How many notes should a virtuoso

With Liszt, one no longer thinks of difficulty overcome; the instrument disappears and music reveals itself. In concerts, the virtuoso approaches each performance, each interpretation as a unique occasion — something I feel is increasingly hard for performers when high-quality recordings are so readily available, benchmarks by which pianistic prowess is measured and which lead audiences to expect a certain manner of playing in live concerts.

It is for this reason that many of us seek out the same virtuoso performers in the same repertoire, either on disc or in concert, to hear how their view of certain works changes and develops over time. Such performances, for me at least, may come across not as virtuosic but rather as academic, mannered or overly precious. The virtuoso takes risks in performance — by which I do not mean coming to the stage ill-prepared. Indeed, the most risk-tasking, vertiginous, exciting or profound performances are often the result of many long hours — nay, years — spent living with the music.

Even a flawed virtuoso performance can excite, delight and enthrall far more than a perfect non-virtuosic performance: technique over artistry nearly always fails to impress. Audiences know this too — these are the performances during which we enter a state of wonder, from which we emerge speechless, hardly able to put into words what we have just heard often the hardest concerts to review, in my experience!

The miracle of an aristocratic performance lies in its capacity to vaporize everything that surrounds it, and in particular all efforts to appropriate it. It includes the ability and willingness to tackle a wide range of repertoire. By which I do not mean playing a lot of pieces , as some younger performers feel they should be doing, but rather playing a broad range of music. One of the chief exponents of this art is, in my humble opinion, Maurizio Pollini.

That is true virtuosity. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address:. The red lines let the user know the notes PhotoScore has gleaned from the score add up to either too much or too little time to fit in the bar, according to the current time signature. After the misinterpretations above occurred when using the printed engine, we thought perhaps the hand-written engine would have better luck. However it was worse, which is probably fair enough given that the sheet music is generally very neat, and it seems it is just the aged condition of the items that is fooling the printed sheet music scanning engine.

So the technique of using PhotoScore necessitated a round of corrections before each page could be used. The ABC notation created in this way had its own issues. Occasionally PhotoScore would correctly or incorrectly annotate things with double voicing.

And this would really mess up the ABC notation. It still ended up being faster than transcribing by hand. We needed to take the note info within that data packet and send it to Reactronica so audio could be generated. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and is a system that was developed in the s to help electronic music instruments talk to each other. As computers started getting involved in the music sequencing, recording and making processes, MIDI also made its way into software.

ABCjs is in active development and, like many open-source projects, is not completely finished. Furthermore the author is working on it in their spare time, rather than doing it as a paid, full-time job. At the time we started developing Virtuoso, the MIDI pitches section of the note event was always blank. Consequently we wrote some rather complicated code that used other information in the note event about the positions of text snippets in the ABC notation string that the current notes are located at, and converts those snippets into the note format that Reactronica needs.

This code is certainly not perfect. It has to keep track of the key signature and ensure notes are being sharped, flatted or naturaled out accordingly, adjust note length if we are in the middle of a triplet, and so much more. There are currently many shortcomings such as not dealing with double flats or double sharps. We were very excited as it meant we could do away with our incomplete code and make a much simpler converter between the MIDI info and what Reactronica uses.

However our excitement was short-lived as it turned out the MIDI pitches data was not tied to the staff the notes belonged to. It was just a list of MIDI data for that moment in time. But in our songs we have staves which can be voiced by any of several instruments. Thus we need to know which staff each of the MIDI pitches belongs to, so we can send the note to the correct instrument.

We have let the author of ABCjs know this and hopefully the staff number will be added in a future release. At various points throughout this project we were lucky to be able to draw on the significant expertise of two staff members, Shari Amery and Meredith Lawn.

We owe them a great debt of gratitude for their input and keen ears. Shari helped us understand what some of the more obscure things on the sheet music were called. Later, she kindly provided a detailed list of issues, corrections and feedback for all of the songs — noticing amazingly small details, such as one note of a chord being out by a small amount in many places!

One of the things she noticed exposed a very tricky-to-find bug in our code, which was related to key changes that happened mid-staff — originally they were only applied to the notes for one bar, rather than for the rest of the line. Our experts also pointed out that the clarinet samples seemed to lag behind the other sounds when used together.

And, for playing quality alone, the virtuoso will opt for the modern one when asked which fiddle they would like to take home. These discordant findings emerge from experiments by Claudia Fritz, a researcher at the University of Paris, at an international violin competition in Indianapolis in She asked 21 musicians to play six different violins, three modern instruments and three by Italian maestros — one made by Guarneri del Gesu around , and two made in Antonio Stradivari's workshop around Fritz commandeered a large room, dimmed the lights and passed the violins in random order to the musicians, who had to wear welders' goggles and stand on the other side of a dividing curtain.

Each had time to play the six instruments and rank them according to their playability, projection, response and "tone colours", a measure of the quality of the sound. With welders' goggles, they could only see the outline of the instrument and not the identifying markings or decorations,' Fritz said.

To mask any telltale aroma from the old instruments, the chin rest on each was dabbed with perfume. Writing in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Fritz and her co-authors describe their findings as a "striking challenge to conventional wisdom".