A Minute with Miles

He may not be well know to the general public today, but, yet Philippe Gaubert was one of the most famous and important French musicians of the first half of the twentieth century.

I don’t suppose you have a pair of four-hundred-year-old pliers in your kitchen tool drawer, or a screwdriver made in the 1700s? No, probably not. Tools don’t tend to last that long. The tools of string players, though, are an entirely different story.

Have you by any chance been hanging on to your grandparents’ old 78 rpm records? Carting them around, perhaps, and storing them on shelves or in boxes whenever you’ve moved from place to place?

The riches that music has to offer, whether in times of great sorrow or great joy, are both incalculable and irreplaceable.

I play concerts for a living, so you wouldn’t think I’d need reminding of the dramatic difference between listening to a recording and hearing a live performance. But it was as an audience member, recently, not as a performer, that I had my reminder – and it was a pretty spectacular one, because I was lucky enough to attend a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

There are many great creative artists, including great composers, who have been mediocre human beings, not to mention any number who have been downright reprehensible human beings, or human beings whose private views we would find reprehensible if only we knew what they were.

The guitar, the lute, and the viola da gamba all have frets. Have you ever wondered why?

Have you ever wondered why, when we’re feeling sad, or lonely, or downright miserable, we usually prefer to listen to music that somehow reflects our mood, rather than music that might jar us out of it?

If you like beautiful old keyboard instruments, not to mention beautiful small museums, I strongly recommend that you pay a visit to the Carolina Music Museum, now the Sigal Music Museum, in Greenville South Carolina.

For those of us who don’t play a brass instrument, watching brass players play always seems a bit like watching a magic show. We hear the French hornists, trumpeters, trombonists, and tuba players playing plenty of different notes, but the number of times they move their fingers—or in the case of trombonists their slides—doesn’t nearly add up to the number of notes.