Classical music for beginners

Greg Sandow on classical music for beginners:

So if you want to start listening to classical music, ask yourself what kind of music you already like. Do you like, for instance, passionate music? Then maybe you should start with one of the romantic classical composers, Schubert, Wagner, or Tchaikovsky. Do you like brainy music? Start with Bach.

Though if I had to recommend just one classical CD, or in this case a classical CD set, I'd suggest Bach's Goldberg Variations, in two performances by Glenn Gould, as reissued in a Sony package called A Sense of Wonder, which costs little more than a single CD, and gives you a bonus disc on which Gould talks about the piece.

The Goldberg Variations is an astonishing piece. It's written in short sections, each based on the same musical design; you can hear that, or at least sense it, so you can start to learn something about classical music's structure. The performances are astonishing, too, but also very different. By comparing them, you can start to answer one question beginners often ask, which is how performances of the same piece differ from each other. And since Gould tells you (on the bonus disc) which performance he thinks is better, you can develop your independence as a classical music listener, by deciding whether or not you agree with him.

You can read more by clicking here. (Via Musical Assumptions.)

My two-cents on the Goldbergs can be found here.

Tools for serious readers?

I like Levenger, sort of. It's a source for beautiful furniture, reasonably-priced fountain pens, and dazzling (and, yes, unaffordable) watches. I'm sitting at a Levenger carrel as I'm typing.

The problem with Levenger though is its tendency to turn any human endeavor into a sham--a mere exercise in conspicuous consumption. Consider its new product line: Bookography™, an array of reading-journals and accessories.

The company slogan--"Tools for Serious Readers"--looks pretty ironic in light of Bookography™. "It's never too late--or too early," the catalogue encourages us, "to start keeping a journal of the books you've read and are planning to read, and the truths and pleasure you take from them. We've found [sic] a new and satisfying way to do so, which we call your Bookography."

Oh, my very own Bookography™.

The Bookography™ Journal must be seen to be appreciated (by clicking here). It's a ring-binder with removable pages ($20, Junior; $24, Letter). An optional leather jacket will cost you $78 or $94. There's also Electronic Bookography™ ($50) and a Deluxe Electronic version ($84, for books, "music," and "video"). A scanner ($14) is available to gather online information via barcodes (I'm not kidding).

Each book is allotted a single page, which travels from section to section of the Journal. The page begins in the "List of Candidates" (books you want to read). Note that a true list would gather many titles on a single page. With Bookography™, you've already devoted a page to a single book you might never read (you get only fifty pages, with "refills" available).

In an ideal narrative, the page travels to the "Library of Candidates" (books you've "acquired"), then to the books you're "Now Reading" (with a section for "Castaways," "proof of your sampling enough good titles"), then to "Après Reading" (while you review the book "a few times at lengthening intervals"), and, finally, to your "Living Library" ("most pages will live here").

The fill-in-the-blanks layout of the book page itself reminds me of the pages my children were filling out not too long ago in elementary school. To wit:

"My reason for wanting to read it": One of the imaginary people whose handwriting graces Levenger catalogue photos has written, in ladylike script, "Sounds like fascinating history."

"Notes as I go": Three lines, with an arrow to the back of the page.

"My review notes": Another three lines, another arrow.

(And here I'm really reminded of elementary school: "Use the back if you need more space!")

"I'll recommend this book to," "I'll buy this book for," "This book led me to these books," "This book led me to these experiences or interests": These prompts are each allotted a single line. (All that's missing is "I liked this book because.") There's no arrow next to "This book led me to these experiences or interests." Levenger customers must be pretty darn succinct (or else they write more about their experiences in their leather-bound journals).

Here's a different approach to keeping a reading-journal. Keep a list of books you might want to read (an index card, text file, or Palm memo will do just fine). Buy a notebook. Buy or borrow some books. Read. Write.

It surprised me at first that the Levenger catalogue gives away the whole idea of Bookography™ by showing the page format in a large, easy-to-read photograph. There's nothing to stop someone who really wants to do a Bookography™ Journal from typing out a reasonable facsimile, printing copies, punching holes, and getting started. But Levenger must know its customers well enough to know that what they're really after is the feeling that comes with possessing this, uhh, tool. A tool for a serious reader? A tool for a serious dilettante, I'm afraid.

An aside: For several years I asked students in my classes to keep reading-journals--tremendously rewarding for them to write, tremendously exhausting for me to read. The minimum entry was 400 words per class (in college classes meeting three times a week). I graded journals on length, relevance, and completeness. A finished journal typically filled one or more two-inch looseleaf binders. That's what I call a tool for a serious reader.

