If you’re a software developer, or work in some intellectually demanding occupation, one that requires continued focus for a long time, and you don’t have the happy choice to work from your garden or even beach lounger, then I’m sure at some point you must have faced the problem that your environs are just too noisy.
Assuming you probably wouldn’t start a fight to make everyone shut-up and thereby induce a fear- or resentment-driven silence, I’ll take a punt and say you’ve donned your headphones and immersed yourself in your private music room. Let’s call it your own ‘cone of silence focus’, your own meditation room.
If you haven’t, let me tell you it’s an extremely powerful way of finding your concentration. [It sure depends on your choice of music, but de gustibus non est disputandum. If Heavy Metal works for you, I’m not going to question… (Indeed, I’m sure I’ve used it a few times)].
You crowd out outside noise, you listen to something that gives you pleasure, it may focus your thoughts and if you’re lucky even induce you into the zone. At least, that works for me.
Now, I know this is mainly a blog about technology: programming, a little bit of crypto and maths. But more than that, I think, it’s about the whole experience of being a developer in a technological world, with all that entails as a living person.
If you’re an engineer, a lecturer, or a portman, or driver, your profession is not your essence. It’s only what you do. And you can only be effective at that while you as a whole are centered, healthy and reasonably free of stress and personal problems. Then, the techniques that you use to achieve that become as integral to your professional success as your technical competence.
While this blog has been, so far, mostly technical with some detours over career progress, it should not really be strange to have posts about the environment that surrounds professionals outside of the technical skills.
So today, let me talk about music. Yes, let me talk about music, and what is my passion, classical (piano) music. (If you ever meet me and raise this topic, we could be in for a very long talk).
Musical Revelations
It happens a lot. I’m coding, or reading a research paper, or just thinking over some hard technical problem. Today, it was AZTEC’s specification and White Paper, and their whole approach to privacy on Ethereum (maybe a post for another day).
And there is a bit of noise around, even minimal, that throws my thoughts off, and makes me double back on what I’ve read several times. At those times, I immerse myself in my music world and take a temporary leave of absence from the world until someone visually calls me back.
In one of these escapades, I found today an amazing interpretation of Liszt’s La Campanella, that for 5 minutes, held my whole attention. It mesmerized and caused in me waves of novelty, emotion and excitement, in a piece I’ve known for years.
How had I never heard it so clear? How had I never heard the ‘bells’ in the right-hand so daringly and sensibly expressed? How had I ever missed all the drama in the left hand?
It’s not my fault, of course, all of those are artistic choices of the interpreter. But being for years ‘trained’ in the versions of Nikita Magaloff and Valentina Lisitsa, as I was listening today to Alice Sara Ott I found a whole new piece.
This happens a lot in classical music, and is why musicophiles tend to collect several versions of a piece. And occasionally I’ve had moments like these that stay in my mind forever, when I feel glued to my chair as if suddenly whisked in an accelerating Lamborghini.
The one I remember most vividly was when I saw Arkadi Volodos (I highly recommend him) live, playing an encore I never knew the name of. Another, was when I heard Liszt’s Chasse-neige played in an elimination round of a Young Pianists Competition.
Today’s was not a live experience, but still equally as powerful. Now, I confess I do not know Alice Sara Ott. I had only recently heard her playing Rachmaninoff and was not very impressed. But I was totally convinced when I heard her play this Campanella and decided to search for more of her music.
Music for Everyone
Now, despite its long history, in some sense Classical Music can be as esoteric and as little-accessible as blockchain.
Unlike the latter, though, I don’t think that’s due to difficulty inherent to the music, or relative obscurity. It’s more like a social construction, a product of a society that aggressively promotes and publicizes music for faster and much easier consumption.
But it is my belief that everyone can enjoy good classical music, even if they’re not musically trained or just don’t do it out of a habit. So in the rest of this post, I’ll share with you a few tidbits about La Campanella.
If you haven’t been introduced to classical music (or Speed Metal, for that matter), you may be amazed at how fast one can play sequences of notes. I am still bewildered every time I see a piano virtuoso flail their fingers and throw their arms around the piano in a gymnastics display that defies your own eyes.
But also let me say, that those who play these pieces are pretty much the Olympic Runners of the Piano, those who reached the pinnacle of technique mastery. So, don’t go away thinking every pianist can play this piece.
Liszt and Paganini
La Campanella is part of a set of pieces by Liszt called Grandes études de Paganini. But they are also named, with 12 other etudes by the same author, as Études d’exécution transcendante (d’après Paganini).
The French is close enough to English that the meaning should be clear, but what this means is that they require a transcendental level of execution. And although the word ‘transcendental’ may have many meanings (from philosophy to maths and even meditation), I feel the most appopriate meaning in the case of these études is simply beyond the normal limits of difficulty in the piano repertoire. In other words, among the most difficult pieces ever composed.
That of course is not surprising, given the pedigree of the piece. Franz Liszt and Niccolò Paganini are very similar figures in technical terms (not so personally, but that is a story for another day) in that they were superstars in their day that pre-figured the modern Rock Star in the levels of showmanship they displayed and hysteria they caused.
Moreso Liszt, probably, who caused such levels of euphoria in his audience that we have contemporary records speaking of women rending their clothes in his concerts and hiding cigarette butts in their cleavage.
They belong to different generations and mastered different instruments. Both were the foremost masters of their instrument (violin for Paganini, piano for Liszt) in their time; both wrote original music for their own concerts that no one else could play at the time; both greatly developed the techniques of their chosen instrument .
There is also a direct link between them. Liszt attended a concerto by Paganini at a young age and was so stupefied that he decided to become the equivalent master for the Piano. And that he surely did.
