A Minute with Miles

One of the wonderful aspects of life as a musician: age differences don’t mean anything.

Most of what brass players do is done with the lips, and it’s invisible to us.

Imagine you’re a professional basketball player, about to take a foul shot. You’ve practiced this thousands of times, and you know exactly how you need to set your feet and orient your body in order to get the best results. But then you notice that the floor is uneven, or slippery, or has a big depression right at the foul line, or has a board sticking up under your foot. It’s going to be much harder to make the shot. Well, this doesn’t actually happen on professional basketball courts. But something like it does happen to professional musicians on tour, all too often, in fact, and it’s called “bad chairs.” Chairs that are too low, too high, too hard, too slippery, or with seats tilted backward… they’re the bane of musicians’ existence. When you can’t sit right, it’s much harder to play your best, not to mention the fact that after playing a whole concert on a bad chair you often wind up with a backache.

We’re all entitled to our own reactions, and none of us needs to be told how to react.

The days of the tyrannical conductor were, most assuredly, "the bad old days."

Here are the names of seven composers of Italian opera who were contemporaries of Giuseppe Verdi: Filippo Marchetti, Errico Petrella, Pietro Antonio Coppola, Luigi Ricci, Federico Ricci, Antonio Cagnoni, and Giovani Pacini. Ever heard of them? Neither had I. But among them, those seven composers wrote 172 operas. So why is it that Verdi’s operas have lasted, and those other 172 haven’t? Why do we still know Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore? Surely Verdi didn’t have a monopoly on talent. The

If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus, or the play it was based on, you may have gotten the impression that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was some sort of giggling idiot who just happened to be really good at writing music. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. Read a collection of Mozart’s letters and you discover a person who is serious, articulate, witty, and perceptive; someone who writes beautifully and can make jokes—sometimes very dirty jokes, it’s true—in at least three different

If you’d like a remarkable example of the genius of Leonard Bernstein, I recommend that you listen – or listen again – to the song “Cool,” from West Side Story. Bernstein needed a song for the character Riff to sing to build up the tension before the gang fight between the Jets and the Sharks. If I told you his solution was to take Baroque counterpoint – a fugue, to be precise – the syncopated rhythms of jazz, and the atonal twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg… and to mix them all

Every musician will tell you that there are some musicians who just seem to have better ears than others do. We’re really talking about the brain, rather than the actual organ of hearing, but in any case from the same sounds others hear, some people are able to extract more information, and they’re able both to process and to store that information faster, more accurately, and more efficiently. Yesterday I talked about ear training courses for musicians, and rigorous training can certainly lead

One of the common dangers of studying composers’ lives is finding out that some of the people whose music we love and admire turn out to have been very unadmirable human beings. Exhibit A in this category is usually Richard Wagner, an egomaniac and anti-semite, among other things, but a man who wrote lots of exquisitely beautiful music. What are we to make of such jarring disjunctions? Should we throw out the music with the maniac? I don’t have the answer. If your personal association with the music of Wagner is hearing it broadcast by the Nazis, that’s one thing, and it’s understandable that you’d never want to hear it again. The problem is that the beauty is real, and it will outlast us… all of us. My own choice, for lack of a better one, is simply to use cases like Wagner’s as occasions to marvel at the complexities and apparent contradictions of human nature, and to realize that there are some questions I just can’t answer.