And now Brett does Wolfie

Think about it, seriously, the history, the cross-currents. 

We've got European high-classical from the 18th century being bred with contemporary American hip-hop, which is African-America. Mozart was in flower at the time when Africans were being enslaved and taken to the Americas. Three centuries later, hip-hop, and everyone's doing it. In this case, a pair of Australian-Chinese classical musicians.

The mind boggles.

TwoSet's back! Umm, errr...Bach!

TwoSetViolin: "Bradley Cooper didn't practice 40 hours!"

How TwoSet Violin is shaking up classical music

Kidz these days: 2-Set phonks up the classics

Paganini Caprice No. 24 on electric bass [Ling Ling 40 hours!]

At about 0:24 CharlesBerthoud mentions that he learned this piece by practicing 40 hours a day. That is impossible as a day only has 24 hours. Berthoud is undoubtedly alluding to a mythical violin virtuoso named Ling Ling, who is the creation of TwoSetViolin. I've collected other versions of Pag24 in this post.

Born to Groove, Kids and Music 2: Prodigies R’ Us

Prodigy: a person, especially a young one, endowed with exceptional qualities or abilities. That’s what the dictionary says. Not all fields have them, but them seem especially prevalent in chess, math, and music. And YouTube has plenty of musical prodigies.

Perhaps you’re looking for a violinist, a contemporary Yehudi Menuhin, or a pianist, a Mozart. Soon enough. Here’s Nandi Bushell, a drummer:

She’s got showmanship too, twirling her drumsticks. She’s just one of I don’t know how many excellent child drummers on YouTube.

Here’s a six-year old who goes by the name of Miumiu Guitargirl. She’s primarily a guitar player, but she also plays drums, bass, and sings too.

Mozart couldn’t have done that, the technology didn’t exist.

But he could have performed this. He wrote it. Mysin Elisei plays Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23:

How good is the performance? I don’t really know. I’m not familiar with the piece. But I suspect that someone more attuned to classical piano could tell that the performer is not a seasoned professional. It’s doesn’t quite matter though. The child is a remarkable musician.

Even if I didn’t see her the next performer (no name is given) I could tell that this is not an adult. Her voice sounds strained at times, and thin. And I know this aria well enough to know that she misses some slurred triplet figures about two-thirds of the way through (about 2:01).

But she’s committed. As you may recognize, she’s singing “Der Hölle Rache” from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), a notoriously difficult piece which goes unusually high, even for an operatic soprano. The Queen of the Night sings this while she’s urging her daughter to kill the high priest, Sarastro, hence the girl’s dramatic gestures. Play acting? Sure, it’s opera.

Now...now we have some young violin prodigies. They’re presented by TwoSetViolin, a pair of professional violinists, Brett Yang and Eddie Chen, who have been on YouTube since 2013. What they do is difficult to describe, but they present classical music, with a particular emphasis on violin. They’re comic and have invented a mythical super-violinist named Ling Ling, who practices 40 hours a day. In some episodes they mock televised talent contests, with particular mockery reserved for violinists who claim to play the fastest version of “Flight of the Bumblebee.” In other episodes they’ll watch actors playing violinists in this or that drama and remark on how authentic their performances are.

And they often feature violin prodigies. In this episode we have five, aged 10, 12, 7, 13, and 10, respectively (totaling 52). Brett and Eddie listen to their performances without seeing them. They then guess their ages. When they’re heard all five they add up their scores; the one whose total comes closest to the correct total is declared the winner in this mock contest. The winner then gets to pick a piece that the looser must attempt to perform. The piece must be one of those performed by the prodigies.

Here they go:

Notice their reactions to the playing. It’s a complex juggling act in which they appreciate and acknowledge the abilities of these children and deal with anxieties about their own playing – they are, after all, trained professionals. They are good, but not THAT good. Notice that they tend to over-estimate to over-estimate the ages. They also make interesting comments on the performances, things you might not notice unless you were a violinist.

Prodigy-hood is a well worn cultural trope. These kids are super-human and we are not worthy. Brett and Eddie are playing with that trope and thereby naturalizing the prodigies and reclaiming their own musicianship.

Here’s another TwoSet video, but there are no prodigies in this one. Rather, Brett and Eddie perform Paganini’s well-known Caprice 24, which I first heard as Rachmaninoff had transformed it into Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. It is a set of variations, each 16 bars long. Brett and Eddie split the first eight bars of each variation, and then Hillary Hahn plays the last eight. Hahn, of course, is a first tier soloist who was once a prodigy.