I dream of Mingus

A dream with Charles Mingus in it: He and I are sitting in a dark room with floor-to-ceiling red drapes. There are bookshelves attached to metal posts on one wall. Mingus is methodically signing LPs (not mine) with a Sharpie and talking: "Remember--what I will be tomorrow, you have already been." The words in this dream seem backwards (me ahead of him?), but my guess is that they're related to the multiple selves in the opening paragraphs of Mingus' Beneath the Underdog (1971):

"In other words, I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there's an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he'll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what's been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can't--he goes back inside himself."      "Which one is real?"      "They're all real."

Moxie

From Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day service:

The Word of the Day for May 6 is:

moxie \MAHK-see\ noun
1 : energy, pep
*2 : courage, determination
3 : know-how, expertise

Example sentence:
It took a lot of moxie for Brandon to go back to school to follow his dream of becoming a lawyer.

Did you know?
"Hot roasted peanuts! Fresh popcorn! Ice-cold Moxie!" You might have heard such a vendor's cry at a baseball game--if you attended one in 1924. That was the heyday of the soft drink called "Moxie," which some claim outsold Coca-Cola at the height of its popularity. The beverage was a favorite of American writer E.B. White, who wrote, "Moxie contains gentian root, which is the path to the good life. This was known in the second century before Christ and is a boon to me today." By 1930, "moxie" had become a slang term for nerve and verve, perhaps because some people thought the drink was a tonic that could cure virtually any ill and bring vim back to even the most lethargic individual.

Here in the midwest, you can find Moxie in stores that carry "specialty sodas." Moxie must be tasted to be believed.

Words, words, words

From a New York Times article, "SAT Essay Test Rewards Length and Ignores Errors":

In the next weeks, Dr. Perelman studied every graded sample SAT essay that the College Board made public. He looked at the 15 samples in the ScoreWrite book that the College Board distributed to high schools nationwide to prepare students for the new writing section. He reviewed the 23 graded essays on the College Board Web site meant as a guide for students and the 16 writing "anchor" samples the College Board used to train graders to properly mark essays.

He was stunned by how complete the correlation was between length and score. "I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one," he said. "If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you'd be right over 90 percent of the time." The shortest essays, typically 100 words, got the lowest grade of one. The longest, about 400 words, got the top grade of six. In between, there was virtually a direct match between length and grade.

He was also struck by all the factual errors in even the top essays. An essay on the Civil War, given a perfect six, describes the nation being changed forever by the "firing of two shots at Fort Sumter in late 1862." (Actually, it was in early 1861, and, according to "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James M. McPherson, it was "33 hours of bombardment by 4,000 shot and shells.")

Dr. Perelman contacted the College Board and was surprised to learn that on the new SAT essay, students are not penalized for incorrect facts. The official guide for scorers explains: "Writers may make errors in facts or information that do not affect the quality of their essays. For example, a writer may state 'The American Revolution began in 1842' or '"Anna Karenina," a play by the French author Joseph Conrad, was a very upbeat literary work.'" (Actually, that's 1775; a novel by the Russian Leo Tolstoy; and poor Anna hurls herself under a train.) No matter. "You are scoring the writing, and not the correctness of facts."

How to prepare for such an essay? "I would advise writing as long as possible," said Dr. Perelman, "and include lots of facts, even if they're made up." This, of course, is not what he teaches his M.I.T. students. "It's exactly what we don't want to teach our kids," he said.

You can read the article by clicking here.

Mixed metaphors

From an article in the Orlando Sentinel on saxophonist Branford Marsalis' explorations of the classical repertoire:

So, Marsalis embraced the crucible to propel himself into a higher orbit.

Yikes!

[Thanks to my dad for sending this article my way.]

Multitasking makes you stupid

From "Multitasking Makes You Stupid: Studies Show Pitfalls of Doing Too Much at Once," by Sue Shellenbarger:

--People who multitask are actually less efficient than those who focus on one project at a time, according to a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The time lost switching among tasks increases with the complexity of the tasks, according to the research by Dr. Meyer and others.

--The process of switching back immediately to a task you've just performed, as many multitaskers try to do, takes longer than switching after a bit more time has passed, say findings published last fall by researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health. The reason is that the brain has to overcome "inhibitions" it imposed on itself to stop doing the first task in the first place; it takes time, in effect, to take off the brakes. If you wait several seconds longer before switching tasks, the obstacles imposed by that shutting-off process are reduced.

