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TONAL REFRACTION
The blog in its current phase is recounting events in Nancy's newly enriched musical life and the insights gleaned from a lifetime of devotion to amateur musicianship. Read More
What is Refraction?
Refraction is the word Proust used to describe what happens to memory as it is transformed by emotion. A comparable transformation...
artie73
Jun 201 min read
Music: A noun but not a thing
In order for a tone to become compelling it must pass through a living body into a receptive ear. This observation, seemingly...
artie73
Jun 191 min read
Templates are not Gateways
Music pedagogy is too often based on short cuts which become templates which effectively limit perception while pretending to have...
artie73
Jun 171 min read
Out of the Traps
Over 30 years ago I fought to get as my piano student an already prodigiously gifted young composer. Breaking all the school's rules I...
artie73
Jun 161 min read
Talk about traps:
Words easily become traps when they pretend to name experiences which have no names. Print, too, becomes a trap when it is taken as the...
artie73
Jun 151 min read
The Fact Trap
The trap into which we all fall is factual: measurements rule. As a teacher of children it took me quite a while to extricate myself...
artie73
Jun 141 min read
This Mozart business
Why does it keep coming up? The answer is in the question mark: an element of punctuation which musicians are, as a rule, not taught...
artie73
Jun 131 min read
"Mozarted to death"
Raphael Mostel's apt diagnosis of so many fatalities, haunts me. For I was Mozarted to life as a child, via sounds of his music on my...
artie73
Jun 121 min read
Mozart: Boring?
Something's wrong but it's not him. It's the system that reduces Classical music to a system of visual coherence belied by acoustical...
artie73
Jun 111 min read
"Mozart is boring as all get out!"
Do you agree? Then how is it that, without a clue as to who or what "Mozart" might be, sounds I stumbled upon in my first encounter with...
artie73
Jun 101 min read
Perfection and predictability
They go hand in hand. Which came first? Now I literally hearken back to tonality as I (falsely) learned it as a child, falsely insofar...
artie73
Jun 91 min read
Perfection rules. Or does it?
Perfection rules at this time of year: competitions, recitals, exams. Having physical disability, I was unable to do as I was expected...
artie73
Jun 81 min read
Rule-Bending
A couple of days not posting nonetheless rich in reflection: my attention is repeatedly drawn to the over-reliance on conformity in music...
artie73
Jun 71 min read
Why is music so difficult?
It has to do with time, not beats, but time as it flies - or doesn't: mental speed. Ear is faster than eye. Okay, but how can one make...
artie73
Jun 41 min read
Perfection be Damned
Having worked intensively on the Schumann Fantasy Pieces Dave Eggar and I did not have time to dig into the Brahms E minor. When we...
artie73
Jun 21 min read
I Always Hated It, Until Now
The life of the ear was proved yesterday when Dave Eggar came over for another life-changing rehearsal, this time of a work which I have...
artie73
May 311 min read
The Box of Words
Hannah Arendt was clear on the subject of how trust in the ear was never brought up in all of her education. I have long felt that...
artie73
May 301 min read
Vibrations Rule
It is only via vibrations that I can make myself be heard: words connect in a way, but within the commonality of the ear in no way...
artie73
May 291 min read
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