And although this post is not about Liszt himself, I can’t help sharing with you why I find him so unique and fascinating. He was a professional pianist touring Europe from the age of 12 (!); as a mature man, he was the king of concert halls for 10 years, mastering and manipulating audiences without regret; he moved in high society and lived maritally with a not-quite-divorced Polish princess for almost 20 years.
And still, before he was 50, he retired to a monastery in Rome and joined a Franciscan monastic order. A few years later, he received all the 4 minor orders of the Catholic Church, and became known as Abbé (ie Abbot) Liszt and dedicated himself to sacred music. He lived in a monastery for around 10 years, before returning to the world teaching master classes in Weimar and at the Budapest Music Academy, often for free.
He went from a life of indulgence to one of abstinence and dedication, embodying the extremes of the Romantic era. You can find more about this paradoxical and admirable man in this biography.
La Campanella
Among the many pieces that Liszt wrote, which are usually of a very high technical level, the Paganini and the Transcendental Études stand near the very peak.
Liszt even revised them in later editions (about 15 years later) to make them more accessible to other pianists. At least in the case of the Campanella, this results in a whole new and different piece with only some similarities.
The simplified versions are the ones usually played today, and that includes the one I am referring to in this post. They are all based in the music of Paganini, most of them on one or other of Paganini’s famous 24 Caprices, the most famous of which, the last one, was used by many other composers.
Check for example, the output of another famous Piano virtuosistic composer, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (you may have heard this before).
La Campanella is one of Liszt’s best known pieces and one of the most charming ones too. Études are usually training pieces, whose primary outward purpose is to provide an exercise around some specific technique.
We have to thank Chopin for developing them into such an art form with so high musicality as to make them performance pieces, so that some of them (eg Chopin’s, Liszt’s and Rachmaninoff’s) are indeed part of the standard repertoire.
The main focus of La Campanella is the trill, in the high register of the piano, often playing the melody underneath. That means, alternating very quickly the two outermost fingers with the right hand.
Not only are these the weakest fingers in the hand, which makes playing a decent volume harder than with the others, they are also connected by the same tendon, which makes them hard to play independently and quickly alternating them in a trill is just sadistic, but there you go, that’s what you get if you want to be a piano virtuoso.
And even for these, it is hard to play the long sequence of trills near the midpoint of the piece evenly, without slowing down or changing the volume of successive notes.
Most of the performances I know of this Étude focus almost entirely on the right hand, leaving the left as a mere accompaniment. And this is where Alice Sara Ott’s interpretation was so revealing to me.
The right hand, in the Campanella, plays a delicious melody (Paganini’s original theme) immitating a little bell, with octave jumps and repeated notes in the piano’s high register.
These are centered around the D# note, but there is a lot more going on and it is the responsibility of the pianist to play all of that while still emphasizing those crystal D# that reveal the bell even when stifled by the thunderstorm.
Alice Sara Ott does this with grace. She plays slower and more emotionally than other pianists, but only for emphasizing the lyricism of the piece. And she gives more relevance and presence to the left hand, both in the bass and in the middle register.
This gives this étude a whole new dimension. Lisitsa and Trifonov, for example, are very good but you come away with the feeling that nothing much happened or changed during the music except going over the obstacle course (Lisitsa) or playing beautifully delicately but a touch slower than others (Trifonov).
When I heard Ott playing it for the first time, I felt drama. I heard pace changes with slower rubato passages that revealed an emotion beyond that of a technical exercice; an emphasis on the high D# I had never heard before, as a bell in a distant sinking ship that keeps playing until it submerges; a flawless articulation and solid stable trills; and a bass accompaniment that excited and roused me, that kept me guessing as to how much it wanted to take attention from the right hand.
This dynamic left hand transforms the piece into much more than a cute and pleasant-sounding exercise.
It is probable I’ll find other versions of La Campanella that I really love. New pianists come and go, with new ideas. Some times, I prefer the comfort of the old ones. Sometimes, I’m raptured by some exciting new approach.
They are all part of a Journey to take pleasure from a piece. Mine started when I heard it played by Ingeborg Baldaszti in a Portuguese late night show. For now, I’m with Alice Sara Ott. Who knows when I’ll find someone who can sing this music even more to me?
Back to Reality
Wow! The above surely is new for this blog. I guess I have never written so much about music in a public forum, and certainly not in a tech blog. It felt like an excursion to another reality, a dimension outside of the normal world of this blog. A step into the mythical otherworld, if you like.
But is this not part of us? When we are in the zone working, are we not in some other place where the real world of colleagues, office noise, distractions and politics appear as clouded and muffled by some veil?
Have you ever felt that you typed to the rhythm of the music you were listening to, with each key stroke and thought falling in place with the next beat? Did you not feel like typing a solution that was magically arranged in your head and made complete sense?
I’ve felt this on occasion, and I think music has that concentrating power that can evoke this magic regularly. But even if you use it as a concentrating tool, don’t forget who you are, and that whoever made that music made it for some other purpose than your code.
If you find true beauty when listening to music while working, stop as soon as your immediate thoughts are done and contemplate what you have heard.
Learn about the context that nurtured that piece, the people that created it and its significance for them and for the world. Integrate that within you, accept its gift and how it can enrich you as a human being. And then, go back to being a great professional.
Listening to music is an integral part of how I study, do research or code. Not all the time, but still a significant part of it. It is also inevitably something that makes me tick. If you’ve read this far, I suppose that is interesting to you as well.
If you liked this post and would like to read more of this kind, let me know. Comment or contact me about it, I’ll be happy to reply and maybe share some more musical stories.
Farewell and happy listening.