--Managing two mental tasks at once reduces the brainpower available for either task, according to a study published in the journal NeuroImage. Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University asked subjects to listen to sentences while comparing two rotating objects. Even though these activities engage two different parts of the brain, the resources available for processing visual input dropped 29% if the subject was trying to listen at the same time. The brain activation for listening dropped 53% if the person was trying to process visual input at the same time.

"It doesn't mean you can't do several things at the same time," says Dr. Just, co-director of the university's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. "But we're kidding ourselves if we think we can do so without cost."

You can read the Wall Street Journal article by clicking here.

Clutter

From EurekAlert!:

No matter which channel you turn to on television, you are likely to find some kind of visual element that seems to overpower the screen--making it difficult to focus on one thing.

In the past few years, television stations have begun to reformat their screen presentations to include scrolling screens, sports scores, stock prices and current weather news. These visual elements are all designed to give viewers what they want when they want it.

However, Kansas State University professors Lori Bergen and Tom Grimes say that it's not working.

"Our conclusion has been that if you want people to understand the news better, then get that stuff off the screen," Grimes said. "Clean it up and get it off because it is simply making it more difficult for people to understand what the anchor is saying."

Grimes and Bergen are both associate professors of journalism and mass communications. They have collaborated with Deborah Potter, head of the Washington, D.C., research firm Newslab, in a study on distracting visual information. The study focused on viewers' ability to digest content in the presence of distracting information on the screen.

"We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don't have it on the screen," Grimes said. "Everything you see on the screen--the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast--are conflicting bits of information that don't hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message."

For their research, Bergen, Grimes and Potter conducted a series of four experiments that examined people's attention spans regarding complex and simple cognitive processes.

"The outcome of all of the experiments was that people were splitting their attention into too many parts to understand any of the content," Grimes said.

In 1990, Music Cable Television Network, or MTV, made its debut on cable television. Colorful graphics, young video jockeys and hip music seemed to be the key elements that captured viewer's attention.

Robert Pittman, who created MTV, attributed the station's success to the ability of viewers in their late teens and early 20s to process multiple facets of information simultaneously. In television, success brings imitation. When MTV's ratings soared, other stations began to adopt the presentation format. CNN's Headline News was one of the first to transform its screens to showcase more than just the anchor.

"When Mary Lynn Ryan, who was CNN's producer at the time, did this the news ratings skyrocketed," Grimes said. "So it appeared as though Robert Pittman was correct: if you are from 12-22 years old, your brain has learned how to process all these competing messages simultaneously, but people in their 30s and older have not learned how to do that."

Bergen, however, hypothesized that Pittman's theory was not correct. The way people process information is not something that can be learned--rather it is a matter of perceptual grouping.

"The human brain is today as it was in the 1880s, the 1580s and in the time of the Greeks and Romans. It has not changed," Grimes said. "We are no better able to parallel process conflicting information now than we were 300 years ago. So this notion that Pittman had that people have learned how to do that is nonsense."

That last paragraph is a fine rejoinder to inflated claims about the ability to "multitask" (i.e., lose one's concentration by attempting to focus on too many things at once).

You can read the rest of the article by clicking here. (Via 43 Folders.)

Percy Heath

From this morning's New York Times:

Percy Heath, whose forceful and buoyant bass playing anchored the Modern Jazz Quartet for its entire four-decade existence, died yesterday in Southampton, N.Y. He was 81 and lived in Montauk, on Long Island.

The cause of death was bone cancer, his family said.

Mr. Heath recorded with most of the leading musicians in modern jazz, including Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. But from the early 1950's through the middle 1970's, most of his recording activity and all of his live performances were devoted to the group known to its fans around the world as the M.J.Q.

You can read the Times obituary by clicking here. [Use mediajunkie as your name and password.]

Post-it history

From "Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes":

[T]he Post-it Note was more than just a practical tool--it was also a psychological one. Compared to the clunky machines of the 1980s that generated all those documents, it was a vision of high-tech minimalism. Its edges were sharp and square, with no ugly binding, no perforations, no metal rings. Its color, a subtle but attention-getting yellow, was somehow like the color of thought itself, a lightbulb going off in your head. Devoid of any other graphic elements, it had the effect of a clean, calming, blank screen. And, yet, for all its streamlined efficiency, it was playful and user-friendly . . . .

You can read the article by clicking here.