There’s a catch. They perform while spinning hula hoops. Brett explains, looking at Eddie: “What’s gonna happen is I’ll play the first part, you repeat it, and Hilary can get the hard parts.” Brett: “Sounds good to me.” They chat a bit, Hillary gets her hoop spinning, the guys catch up, and then Eddie starts. A split second after Hillary starts playing Eddie’s jaw drops and the audience yells their appreciation. She finishes, stops, there’s laughter and applause, she repeats her part. The skill difference obvious. Which is only part of the point; remember, they’re all spinning hula hoops.

Paganini 24 Hula Hoop (with Hilary Hahn) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOjO4ekcJQA

The performance goes on. They generally pause just a bit after each variation. Eddie almost drops his hoop at one point (c. 2:59). Hillary does drop hers (c. 4:27) – while Brett had moved on to the next variation. They soldier on – if that’s the phrase, perhaps “clown on through” – and finish to much laughter and applause. But, you know, they’re not clowning, not deliberately. They work the performance as well as they can. But the conjunction of virtuoso fiddling with hula hooping is so endearingly demanding that comedy is inevitable.

And what of childhood and prodigies? Try to imagine that last performance where, instead of Hillary Hahn, we have any of the violin prodigies from the previous video. It wouldn’t work very well, perhaps not at all. Hillary Hahn can give herself to the performance as an adult in a way that none of the children could, not even the oldest. Hahn has a place in the world and is secure in it, as are Brett and Eddie. Her participation allows us all to affirm that we are in this together. The prodigies are still growing. In that context performance their childhood still sets them apart, it may even exaggerate the distance.

That is the danger of prodigious ability at an early age. It can be off-putting and isolating. When Brett and Eddie react to the prodigies in the first video they are reacting to performances. There is no interaction between them and the performances. In the second video, the three perform together, in the same space, before the same audience and ultimately to the same applause. Yes, the audiences reacts to Hahn differently then she reacts to Brett and Eddie; no one is surprised about that. Think of that surprise and laughter as a gift, from her to them in some sense, but really, from them to us all.

Prodigy Bonus

In this video we see TwoSet follow the progress of YoEun Seol from 2 years and 8 months to 4 years.

Here we see her on television with Henry Lau, who has done a series of videos with young musicians. She’s eight years old. Notice that he fixes some food for her at about three minutes in.

Note: Part one in this series: Three examples.

TwoSet Violin – In synch and holding it in

I’ve been watching a lot of TwoSet Violin recently and wanted to bring two rather different videos to your attention. The title of the first is self-explanatory as, I suppose, the title of the second as well.

2 Boys 1 Violin

The premise is simple. One plays the violin with two hands, but do both hands have to belong to the same violinist? Not necessarily. In this video Brett and Eddy divide the execution chores between: one of them fingers the violin while the other wields the bow. They switch tasks back and forth between them from one composition to the next. The result is surprisingly good?

But what’s surprising about it? They’re both excellent musicians and, as such, have had a great deal of experience making music with other musicians. That requires close coordination. When playing in the violin section of an orchestra, all violinists in the section must necessarily play the same notes at the same time and with the same phrasing. That requires, among other things, that their left hands move along the fingerboards in the same way and that their right hands execute bowing motions in the same way. From that point of view it is an accident of physical circumstance that, for each violin, the fingering hand and the bowing hand happen to be attached to the same violinist. But that’s not a matter of logical necessity, only physical structure.

From my notes:

A number of years ago I saw a TV program on the special effects of the Star Wars trilogy. One of the things the program explained was how the Jabba the Hutt puppet was manipulated. There were, I think, perhaps a half dozen operators for the puppet, one for the eyes, one for the mouth, one for the tail, etc. Each had a TV monitor which showed him what Jabba was doing, all of Jabba, not just their little chunk of Jabba. So each could see the whole, but manipulate only a part. Of course, each had to manipulate his part so it blended seamlessly with the movements of the other parts. So each needed to see the whole to do that. That seems to me a very concrete analogy to what musicians have to do. Each plays only a part in the whole, but can hear the whole. [Here’s an old post spun out of this observation.]

In the case of these TwoSet performances we have, 1) a single violin instead of an elaborate electromechanical special effects puppet, and 2) Brett and Eddy instead of a team of half a dozen puppet operators. But the underlying principle is much the same.

