Henry Lau does Mission Impossible

Some varieties of improvisation, from New Orleans, through bebop, to Cage, and to K-Pop

Nahre Sol recently posted a video about improvisation, a subject she’s been posting about for several years: Why is Improvisation SO DIFFICULT for Classical Musicians?

Independently of what she said, there are two obvious answers to her question: 1) it isn’t part of their training and so is utterly foreign, and 2) it is to some extent surrounded by a mystique that magnifies the difficulties imposed by lack of training. It’s as though improvisation is this special thing where you have to learn the secret handshake and go through the initiation ritual before you’re allowed to even begin doing it.

I don’t know where the mystique came from – it was there when I was young in the 1960s – but I suspect it may be a reflex of the process whereby improvisation disappeared from the classical tradition. For, as Sol points out, improvisation was important in the Baroque era and into the 19th century. Thus Mozart was renowned for his improvisation and I recall reading somewhere that someone had even suggested that some of Beethoven’s piano sonatas are derived from improvisations. But by the late 19th century improvisation had all but disappeared – though as Sol notes, it continues among organists (many of whom have to improvise interludes and such for church services).

Why did it disappear? I’m not sure we really know. One thing, as Sol points out, is that it is pretty hard to imagine how one could create a piece of music where all the musicians in a symphony orchestra (60 to a 100 or more musicians) are busy making stuff up. How do they coordinate what they’re going so that the resulting performance is a coherent musical experience?

Roles in an ensemble

But the problem exists for small ensembles as well. A classical string quartet is very different from a small jazz group, quartet, quintet, or more or two more, or, for that matter, a rock group or a bluegrass group. In a jazz group there is a clear distinction between the rhythm section – generally piano (or sometimes guitar), bass, and drums – and the front line – generally one or two horns, trumpet and/or saxophone, and/or trombone. The rhythm section is responsible for maintaining the basic form of the piece, harmonic structure and rhythmic pulse, while the front line musicians are free to improvise melodic lines. The rhythm section players are thus more constrained than the front line soloists.

This distinction between front line and rhythm section doesn’t exist for a string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello) or for other chamber ensembles. While the players will take different roles in the course of a piece, sometimes more foreground, sometimes more background, there is no one player who can outline and anchor the harmonic structure the way a pianist in a jazz group can. While strings can play double and even triple and quadruple stops, I suspect you’d have some very annoyed cellists if they were forced to play triple and quadruple stops all the way through a piece, nor would it sound very good. Triple stops and even quadruple stops can be used here and there, but employing them on a continuous basis is something reserved to Paganini-style stunt pieces. Consequently all the players in a string quartet must play a role in maintaining the harmonic structure of the piece. And while one player will be assigned the melodic line (often, but not always the first violin), that is quite different from the relatively free improvisation of a horn soloist in a small group jazz.

Returning to jazz, we need to recognize that the scope of improvisation itself has changed from one style to the next. In the earliest form, New Orleans style traditional jazz (later revived as Dixieland), you didn’t have solos. While the group did recognize the distinction between front line (typically clarinet, trumpet, and trombone) and rhythm section (generally tuba rather than string bass, banjo and/or piano, and drums), the front line musicians did not play solos. One instrument, often the trumpet, would play the melody at the beginning and end while the other two instruments would play stylized counter melodies. Between the beginning and the end the front liners engaged in group improvisation (with the rhythm section), highly stylized and constrained counterpoint lines in relation to one another. The solo developed from something called a ‘break’: the rhythm section would stop playing for a short time, say four bars, and one of the front liners would improvise a line to fill the space. By extending the break and bringing the rhythm section in for background you have a solo. Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong appear to have been the prime movers here.

Starting in the mid-to late 1920s, traditional jazz gave way to the big bands of the swing era. These bands consisted of a rhythm section (piano, and sometimes guitar, bass, and drums) and trumpet, saxophone, and trombone sections, each with three to four members. The big band was a composer’s and arranger’s medium. Star soloists would be given a chorus, maybe two, in arrangements, but they weren’t expected to carry a performance. Nor is it clear to me just how much improvisation they did, as opposed to un-notated composition – something I’ll take up in the next section.

