Smooth Pebbles

Beethoven's 9th, on his 238th

Beethoven showed up 238 years ago today. No one else, no one else ...

My violin teacher used to tell me, "You paid for the whole bow; use all of it." Those violinists aren't wasting any bow money.

NB: earlier title said "Beethoven's 7th, on his 238th". I do know the difference! ... but had begun to post the 7th and changed my mind but not my title.

Musical Audition 2.0: Live, from Carnegie Hall, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra

Beautiful -- YouTube and Carnegie Hall are holding online auditions for the "world's' first collaborative online orchestra":

In short, YouTube is offering a new twist on the familiar formula of how to get to Carnegie Hall: Practice, practice, upload.

From the Washington Post, YouTube Announces Auditions for Its Own Symphony Orchestra

You can even download the score for the audition piece, "Internet Symphony No 1: Eroica."

Musical roller coasters

Some musico-video relief from darker matters.

First, from On an Overgrown Path:

Here is the Zurich Chamber Orchestra putting the usual YouTube offerings to shame. The full screen version is even better.

Zurich Chamber Orchestra : Roller Coaster
by mikropikol

Path also led me to nice piece on the Wall St. Journal on Anna-Sophie Mutter. To my ear, only Gidon Kremer comes close in wielding seemingly unlimited chops with a broad and deep music intelligence.

So what the heck. For video of Mutter & Kremer playing (separately), go below the jump:

Louis Armstrong & Johnny Cash A-Jammin'

The wonders of YouTube. Couple of highly distinctive voices here. Wonderful stuff.

Hat tip: kottke

Blackboard scribblings from Einstein & others

From "Bye-bye blackboard ... from Einstein and others," an exhibit at the Museum of the HIstory of Science in Oxford.

‘I wrote the music on this blackboard while I was giving a lecture about Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the Holywell Music Room on 22nd March this year, before performing them. I was trying to make a connection between Bach’s super-sensitivity to the contemporary styles around him – very very acute in this piece – and today’s musicians. There’s a lot of information in the Goldbergs – structure, harmony, a ladder of canons – and coded information we can only guess at – myths, cosmological allegories, and a soulful journey. It all starts with the bass line.’

Joanna MacGregor
Pianist

Unfortunately, MacGregor, who is a sort of Brian Eno of the British classical scene (indeed; she has collaborated with him), has not recorded the Goldberg Variations -- though she does have a nice recording of Bach's French Suites.

The blackboard exhibit is definitely worth a visit, as is the larger Museum of the History of Science website, which I hope to revisit here (and visit in person as well).

Ian McEwan's libretto

I like several of Ian McEwan's novels and especially admired his novel Saturday, which, being among other things a riff on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," updated that novel's m.o. by giving the stream of its narrator's narrative a decidely neuroscientific tint.

In another novel, Amsterdam, his protagonist is a somewhat pompous composer who, toward the end, is caught rather embarrassingly suspecting he is a genius even as he churns out a piece of career-wrecking unoriginality. "Genius," he dared think himself, and it proved otherwise.

I thought at the time the composer was partly a stand-in for the dangers of vanity and overassessment that face any artist. Now I learn that McEwan has written a libretto for an opera, For You, that examines the dangers of sexual jealousy.

Why So Serious? How the classical concert grew so stiff

Alex Ross, the New Yorker's wonderful music critic, on the strange and amusing history of how the classical music concert assumed its present form -- which, as he notes, often seems to constrain rather than unleash the music.

NYT Scientist at Work: A Young Surgeon-Pianist Who Performs with a Scalpel

For Claudius Conrad, a 30-year-old surgeon who has played the piano seriously since he was 5, music and medicine are entwined — from the academic realm down to the level of the fine-fingered dexterity required at the piano bench and the operating table.

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

IN TUNE Dr. Conrad, a pianist and surgeon, says that he works better when he listens to music and that music is helpful to patients.

“If I don’t play for a couple of days,” said Dr. Conrad, a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and music philosophy, “I cannot feel things as well in surgery. My hands are not as tender with the tissue. They are not as sensitive to the feedback that the tissue gives you.”

Like many surgeons, Dr. Conrad says he works better when he listens to music. And he cites studies, including some of his own, showing that music is helpful to patients as well — bringing relaxation and reducing blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones, pain and the need for pain medication.

But to the extent that music heals, how does it heal? The physiological pathways responsible have remained obscure, and the search for an underlying mechanism has moved slowly.

Now Dr. Conrad is trying to change that.
Technorati Tags: music, surgery, Mozart, Dobbs, Claudius Conrad

Pebbles I stumbled on this week (notables from the web)

A Chopin Nocturne...

from Derek Bownds' MindBlog by [email protected] (Deric)

Bownds blogs on neuro matters -- and, each week, posts a video of him playing a bit of classical music on his piano. Gotta like it.

FDA To Mine Big Databases For Safety Problems

from Pharmalot

The effort, called Sentinel Initiative,
will be the first time the FDA will have an opportunity to monitor
almost immediately how drugs are affecting the public. To do so, the
agency will mine databases of more than 20 million patients who receive
their drugs through Medicare. The idea, of course, is to catch side
effects that might otherwise go undetected for months or years.

Also covered at the Wall Street Journal Health Blog

A Musical Aptitude Section Of The Genome?

from Scientific Blogging - Neuroscience

Molecular and statistical genetic studies in 15 Finnish families have shown that there is a substantial genetic component in musical aptitude.

Musical aptitude was determined using three tests: a test for auditory structuring ability (Karma Music test), and the Seashore pitch and time discrimination subtests. The study represents the first systematic molecular genetic study that aims in the identification of candidate genes associated with musical aptitude.

File this under "Interesting if true" -- or what scientists call "needs replication."

As General Surgery Ranks Dwindle, Patients May Suffer

from WSJ.com: Health Blog by Sarah Rubenstein

Sexual Dysfunction On Anti-Depressants Higher Than Thought, Longer Lasting

from Furious Seasons by Philip Dawdy

Thanks to CL Psych who flagged this issue the other day and posted one academic paper acknowledging that not only are there weird problems such as genital anesthesia--such a polite term--connected with anti-depressant use in some cases, but that the rate of sexual dysfunction on the happy pills isn't very happy at all. In fact, it's much higher than doctors have commonly assumed and than pharma companies have been willing to admit.

Dawdy -- a fearless chronicler of others' and his own experience with depression and antidepressants -- notes that he himself experienced no sexual side-effects.

The shifting sands of the 'autism epidemic'

from Mind Hacks by vaughan

The Economist has a short but telling article on whether the so-called 'autism epidemic', occasionally touted in the media, may simply be a change in how developmental problems are diagnosed.

It covers a new study that did something really simple - it tracked down 38 people who, years ago, had been diagnosed with a delay in language and re-assessed them using the latest diagnostic interviews.