to pay that much without exploring other avenues (I’ve several expenditures to worry about) and so I thought I would wait in case anyone turned in orchestra seats (those are more like $35), or to see if the price would drop nearer the concert start, or (my main hope) to see if someone showed up with an extra ticket (maybe a friend could not make it) and would just sell it to me right there near the box office. So I stood there for over an hour, watching the world go by, most of it looking curiously at my bike in half-fold position. It dawned on me at some point that I’d no really reliable way of discovering who might have tickets to sell or not. This became especially clear after a group of people who came well after me and were hanging around managed to get a ticket in this manner. So after a while I began to learn who had “the look” of maybe having a ticket to sell, and with about ten minutes to go before the concert (and after a long conversation about the bike which made me miss at least one more sale) I managed to negotiate an $82 ticket down to $50 (I could have done better, but it seemed fair), folded up and popped my bike off in the coat check area and emerged (appropriately attired) for an evening of a bit of relaxing to some Mozart.
I came because I had three students (Joesph Benson, Kyle Patterson and David Reese) in my Physics 151 tell me that they had to miss some parts of a few Thursday lectures because they had to go and rehearse for a concert. Of course, I asked what concert it was, and it turned out that they (as part of the USC Thornton Choral Artists) would be performing Mozart’s Requiem with the LA Philharmoic at Disney Hall over three nights! Of course I had to find a way to go!
The first 30 minutes was a performance (Andreas Haefliger, piano) of Mozart’s piano concerto number 27 (K 525), which was fine. I listened to endless amounts of Mozart concertos when I was a teenager, and so much of what he does is simply brilliant, but eventually they began to strike me as (brilliant of course) essays by a master, and I began to learn to recognize his stlye and voice all to well, predict many of the standard Mozart phrases to come a few bars ahead of their arrival, etc. That was time (back then in my youth) to seek out greater works, and other composers and voices, and I left most of Mozart’s piano concertos alone for a while. So occasionally it is lovely to hear one, and recall how beautifully constructed they are, and how flawless and bright they are, almost to the point where those latter features themselves limit the overall beauty of the piece, in a way I cannot fully explain. But I do like them a lot. Of course, they do remind me so much of my late teenage years, getting up early to listen to and make tape recordings of bits of BBC Radio 3’s “morning concert” programme. This was around the same time I was consuming a lot of new concepts in mathematics from classes and books and just loving it so much.
Eventually, though, one discovers Mozart’s Requiem (K 626), and one really grows up. There are no simple beautiful pretty things to be found easily here like in (most of - not all) the piano concertos, but instead the richer beauty that comes from a transcendent mixture of joy, passion, pain, sorrow, wonder, etc. This was not a mere essay from the master, but a true…masterpiece, in every sense of the word. One of the true “great works”.
…..The Philharmonic was good (Christoph Von Dohnanyi conducting) and the soloists were also (Barbara Bonney, Ruxandra Donose, Eric Cutler, Alfred Reiter), but my focus tonight was on the USC students. They were wonderful! I still can’t get over it. There are wonderful chords that the chorus is given (some of my favourite chords, in fact) which they rendered excellently, never once getting lost inside them, as could probably be easily done. While I dozed a touch during the piano concerto (end of a horribly busy week, as I said, with not enough sleep), I was at the edge of my seat for the entire 55 mintutes of the Requiem. It was really quite a perfect evening to end the week.
So it turns out that these three students are not music majors. No, they just do this because they want to. They are freshmen in Engineering, who happen to sing. Really sing.
-cvj
February 25th, 2006 at 7:28 am
Hey Clifford
Reading “they do remind me so much of my late teenage years, getting up early to listen to and make tape recordings of bits of BBC Radio 3’s “morning concert” programme. This was around the same time I was consuming a lot of new concepts in mathematics from classes and books and just loving it so much.” I got an idea for something for you all to blog about: What was it like studying?
Maybe for the time you run out of ideas. You don’t seam to right now.
Cheers, Helge
February 25th, 2006 at 11:13 am
i’m always afraid to buy tickets unofficially. what’re the general rules for scalping? defintely puts a damper on the resale value.
February 25th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Helge,
Maybe you could think of Clifford’s article, in another way?
While being “the builders of science(engineers),” they had a greater understanding of the music involved, and so did Clifford?
February 25th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
hugechavz:- I don’t do it as a routine matter, but this was exceptional, and there are no ticket scalpers there……..No… these are real concert-goers who are just trying to get rid of extra tickets. I ended up sitting next to the guy in the concert, for example. He was grateful that I helped him out, and I him. Also, the Disney Hall people don’t mind… they don’t officially condone it, but it was in fact mentioned to me as an option by one of their staff….unofficially, when I said how keen I was to try to make that concert. The guy I got the ticket from was headed for the line to try to sell his ticket back to the official people, but it was too late.