In this video TwoSet in effect takes us behind the scenes two show us how this puppet (that is, the violin) is operated. What we see is, in effect, a single mind operating this strange double-body. Well, not quite. Their coordination isn’t perfect. For one thing, they aren’t the same height, and that causes problems here and there. And it seems that in at least one passage, they didn’t use the same fingering so bowing and fingering went haywire for awhile. Still, if they worked at it 40 hours a day, like Ling Ling, who doubts that they could blend the motions seamlessly?

BTS - Mic Drop Violin + MOST DIFFICULT JOHN CAGE

Here they did violin covers suggested by fans. They begin with a medley of Mary Had a Little Lamb and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, with elaborations, and then onto BTS’ Mic Drop, which I’m not at all familiar with; Eddie dances, and both of them fiddle around, throwing in some classical references. And then they arrive at the MOST DIFFICULT JOHN CAGE at 07:00. You can imagine what that is.

Yes, 4’33”. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

4′33″ (pronounced "four minutes, thirty-three seconds" or just "four thirty-three")[1] is a three-movement composition by American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1952, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs the performer(s) not to play their instrument(s) during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. The piece consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, although it is commonly perceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence". The title of the piece refers to the total length in minutes and seconds of a given performance, 4′33″ being the total length of the first public performance.

Conceived around 1947–48, while the composer was working on Sonatas and Interludes, 4′33″ became for Cage the epitome of his idea that any sounds may constitute music. It was also a reflection of the influence of Zen Buddhism, which Cage had studied since the late 1940s. In a 1982 interview, and on numerous other occasions, Cage stated that 4′33″ was, in his opinion, his most important work.[9] The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes 4′33″ as Cage's "most famous and controversial creation".

And that it is, but it is not difficult in the sense that the word ordinarily has in reference to music, where it indicates technical difficulty. On the contrary, this piece is very easy to execute. The performers just sit or stand there doing nothing. It has a fairly extensive performance history.

Brett and Eddy make an elaborate show of not making any music (in the ordinary sense of the word). While they’re not making music – though Eddie does take violin in hand and is clearly fighting the temptation to play it while Brett stares at the ceiling – we see a digital clock counting out the minutes and seconds. Are they really going to stretch this nonsense out the whole four minutes and thirty-three seconds? Yes, it seems, they are. And they do. From about 04:15 to the end they are visibly suppressing the sounds of laughter, which breaks out at 04:33.

At this point I’m not sure what to say. I’ve known about this piece for decades. I don’t think I’ve ever attended a live performance of it, nor, for that matter, do I recall watching any other version on YouTube, though I’ve certainly come across them. Cage’s first book of essays, Silence, was very important to me in my undergraduate years, so I’ve got some understanding of and appreciation of the milieu surrounding Cage. A family friend, Jon Barlow, taught at Wesleyan University, where Cage had an affiliation. In the late 1990s when I was researching my book on music I visited Jon at Wesleyan and we performed one of Cage’s compositions. While it was only scored for piano, it was fundamentally improvisational in character and I was quite happy to play it with Jon (I play trumpet).

But all that’s incidental. It’s just my personal history, which now includes watching this video. I suppose there’s something to be said about the cultural trajectory that led from John Cage conceptualizing that piece in 1952 to TwoSet’s 2018 YouTube video. But that trajectory is a very diffuse one. It’s not as though there’s a single line of musical development that connects these two. In fact, one could reasonably say that there is no line of musical development between them at all. 4’33” is simply one piece of cultural material available to TwoSet, like Mary Had a Little Lamb, or Mic Drop.

Hilary Hahn on daydreaming as a mode of practicing music, of priming yourself to go with the flow in performance

Some time in the last week I discovered TwoSet Violin, a YouTube channel for two Australian violinists, Brett Yang and Eddy Chen. They are classically trained and are perhaps the most interesting musical comedians since Victor Borge – though admittedly, musical comedy, in the sense of comedy acts organized around musical performance, is a scarcely populated genre. They’ve done a number of videos with Hilary Hahn, the classical violinist, who has also performed with them in some live concerts.

The following video is an hour and a half of conversation between the three of them. It starts off with chit-chat about being a performer, the logistics of touring, this that and the other, and then hits pay dirt when Hilary talks about daydreaming when she practices.

Of course, I know about daydreaming. And I know about daydreaming while practicing, too (I’m a semi-virtuoso jazz trumpeter). But daydreaming is something that’s been extensively studied, in one way or another, by contemporary neuroscience, and is associated with a complex of neuro-functional areas known as the default mode network (which I’ve blogged about). So I’ve transcribed some of that conversation below.

