An unforgettable game!

If you are a soccer fan--but especially if you aren't--do yourself a favor and watch the Barcelona-Madrid game from earlier today. I just finished watching it. It was outrageous. Don't just watch the highlights! You'll miss the best parts.

Simply put, Barca played soccer at its awe-inspiring best. In the beautiful game, a scoreline isn't always indicative of how the match played out on the field. But 5-0 is a perfect reflection of Barca's dominance--maybe even flattering to Madrid. Barca have ripped teams to shreds before. But to do it with such conviction, such assurance, and such swagger, against one of the best teams in the world! Remarkable. Madrid, after all, had not lost a game all season. Rarely do you see a team put 20 consecutive passes together in a game. Barca did that at least half a dozen times, including in the run-up to the second goal. And all the while they were enjoying themselves, expressing themselves, and putting on a show for the Camp Nou fans, who ate it right up. It wasn't just the sheer number of passes or quantity of possession that did it; it was all the heel flicks, one-touch passes, and nutmegs that Barca inflicted on hapless Madrid defenders. The crowd was already ole-ing passes within the opening 20 minutes. And I haven't even said anything about the goals.

advantage rule and diving, again

On the eve of an important soccer event in my own life, to soccer we turn again. Right now I can't resist but make an argument I've already made, only more emphatically and with renewed conviction: that diving in soccer is largely a product of the inadequate advantage rule.

I probably should have talked more about this during the World Cup, because diving seems to be Americans' preferred reason for disliking the beautiful game and dismissing out of hand. I could hardly read anything last summer about soccer in the US without coming across some disdainful comment about how diving makes soccer un-watchable. And that now infamous challenge by Carles Puyol on Arjen Robben in the final would have been a perfect way to explain the real deal with diving.

In addition the issue comes come up so often in my own playing, with my being consistently the most fouled player on the field, and what can I say... it makes me extremely angry.

So first, let's think about that Arjen Robben play again. Robben is through on goal in the second half of the World Cup Final, and feels contact, which he knows is illegal, from Carles Puyol. Because he knows the current advantage rule is in force, he knows he has two choices: go down, take the foul, earn Puyol a probable red card and himself a free kick well outside the area, or go on and try to score. To Robben's credit, he chose the latter course, figuring his chances of scoring were still rather high, despite having been fouled by Puyol. Unfortunately for him (but thank God for soccer) he failed to score. It was probably the only moment in which I sympathized for him in the entire game.

Meter, ct'd

A friend of mine wrote me this long email discussing the philosophy of music. I wrote back, telling him the discussion was arcane, and sent him the link to my meter post, below. He accused me of irrelevance.

I remembered this piece I heard last year. My friend plays in a wind quintet. They played this piece, "Aires Tropicales." I heard it twice, once in a masterclass scenario, and then in their concert. Now listen to the beginning of the second movement. Where's the downbeat? Now when I first heard this movement, in the class, I heard it, as I'm sure you did, as the first image shown above. It's the only way anyone would ever hear it! After the bassoon goes on for a while, the other instruments join, but if you'll listen through to the youtube video, the rhythm just doesn't sound right for the entire movement. Then, in the masterclass, they projected the score on screen, and it all made sense. The bassoon ostinato is actually written as the second image above. But once you get it in your head the first way, it's impossible to get rid of it. Every time I heard it, for the rest of the class and then again in the concert, I tried really hard to hear it the right way, in this case not just because it was right, but because the whole piece sounds so much better the right way. But I couldn't do it.

(Apparently, neither can the clarinetist in that youtube video, who keeps tapping his foot on the faux-beats.)

Anyway, the point is, the metrical tension should be one of the most important aspects of this music, but it's completely lost when it's impossible to hear it the right way.

My suggestion: the basoonist should stomp at the start of the second movement to signal the downbeat, or at least breathe to the downbeat. I don't know if that would solve the problem, but it couldn't hurt. I mean, he's got to do something, right??

Point is: this happens all over the place. It's far from irrelevant!

