Wherever I have been, I am back
The piano and myself
So a thing happened in the wake of the music festival last spring, the correct response to which was for me to walk away from my piano lessons. I won’t go into detail about what happened because, given the circumstances, it would be punching down. Suffice to say, a thing happened, it was some petty bullshit, and I was right to nope out of it.
Simple enough—unpleasant situation, extricate myself therefrom—except that it hit me far harder than I expected it to, and I’ve been taking much of the time since to figure out why. Part of it was simple exhaustion. Part of it was that I’d invested myself so thoroughly in the process that walking away from the piano stuff felt akin to ego death. And there were some uncomfortable parallels with the last time I’d invested myself so thoroughly in something: my PhD program, which I walked away from in 1999. (I haven’t felt at liberty to discuss that either, though not because I’d be punching down. Let’s just say I’m very much aware of which of my former professors are still alive.)
Anyway, I’ve been trying to figure out where to go on the piano front since then. While I was upset in the immediate aftermath, I was also, unexpectedly, relieved—a sign that I’d been pushing myself too hard for too long. The structure imposed by having to work on something for each weekly lesson stole time from a lot of other things. After nearly two years of that, I felt a bit out of balance. Re-establishing that practice regimen, but at a more sustainable level, and without dwelling on the disappointment while at the keyboard, has been a challenge.
While this was happening, I heard the news that the pianist Alfred Brendel died at the age of 94. I was familiar with Brendel, since he focused on a lot of the music I was interested in; if I searched for something by Beethoven or Schubert on Apple Classical, particularly if it was one of their more off-the-beaten-track compositions, it was often one of his recordings that came up. (He was the first, apparently, to record Beethoven’s entire piano repertoire.)
His obituaries, however—see appreciations at The Critic, Gramophone and Piano Street—revealed him as a bit of a polymath: among other things, he painted and wrote poems and essays (I’d actually read a collection of the latter). As the Times obituary put it: “Yet where a pianist such as Vladimir Horowitz had two topics of conversation, the piano and himself, Brendel had his vast hinterland—coupled with his anarchic spirit—to fall back on during difficult times.” I liked and identified with that.
It also turned out that Brendel was largely self-taught: there were lessons, but apparently intermittent, and done by the age of 16; after that he worked on everything more or less on his own. Reading that a few weeks after walking away from my own lessons was a comfort. Here was precedent: I didn’t have to take lessons to pursue my piano goals. And in any event I’d started to lose sight of what those goals had been at the outset: they did not necessarily include getting an ARCT, and certainly didn’t involve entering competitions or turning yet another passion into yet another side hustle.
So, inspired a bit by Brendel’s example (polymath, autodidact—two of my favourite words in any event), I’ve been working at recapturing just what it is I’m trying to accomplish at the piano. Watching livestreams of the Chopin Competition did a lot to rekindle the joy. And reading books about amateur playing, like Charles Cooke’s Playing the Piano for Pleasure (1941) and Alan Rusbridger’s Play It Again (2013), helped remind me what it is I’m trying to do. And I’ve been practicing—not as much as I used to, not enough, but it’ll do for now.
Criticism and reviewing, the decline and fall thereof
Earlier this year, the Associated Press stopped providing book reviews, the New York Times reassigned a bunch of its critics, and the Future of Reviewing was Called into Question.
The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, a film critic, offers a defence of the traditional review—in part by comparing a reviewer’s relative independence with what takes its place: content produced by vested interests, as part of a marketing plan. Norman Lebrecht, writing in The Critic about classical music criticism, worries about the loss of reviewers’ influence. But Molly Templeton at Reactor points out that critics have been fretting about the state of reviewing for decades; it’s existential this time because it’s not just the decline of reviewing, it’s the decline of the newspapers and periodicals that printed them, of local media, of everything. And New York magazine seems to be invoking Betteridge’s law of headlines with the title of Charlotte Klein’s piece, “Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism?”
The consensus of the people I spoke to was that stand-alone reviews just don’t generate traffic, and reviews of more niche art forms, like an independent film or a string-quartet performance, are even harder sells. [...] But the vast majority of reviews go virtually unread.
Part of the problem is that reviews now float amid millions of other pieces of similar content on the web instead of being part of a bundle that you used to get on your doorstep, which allowed a reader to serendipitously stumble upon a piece of criticism they otherwise wouldn’t have sought out.
If you’re comparing the content you want to preserve to Brussels sprouts, because you think people will love Brussels sprouts if they can only be manipulated into trying them—and Klein quotes an art critic literally making that actual analogy in this piece—you’re probably not winning. That reviews don’t generate traffic matches my own experience, both on my own websites and when reviewing for online publications. But I doubt this is new. To thrash on her interviewee’s analogy a bit: people were being served Brussels sprouts for a long time, but they weren’t necessarily eating them. It’s just that now we know they aren’t. Metrics have ruined so many things.
I’m still reviewing, though
Reviews on The Map Room since my last newsletter: Telling Stories with Maps by Allen Carroll; Earth Shapers by Maxim Samson; and GeoAI ed. by Chivite, Giner and Artz.
Miscellany
(It’s been a few months, so these have been accumulating.)
“Theo Jansen is engaged in creating new forms of life: the so called strandbeests. Skeletons made from yellow plastic tube (Dutch electricity pipe) are able to walk and get their energy from the wind.”
Sesame Street Fever (1978). Exactly what you think it sounds like. We actually had this record.
Goodnight Meade, Goodnight Orion: telescope makers Orion and Meade have ceased operations.
The invasive Burmese python species problem in south Florida is such that progress is measured in tons of snake removed. Guardian story.
Fast Company tracks the rise of Field Notes pocket notebooks from side gig to cult item. I haven’t used Field Notes myself since their paper is apparently not very good with fountain pen inks, but there are alternatives that are; in fact there’s a whole ecosystem growing around the 3½×5½-inch notebook format.
In 1996 the Sailor Pen Company flirted with a then-trendy pseudoscience, releasing fountain pens “infused” with “hado energy.”
The Walrus profiles “Canada’s most stubborn publisher,” Gaspereau Press (which some of you might remember from when The Sentimentalists won the Giller).
Dan Sinker visits the Stamp King. “The first thing you should know about The Stamp King, the last stamp dealer in the city of Chicago, is that it is exactly what you imagine it would be: chaotic and jumbled, a space navigable by exactly one person, the Stamp King himself.”
Yes, you can store data on a bird. “Specifically, he converted a PNG sketch of a bird into an audio waveform, then tried to embed it in the song memory of a young starling, ready for later retrieval as an image.”
“Yagawa Mitsunori, the 73-year-old Hiroshima-based tuner, has brought seven A-bombed pianos back to life so far. Their original owners, who also survived the blast, donated them to Yagawa after they learned he had been refurbishing old pianos to donate to civic organizations. They trusted him to use their instruments for a good cause.”
Bhutan’s playable stamps: “Issued in 1972 in a set of seven, the stamps are miniature, one-sided, 33⅓ rpm vinyl records playable on a standard turntable. You peeled off the backing paper and stuck them on an envelope or postcard. Content includes Bhutanese folk songs and histories of the country in English and Dzongkha, the local language.”
Evergreen
Gawker, June 2022: I should be able to mute America. “Why? Because America has no chill. America is exhausting. America is incapable of letting something be simply funny instead of a dread portent of their apocalyptic present. America is ruining the internet.”