Technique? Practice? Vision? Talent?

From technique, practice, vision, and talent sprouts only the artist, not the professional.

The question remains: What does it take to be a professional artist?

Persistence. Ambition. Love of the art. Indifference to wealth. An ascetic lifestyle. And especially: a roaring tolerance for rejection. 

The Pianobabbler recently saw Every Little Step. Moving. Entertatining. Gripping. Saturated with talent. 

This documentary follows the auditions for the 2006 revival of the 1976 Broadway musical A Chorus Line. From thousands of supplicants, the producers had to extract seventeen. 

Each role demanded Olympian singing, ...

 

There are lots of books and articles out there about perfectionism, but they are all a little biased. Specifically, they all deal with how not to be a perfectionist. That’s all fine and dandy, but what about all those poor underrepresented souls who want some advice on how to become a more perfect perfectionist? Well, here it is.
 

Perfectionism defined

Perfectionism has been defined as “the setting of excessively high standards of performance in conjunction with a tendency to make overly critical self-evaluations” (Frost, Marten, Lahart, & Rosenblate, 1990).

Well, do you think you have what it takes? Like anything else, becoming a true hard-core perfectionist takes a lot of hard work, dedication, ...

I have had the very good fortune of studying with some of the truly great musicians and teachers possible. I’ll begin at the beginning (please read my first blog for more background about my childhood and my family).

My father, ELMER SETZER: I started violin at the age of 5 with my dad, who was not only an excellent violinist, a member of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1949-91, but also had earned the reputation of being one of the best teachers of beginning violin students. I was very young, but I do remember him showing me how to hold the violin and bow, all the basic training exercises and how to read music correctly, both in terms of the pitches and the rhythms. He taught me how to get a nice sound instead of the usual sound ...

I often have wild ideas that people think I'll just give up on or forget but they're wrong.  "The Illharmonic Rockestra" is a cheesy gimmicky dream that I've had for a while and I think could be real and successful.  I dream of an orchestra my non music literate friends can have fun seeing and listening to.  An orchestra that plays not arrangements of "popular" music but artistic renditions, re-realizations, remixes, and originals that prominantly display the 2nd and 4th beat of 4/4 time.  Maybe by adding backbeats to loved tunes or classicizing music with backbeats.  I want the eurocentric orchestra to have an american groove like all the hip hop synth orchestra samples, ...

As tweeted by Chris Richards (@8bbAdvocate), here are all 504 submissions to eighth blackbird's comp comp.



Oh holy hell. I do not envy their job one bit.

Postmodernism, as it flourished in my salad days, had many characteristics, but the most telling was the employment of a new kind of dissonance: the dissonance of incongruent styles.  Postmodern music reveled in sequences of unrelated ideas, jolting the listener from any sense of meaningful continuity.  Following the single-mindedness of much post-tonal and minimalist music, it was a breath of fresh air.

After a while, though, the jolt, like any esthetic jolt, had less and less of an impact.  By the time we got to the end of the XX century, these juxtapositions felt merely like life as we lived it — no more jarring than the daily, surreal shifts of international banking or political polls.

At that point, some of us ...

Music@Menlo broke new ground on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Menlo Park, as the Emerson String Quartet inaugurated the festival’s new winter series. A long-time consideration, the winter series now provides summer festival audiences with performances during the year, programmed and directed by the festival, and presented with Music@Menlo’s signature quality and integrity.

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in David’s words…
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What a thrilling day it was for me and Wu Han, and for the entire Music@Menlo community, to open a new chapter in the festival’s history. The possibility of a winter series had been ...

Having spent the last two weeks at the Bard Music Festival, where the focus this summer has been on Alban Berg and His World, I feel immersed in the atmosphere of the Second Viennese School. My wife, the cellist Roberta Cooper, has performed chamber music as well as orchestral works by many of the major composers of the first half of the 20th century, preceded by a fascinating opera by Franz Schreker, “Der Ferne Klang.” This is all good preparation for the upcoming Emerson Quartet tour of Europe, where we will play music by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Roberta will join the Emerson in two performances of Schoenberg’s intensely romantic sextet, “Verklaerte Nacht. ...

The financial outlook is grim across the nation for arts organizations. One glimpse at recent headlines for Washington Ballet and Detroit Symphony will serve as a sobering reminder. Citing financial constraints, the Washington Ballet will substitute canned music for the pit orchestra, at least for the duration of the 2010/11 season, beginning with the opening production of "Romeo and Juliet" at Kennedy Center Theater, and later, to include "The Nutcracker".

The Detroit Symphony is on Day One of a strike, and as I see it, plunging headlong to its own demise. Detroit, a financially beleaguered city with a population of 800,000 can no longer sustain a "top-tier symphony" (translation: overpaid) with a 52 week season. And the players, ...