The ephemerality of transitional technology
So what’s on my plate this month, now that the holidays are over and we’ve recuperated from that respiratory illness that lingered about three times longer than it should have?
The website redesign is almost done. I still have to settle on a layout for the front page, and then it’s a matter of optimizing the CSS (especially for mobile devices), making sure old pages redirect to the new ones, that sort of thing. It’s an interesting experience, writing pages by hand again: it’ll never be as polished or as perfect or as easy as simply dropping in a professionally designed theme, but damned if I don’t learn something each day I plug away at it.
Meanwhile, the local music festival isn’t until April, but it’s already starting to loom on the horizon. I’m involved in two ways: performing on my own, which is something I’ve never done before at a festival, and accompanying voice students on piano, which is something I did for the first time last year. By tomorrow I ought to have a final list of which pieces those students will be performing, though I’ve been practicing their repertoire for months already. There are pianists who can accompany singers at the drop of a hat, with very little preparation: I am not one of those pianists. At least not yet. I’m still new at this and I have to practice. As for my own pieces, we’ll determine which ones (and to a certain extent, whether) by the end of next month. Watch this space.
Either way, I have to spend a lot of time at the piano. It got tuned last month but once again does not seem to have enjoyed it: it’s acquired a buzziness that last time didn’t resolve itself until spring (so it may be a winter thing), but you won’t hear it unless you’re at the keyboard.
And speaking of keyboards ...
#typewriters
Obsolescence is unevenly distributed
The latest typewriter to turn up on our doorstep (quite literally: when people find out you’re into old typewriters they hand them to you like zucchini) and somehow the only one to be acquired in 2024 is a Smith-Corona Vantage. This is a portable electric typewriter that uses a Selectric-like “golfball” typing element, so it dates from the late 1970s, after IBM’s Selectric patent had expired. Unlike the Selectric, and probably because it’s so much smaller, the carriage still moves back and forth as you type.
Now the thing about the Vantage is that it isn’t really a Smith-Corona: near as I can tell, it’s a rebadged Olivetti Lexicon 82/83, built in Olivetti’s Glasgow factory and full of 70s-era Olivetti design hallmarks—dig those square keycaps!—and uses Olivetti typeballs and Olivetti ribbon cartridges. That is, if you can find them. Compatible typeballs might theoretically pop up on eBay, but the real problem is, as you might have guessed, the ribbon cartridges: they’re proprietary and they don’t make ’em any more. You can still find (proprietary) cartridges for other models of electric and electronic typewriters; I guess the 82/83/Vantage didn’t sell enough, or last long enough, for it to be worthwhile to keep making some for them. The cartridge this typewriter came with is absolutely spent, so even if this thing types, and it appears to, barring some hack we can’t really use it.
This might be the youngest typewriter model in our collection, but it’s the first to go obsolete, for want of a compatible ribbon. We have operational typewriters from the 1930s that take universal typewriter ribbon spools still in production today. We have a rusty old Underwood No. 3 from 1917 that despite age and cruft looks like it can be made to run again, and when it does it will take those universal ribbon spools—because today’s universal ribbon spools and Underwood ribbon spools from that era are one and the same. A lot could be said about the ephemerality of transitional tech: the formats that ostensibly improved on the old and stable, but did not graduate to becoming the new stable.
#music
Back to Beethoven, part two
There’s something about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that inspires filmmakers to make documentaries exploring its contemporary meaning and relevance. They all follow a similar formula: interviewing disparate people around the globe, some of whose relationship to the Ninth is a bit tenuous, feeling for different parts of the elephant before—eventually—arriving at a reasonable approximation of the filmmaker’s point. This was certainly the case with Kerry Candaele’s Following the Ninth (2013); Christian Berger’s Beethoven’s Ninth: Symphony for the World (2020) was a bit more focused, arguing for the Ninth’s universality across continents, cultures and socioeconomic strata through the musicians who perform it.
Most discursive of all is the most recent: Larry Weinstein’s Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity (2024), which recently dropped on TVO and on the TVODocs YouTube channel. But it’s also the most ambitious: it tries to say something about Beethoven’s Enlightenment and humanist ideas and where they stand today. Though it does so with the lightest of brushes (and by bringing in the pop-culturiest of pop-culture philosophers). It’s a study in contrasts: Beethoven composing a hymn to joy and togetherness despite chronic pain, deafness and loneliness—to say nothing of living in the police state that was Metternich’s Austria; conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson performing that music with an orchestra of Ukrainian musicians formed after the Russian invasion in 2022; Weinstein himself, suddenly in front of his own camera, struggling to make a film about that music while waiting for word on his sister, a casualty of the Israel-Gaza conflict. The struggle to find humanity in spite of everything—music in the darkness—is the crux of this film. In other words: Joy, despite.
Whoops! Classical improvisation is a thing
In my last missive I called extemporization in classical music a lost art. Not quite true: thanks to an episode of Ben Laude’s Chopin Podcast, I’ve since learned about improvisational classical pianists like Gabriela Montero and Noam Sivan. Montero dared to improvise during the 1995 Chopin competition (she came third); Sivan offers a master’s in piano improvisation.
#links
The time Vladimir Horowitz played for Jimmy Carter at the White House [YouTube, 68m]. Looking at this from the age of virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake, I’m frankly impressed that Horowitz includes pieces that aren’t fiendishly difficult: I mean, I can more or less play three of these.
CBC PEI on the fate of old, unwanted upright pianos, which can’t even be given away. Pianos have a lifespan, unfortunately, and the cost of restoring an old piano usually far exceeds its value—assuming it even can be restored. (There’s a reason “grandma’s piano” is a pejorative among piano people: see this article at Piano Buyer.)
The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane has gone down the risotto rabbit hole. “I would wander the earth, seeking out one risotto after another, in search of the ideal. Forty years later, the folly has worsened, and the quest goes on.” Now I thought I knew risotto—I’ve been making it for decades—but I Learned Things here.
A Stranger Quest [Vimeo, 90m] is a documentary about map collector David Rumsey, who has spent decades digitizing his enormous collection; and like that collection it’s now freely available online. And let me tell you, it’s a trip: read my impressions on The Map Room.
When women join a profession or group in significant numbers, men head for the exits, and the profession or group is subsequently devalued. It’s called male flight, and Celeste Davis argues that it’s happening in university enrollment too.
The Grauniad on the feline equivalent of the Wilhelm scream.
Cambridge Typewriter is closing its doors at the end of March: the owner is retiring and couldn’t find a buyer for the shop. Boston Globe, CBS, MassLive.
My cousin Jennifer Burgess has started a podcast: The Reader’s Museum looks at objects in beloved novels, with the first two episodes exploring how novels and telegrams turn up in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Apple Podcasts, Spotify.