A Minute with Miles

Here’s a question: Should we really care about the personal lives of the composers we admire? When we don’t know anything about their lives, we certainly don’t care. How many of us know a great deal about Monteverdi, or Palestrina? Or even Bach, or Beethoven? What we care about is the music. But still, we’re curious, especially about composers whose work has meant a great deal to us, work that has enriched our lives. Through their music they seem to have understood our very hearts and souls, and so even when they’re long dead we have a slightly strange but very human need to try to be close to these people, to feel some sort of personal relationship, and perhaps even to thank them. We also often hope to gain insights into the music itself, the how and why of it. But that’s a tricky business, especially since inner motivation is often only related to specific life experience in ways that are either very tangled or completely hidden.

Ears can be trained. Which is why every music school in the world offers ear-training courses. I suppose it should go without saying, but for musicians the ability to recognize fine distinctions among sounds is crucial. And what musicians are trained to do is to recognize very specific kinds of information in sounds, to recognize relationships and patterns and to be able to reproduce them. They do this through practice and memorization. The distance in pitch between any two notes, for example,

Perhaps you’ve thought about this: Bach and Mozart died over two hundred years ago – – Is there anybody alive today whose music will be played two hundred years from now ? It’s a tricky question. There are contemporary composers whose music I like and admire, but I certainly wouldn’t bet my life on predicting their immortality. When it comes to the great composers of the past, we’re lucky: history has done the winnowing for us. You may be able to quickly tick off your fifteen favorite composers

I wonder what today’s voice teachers would think of the composer Gioacchino Rossini’s ideas for a vocal training curriculum. According to Rossini, learning the art of bel canto, or “beautiful singing,” should begin with many months of soundless exercises, starting no later than the age of twelve. Next, several years of just scales, in order to achieve what he called “equality of timbre over the whole range of the organ, equalization of the registers.” Then three years of vocalises and exercises to learn specific techniques for agility and fluidity, then another three years, quote, “putting into practice… everything that [has] been studied in detail.” But even then training isn’t finished, because the singer has to have an education in Style, and “style,” Rossini said, “is traditions, and the secrets of those traditions” can only be gained by imitating “great singers, the perfect models consecrated by fame.”

When I was a little boy just starting violin lessons, my teacher’s instructions were that I should practice a half hour every day. For a six-year-old this seemed an enormous load. I liked the violin… but a whole half hour, every day? Usually I would start, and then run to my mother every five minutes asking, “Is it a half hour yet?” And even later, when I started on the road to a career in music, practicing remained a duty, something I knew I had to do even if I would rather have been doing

It’s always fun to propose lists of the “ten best” of something – or the ten worst of something, for that matter. But when it comes to thinking about composers of classical music, there’s a word I like better than “best,” and that word is indispensable. And the number I have in mind isn’t ten, but rather three.

I’ve spoken about this before, but the subject seems to come up a lot, so why not go over it again: in America, 99.9 per cent of the people who play the flute for a living call themselves flutists, not flautists. That’s not a scientific number, but I think it’s pretty accurate. In any case, I’ve never heard any American flute playing colleague refer to herself as anything but a flutist , so please don’t ever worry about sounding uncultured or unsophisticated if that’s the term you use. And where

If you explore the history of psychotherapy, you’ll come upon the name Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer was born in Germany in 1734, and it was Mesmer who invented the term “animal magnetism,” which is what he called the mysterious force, or fluid, that flowed through his own body and that he could redirect for therapeutic purposes. Before you laugh, you should know that Mesmer had many therapeutic successes and many disciples, and for a period in his life he was rich and famous. And it’s from Mesmer

In May of 1761, Benjamin Franklin was in Cambridge, England, and he heard a man play a performance on musical glasses. They were crystal wine glasses filled with different levels of water, and when the performer rubbed the edges of the glasses, they produced different notes. Franklin was entranced by the sound, and he invented a mechanical version of the musical glasses that he called the glass armonica – that’s harmonica without the H. Franklin’s instrument consisted of a set of glass bowls

Galileo, whose full name was Galileo Galilei, was one of the great figures in the history of science. What may surprise you is that Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, was one of the great figures in the history of Western music. The elder Galilei was a lutenist, singer, and composer, but most importantly he was a theorist. In a book called Dialogue of Ancient and Modern Music, published in 1581, he laid out the theory of what came to be known as monody, the style of music that features a solo