Starting at roughly 55:54:

Hilary: I daydream a lot when I practice. I don’t practice full volume all the time. I don’t practice like I’m performing. I’m daydreaming about the music. I’m playing it but I’m thinking what could I do? Can I do more of this here, or could I do more of that there? I just kind of leave my mind blank to see if something suddenly occurs to me that I wanna’ then practice, expound up on in the practice session. [...]

I don’t do visualizations, I guess. I don’t know. I’ll be practicing and I’ll think...Well, I kind of want to...

Brett: You talk about tinkering with practice.

Hilary: Yeah.

Brett: How does that work? Because it’s – I mean –

Eddy: I think a lot of people watching this would love

Eddy & Brett: to know how to

Eddy: Even help their own practice improve in efficiency, right?

Brett: What goes on in the mind of Hilary Hahn?

There’s a bit of chat back and forth in which they agree that Hilary will give a demonstration a bit later (at 1:22:22). She makes it clear she’s not talking about “spacing out,” that she’s “not giving them permission to not focus” (Eddie’s words).

Hilary: I’m not daydreaming about other things. I’m daydreaming about what the music could be.

Brett and Eddie with questions:

Do you hear it? Do you see like characters playing a story? Do you see yourself doing it? Do you see colors? Do you feel something? Smell? Taste?

Hilary: Let’s see. So, I’m trying to think of a parallel in another topic because it’s really hard to describe. It’s like if you just have a blank piece of paper and you have a pen and you draw a line. What else can you do with that line? Are you going to draw another line off of that line? Are you then gonna do like a circle? It’s kind of doodling? It’s mental doodling, with phrasing, with tempo, with everything.

I kind of start with a blank slate. I reverse the assumptions that I have. I just neutralize everything and then I’m...Kind of letting my mind wander. I’m thinking about what is going on with the orchestra. [Remember: she’s talking about personal practice here, not rehearsal much less actual performance.] Waiting for something to occur to me. I think people don’t ever think that happens in practice.

For a lot of people, I think practice is about being more accurate, improving your playing, being more expressive, being more this or that. But for me, yes, there’s that, but... Those are the tools to get to the point where you can let your mind wander and get ideas. Or it’s like having a bunch of Legos. What are you going to build with those Legos? You put one Lego on top of another and it kind of looks like a house. But then you realize, oh, I have these other Legos. Am I gonna build more in this house? Or am I gonna go off in that direction?

I’ll think about basic things like do I want a crescendo when it goes up or a decrescendo when it goes up? I’m always trying to trigger in mind into new phrasing ideas, so I don’t get stuck and so that when I’m working with other people, I don’t have a lot of rehearsal time and I need to present a unified concert. So, when I’m working with other people, how can I play it in a way that’s authentic to me, but really coincides with what they’re doing and brings out a better version of the music than we could arrive at ourselves separately.

Just a few seconds later after a question from Brett she’s switched from questions of aesthetic interpretation to matters of bottom-level physical technique. That is to say, these may seem to be very different worlds – the highest levels of almost “spiritual” artistry and the brute business of how to hold and manipulate your instrument – but to the skilled performer, one is but the obverse of the other:

I change my technique all the time too. I tinker with the angle of my thumb, the angle of my hand and I notice something’s getting explicably tired. So I’m playing and thinking, why is that – why is that tired? [...] Why is this...Is it how I’m...It’s like ... What is it? I’m just asking questions. [...] Why is this happening? Where is this going? What’s that about?

Eddy goes on to remark that after he left university things got better because he began to question the traditional way he was taught. And then he began to “play around with it.” But, “how much do you think one should balance between just self-experimentation and that creativity versus have a strong kind of teacher or a guide?”

And at this point (1:01:59) I’m going to leave off transcribing. You can decide for yourself whether or not you want to listen to the rest.

Hilary (1:02:23): “I know it’s good when I get goosebumps. [...] Or you feel like the audience was just 100% silent for a second and that second felt like forever. It’s just wow something magical just happened.”

Let that be the last word. But, I assure you, there’s some really interesting chat about actual performance from all three of them. Audience interaction makes all the difference in the world.

* * * * *

On magical moments in music, see this working paper for a collection of anecdotes: Emotion & Magic in Musical Performance. When Miles Davis brought the audience to 100% silence. Finally, note the remarks about riding a roller coaster and music at about  1:07:09. I've got a post on that.