“How do you get to Carnegie Hall” goes the old joke. “Practice, practice, practice.” But of course there’s no other way. If the science of talent development has taught us anything over the last fifty years, it’s that there is no substitute for strategic practice. Some even argue that innate musical abilities don’t exist. Whether it’s nature, nurture, or both, show me a top-notch musician and I’ll show you a person who has learned to practice well.
While Apple is slowly coming around to recognizing that some of its users listen to classical music, there is one quirk in the Music app on macOS that betrays its deep bias toward pop music. It’s this: when you create a new playlist, the application defaults to displaying the tracks in its “Playlist” view, which as far as I can tell serves no other function than to consume real-estate in the UI by displaying a thumbnail of the album art.
Interesting links, a little thoughts for Monday, May 23, 2022.
Free speech in Russia has never been particularly favoured. The Romanov dynasty remained in power long past their expiration date by suppressing waves of free thought, from the ideals of the Enlightenment, to the anti-capitalist ideals of Marx and Engels. At least, until the 1917 Revolution. And even then, the Bolsheviks continue to suppress dissent for the entire seventy-something year history of the Soviet Union. Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union promised change.
My approach to wrestling with iTunes to make it (barely) usable for classical music collections.
I’ve long suspected that Trump regards the arts as an unnecessary nuisance for losers and suckers. High art for this hollow man is the vacuous reality television that made him famous. Now in his Federal budget, Trump offers proof. He proposes the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This is a man with no soul.
But in the closing lines of her lyric poem “Renascence”, Edna St.
Nietzsche at the piano I have always been troubled in some ill-defined way by articles that assert the benefits of music in some tangible way. For example, kids with music training do better at math. (I don’t if that’s true or not; but you get the style of what I’m talking about.) The unwritten inference is something like this: “No one but a fool or the spectacularly talented would regard music as an economically-valid life path; but math might be.