Meter

Something's been bothering me for a while, and that something is meter. Meter is a fundamental attribute of most music, something so basic we're usually completely unaware of our effortless perception of it. But I get it wrong all the time. Is it just me, or are you all in the same boat? Quick survey: How do you hear the following excerpts? At 0:29 here, is the strong beat on a) the triplet, or b) after? What about 7:20 here (strong beat with a) the winds or b) before) or 2:13 here [beats on a) the first of the three note motif or b) the second]? (This kinda thing happens all over the place in Brahms...please also note the ridiculous-looking, yet absurdly effective conducting in the first link). But it also happens in Bach (are the 8th notes here grouped in a) 3's or b) 2's?) What about this one? Go to the end of Variation 25 (maybe 5:10 on)....where are the downbeats? Or where's the beat in this one [with a) the bass notes or b) just after? Don't peek at the score, not that it will really matter!]. Just a few examples of the thousands available!

So did you botch the listening quiz like I did? (answer b is correct for all the questions). How much did it matter if you've played/seen the scores to the pieces in question? For me, the Brahms excerpts go in and out, often depending on how actively and engagedly I'm listening (see below). But I can't hear Hilary Hahn's Bach "correctly" no matter how hard I try (though I can play the correct auditory image afterward in my head). Ditto with the Schumann.

So maybe the composer's really botched it? Or the performers? Or is it us listeners?

Or is it just me.

Political Rant, ct'd

Okay, in case you haven't seen this, please watch it and be horrified. Hopefully the Sarah-Palin-2008-effect hasn't completely habituated us to the outrageous ignorance of aspiring politicians forever, because everyone should be shocked and appalled.

There are, of course, several ways to interpret her remarks and how they reflect on her and the Tea Party movement in general. Maybe she's just an ignorant fool and her ascendency to a Republican Senate nomination is a fluke. Maybe she knows the Constitution decently well, and just got her numbers mixed up. Naturally I suspect that her problem, and the Tea Party's problems, with Constitutional interpretation, are far more substantial.

Guest Post: World's Worst Monopoly

It's not Microsoft in the 90s, Standard Oil in the 1890s, or the Dark Greens by Boardwalk and Park Place. It's Crown Street Towing. Sure it "competes" with several towing companies in the greater New Haven area, and with thousands across the country. Yet Crown St. has all of the worst elements of a true monopoly: a protected revenue model that's completely insulated from customer choice or recourse.

New facebook groups? Who cares!

Facebook is all the rage recently! What with the new movie (interesting commentary here and here), the New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg, and my witty status updates, it's really all anyone can talk about. And then to top it all off, apparently there's some new feature being unveiled this week that's supposed to go a long way toward solving facebook's awkward privacy problem, (or the NEB--Not Everybody's Business--problem).

The feature is a new version of facebook groups, the difference from the old lame groups being that other people can tag you in groups, and you can control which of your information is shared with which groups. In other words, you could end up in groups with your high school friends, your college hall-mates, and your nerdy "set" club-mates and share information privately within each group, all without doing any work to assemble or join any of the groups because other people have already tagged you in them (ya know, the same people who already uploaded and tagged hundreds of photos of you since you don't even own a camera).

Though the new groups feature may seem ideal for restricting who sees that photo of you rolfing off the balcony, I predict it won't change people's facebook behavior much at all.

Gouldberg Variations?

When I first brought to my teacher the idea of playing GBV, he embraced the idea...with caution. His warning: beware of Gould! The piece is so closely identified with Glenn Gould that it's impossible to escape (ultimately unflattering) comparisons whenever one plays it. People who know the piece very well potentially hear everything you do, and everything you don't do, through the lens of Gould's own playing. What a terrifying thought.

There are four complete, as well as three excerpted GBV recordings Gould made (that I know of, at least). The complete versions: 1955 studio recording, 1959 Salzburg recital performance, the 1981 audio recording and the 1981 video (all on youtube--the video and the audio recording are composed mostly of different takes). Everyone's favorite Glenn Gould question: which is the best Goldberg recording??

goldberg variations, ct'd: cheating

So aside from the fact that I'm obviously really gung-ho about cheating in general at the piano, what does it have to do, specifically, with Goldberg Variations? As I talked about here and here, Goldberg Variations is unusual in that it was written specifically for a two-manual harpsichord. Indeed the piece is unusual, almost anomalous, for Bach's writing, in other respects: the multiple-of-three-minus-one numbered variations are virtuosic show-pieces with lots of hand-crossings. These hand-crossings often take the form of voice-crossings of the second type described here, and they present a unique challenge to the pianist playing on a single keyboard: when to respect Bach's part-writing, keeping a continuity of voicing with each voice in the "correct" hand, and when to "cheat" and switch voices to make the execution simpler? What makes GBV unusual is the added "visual element" of the performance. I am not referring to the mere spectacle of seeing someone play it, which is pretty awesome, but rather how the brain integrates visual information along with aural input in separating counterpoint into its different parts.

piano-playing and CHEATING

Cheating: it sullies the world of sport, ruins reputations, tears families apart, and can get you a lot of student loan money, but what does it have to do with playing the piano?