I don’t think there is much in the way of crooked dealings for tickets for random Disney Hall concerts…. As a lucrative market, it cannot compete with what’s going on just down the road by about 8 blocks…. the Staples Centre….. that’s where all the cool kids are, buying and selling tickets for hundreds of dollars, dressed in all their finery, etc, etc.
Cheers,
-cvj
February 25th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Helge:- Thanks for the suggestion.
Cheers,
-cvj
February 25th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
There seems to be some positive correlation between Mathematical aptitude and interest in classical music. Clifford (and others), I’d love to hear your thoughts about it.
I have studied Music Theory and yes, there are certain numerical patterns in harmonious chords as opposed to dissonant ones. However, one doesn’t need to know the details about scales and fifths and thirds to enjoy classical music. Also, when I read about the great composers, I get the idea that their musical creativity was more or less an intuitive process, not one of mechanical calculations.
Comments?
February 25th, 2006 at 9:26 pm
Heh. I was a music theatre major my first year of college and switched to engineering. Lots more money in engineering… But after 25 years, I’m going to take voice lessons again! I’m excited…
It’s not really that uncommon for engineers to be musicians of some form as well. My husband played trumpet all through high school, and many, many engineers I know were involved in theatre or music.
It’s important to work BOTH sides of the brain, logical and creative. I often play music when I study to keep my right brain interested so it doesn’t go wandering off.
February 25th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
donna:- That’s fantastic! Yes… keep it up… indeed, it does not have to be one or the other… it can be both!
citrine:- beware of that oft-repeated belief. It is, I expect, mostly not true. It is often applied to modern masters as well, such as jazz musicians, and other composers in the mode of the “compose it right now” genre. People mumble things about it all being intuitive, etc. Those people are then really surprised (and often tell you straight to your face that you’re wrong) when you tell them that these musicians are well-versed in the theory of music. They know all about major thirds, minor thirds, fifths, sevenths, dominant sevenths, augmentations, suspensions,etc… they often know as much music thoery as any other composer…and they put it into action, and they can (and do) discuss it as excitedly and technically as we physicists discuss the language and structure of our work. What happens is that a lot of it gets internalised through practice…..practice, and more practice. At some point a lot of the mechanics of it becomes internalised…..Just like if you learned a new language…eventually you stop thinking about every last detail of the the grammar..it just becomes internalized. But it is mythology to think that (the vast majority of) great masters (in any artistic genre) are just “doing it naturally”… they put in the hard work, and that is a huge part of their foundation. Just like you can’t suddenly start speaking Swahili without studying it hard first… no matter how much of an “aptitute” you might have for language…… Two examples: Picasso could probably not have defined such a remarkably singular approach and style without having a firm foundations in the standard draughtsmanship he learned in his earlier years. Have a look at his early works, and his preliminary and other sketches …. he was a master of the the classical techniques, and learned them the same way everyone else did. Thelonius Monk looks like he is just a gifted untrained pianist messing around who hit on a remakrable style…. (see my post on You Tube). Nope. He was trained in various standard piano styles, and knew his harmony theory… in both cases, they because great masters by knowing all that technical stuff and by being hard workers at learning it inside out before then breaking away. In fact, the breaking away process…the poineering activity…. can only be properly and most successfully done by knowing properly what it is you are breaking away from…..
Cheers,
-cvj
February 26th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
On composition, Wassily Kandinsky has some words of encouragement?
How might you have interpreted his words?
February 26th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Quite right, Clifford; every master, even of the most ‘out there’ music, has paid dues and put in time in the woodshed. One of the more heartening aspects of YouTube is the plethora of ‘wannabe’ Vais/Satrianis putting up their (mostly very accomplished) efforts in the public domain - some sort of peer reveiw process, as they used to say in pre ArXiv days. Rock on, and keep doing the exercises in Whittaker and Watson, or whatever you young people do nowadays.
February 26th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
But then again, Billie Holliday just did what she did.
March 2nd, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Howdy…Just wanted to say that I loved the article and I was wondering if there was any way I could get the pictures in it sent to me to put in my scrapbook. I was just going to copy-paste them off of the blog,but the resolution would be terrible, because they have obviously been resised.
Thanks,
Tomas
March 2nd, 2006 at 5:11 pm
Tomas…. email me.
-cvj
March 2nd, 2006 at 5:11 pm
robert…welcome!!
Thanks.
-cvj