Well, a lot actually!

A quick political rant

Okay, by now, plenty of writers out there have already come to the entirely reasonable, possibly unavoidable conclusion that Tea Partiers, and Americans in general, are a bunch of selfish unrealistic hypocrites. They hate big government but blame the government for everything that goes wrong, and expect it to help them, specifically. And they definitely don't want to pay for any of the help they get. Maybe election advertisements aren't the best place to look for anything sensical in politics, but every Republican or Tea Party-type ad I've heard or seen has promised two things above all others: that the candidate will dramatically reduce government spending, and also help create a shitload of jobs for everyone.... through magic (or something)! I heard a story on NPR the other day where they interviewed all these people who were thinking of voting Tea Party because they weren't seeing enough jobs created. Ya know, by the government. But god forbid the government should create jobs by hiring people and paying them money to perform societally beneficial work. That would be economic stimulus.

Other than craziness, though, what's behind this crazy logic, and where does it lead us, besides into a future of maddeningly inane political advertising?

And just like that....

A new blog is born with a little help from friend, colleague, and competent writer Alissa. Motto: "because there's more to life than soccer, science, politics, and the arts...ie, New Yorker cartoon captioning."

goldberg variation rankings, ct'd

When I decided to take my sister's advice and rank each of the Goldberg variations 1-30, I didn't really stop to think how difficult it would be after 29 and 30. They're all brilliant to start with, but from here on out they're, like, really brilliant. So we'll see how long I can keep up this farce.

28: Variation 19

27: Variation 8

Variation 19 (8:40) is a nostalgic break in the action from the charming, echoic canon on the sixth and the bustling, energetic variation 20. Two distinct motives are shared between the three voices throughout: a six-note sixteenths figure, and a syncopated eighth-note/quarter note figure. The genius here is in the tied notes that are suspended over the bar lines; these held notes give the variation its unique rhythmic and harmonic character. Beautiful indeed!

Variation 8, like variation 19, has two main ideas which are repeated measure by measure and passed between two voices. In the first four measures, the top voice plays rising arpeggiated sixteenths (with one sixteenth note "missing" at the end of each bar), while the bass plays four falling eighth notes, followed by three falling sixteenths. In the second phraselet (bars 5-8), both parts are inverted, or turned upside down. This is a common technique Bach uses, especially in GBV, to change things up within a variation while maintaining its rhythmic character and give the listener something to latch onto (it happens to a greater or lesser extent in variations 1, 5, 11-17, 20-21, 23, and 26-28 aka all over the place). Variation 8 is a doozy for pianists; look what GG has to do in the last measure (0:50)! Gah!

Atheism; or, why does everyone think I'm so amoral??

As is my tradition, I now take a break from something I (profess to) have authority over to make room for a new topic altogether. Hey, if Richard Dawkins can do it, then why can't I? My writing may not be quite on the same level, but I can surely be less of a dick. Before getting into the treacherous philosophical/political side of the whole thing, a simpler question: what's it like for me, being an atheist/agnostic in this religious society we call America?

goldberg variations, ct'd

Okay, enough "Handel-lambasting" (as Brett accused me of in his last comment). Let's do some Bach-lambasting instead.

Wha??? But I thought GBV was, like, the greatest? Well, it is....but Bach does some nasty things in there that just make it really hard to pull off, on harpsichord or piano. Especially on piano....but especially on harpsichord. One of the difficulties in performing, listening to, or understanding GBV is voice-crossing.

When two separates lines of music "cross" pitch paths, we call it a voice-crossing; one starts out above the other in pitch, but ends up below. If one person started singing a scale up from below, and another person down from above, there would be a voice-crossing somewhere in the middle.