It really isn’t until we come to the bebop era, starting the early to mid 1940s, that the improvised solo comes to dominate jazz. Bebop was a small group form, typically quartets and quintets. The arrangements were simple:

1. a brief introduction from the rhythm section,
2. the front line plays the head (i.e. melody), often in unison, but sometimes in harmony,
3. solos from the front line, often the pianist would take a solo, sometimes the bassist, and often the solo section would end with the front-line trading four and eight-bar phrases with the drummer, and finally,
4. repeat the head.

The soloists would each have the same number of choruses, though the slow tempo of ballads often required different arrangements, and each was free to do as they pleased within the general constraints of the form. Later soloists were not required to use material provided by an earlier soloist, nor was there any requirement to somehow create a form that somehow went beyond the theme-and-variations format.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s various musicians experimented with freer formats, either simplifying to simple modal forms or loosening harmonic constraints. In time avant-garde groups would all but eliminate the difference between front line and the rhythm section. At that point any player was free to take any role in the evolving performance.

Let’s move on.

Un-notated composition

Back in 2018 Ethan Iverson interviewed Carla Bley, the (stone cold genius) jazz composer. She talked of having met Louis Armstrong:

I actually met Louis Armstrong! That was really amazing. It was in the subway and he was with his wife, they were going home to Queens. I just practically fell over. I couldn’t believe it. I thought that he lived on a cloud somewhere, in a palace, not in Queens. He was a very nice person, nice to me, anyway. I, of course, revere him for the same reason as I revere Count Basie. Everything is perfect. Every note, all the phrasing, is perfect. He worked on it. He told me he didn’t have that ethic that the rest of the musicians have, always coming up with something new, never repeating themselves. He just worked on a solo until he had it, and that was really freeing for a person like me, used to writing everything down. I couldn’t really enjoy improvising. When it turns out great, I am thrilled. But on the way to sounding even good, I’m in a terror. I just cannot relax.

Let’s be clear about that. When you listen to a Louis Armstrong solo, whether on a sound recording or a YouTube clip, most likely you are not hearing something he improvised on the spot. Rather, you are hearing something he’d worked over until he was satisfied. He then played that on all further occasions. What you are hearing is a composition which has not been notated. It will vary in minor ways from performance to performance, but it is always recognizably the same melodic line.

Consider this 1928 recording of “West End Blues,” in particular, listen to the opening cadenza:

Here’s a live performance from 1955 (with a helpful transcription):

After almost three decades he’s still playing the same cadenza, and his solo chorus at the end is the same as well.

Was he improvising or not? It depends. I’d be very surprised if he’d lost the ability to make up interesting melodies on the spot. He just was not interested in doing that once he’d arrived at an approach he liked. A saxophonist I worked with in a rhythm and blues band some years ago was the same way. Once he’d arrived at a solo he liked, he stuck with it.

In Armstrong’s case that solo has become part of the jazz canon, and, as such, part of the apparatus of jazz education that has been build up over the last five or six decades. Thus, last year something called the “West End Blues Challenge” swept through jazz trumpet circles on YouTube. Trumpeter after trumpeter played that cadenza. I don’t know how many versions there are; I’ve only listened to a half-dozen or so. All of them are technically competent, and musical as well. And they’re different in small ways. How could they not be? They’re different musicians, no?

Baby Shark Gets Around [Kawaii alert!] {#BoycottZukerman}

The original "Baby Shark":

Henry Lau's version (one of them):

And here we have BTS as Sharks:

In light of the Pinchas Zukerman scandal (HERE and HERE at New Savanna), I propose a somewhat revised version of the original video where the word "baby" is replaced with "Pinchas", to give us "Pinchas Shark." We'll make some other changes as well. Instead of cute kids we have East Asian violinists brandishing their bows like rapiers. Better yet, how about Star Wars light sabers? And Pinchas Shark can have a Darth Vader helmet.

Revised lyrics:

Pinchas shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Pinchas shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Pinchas shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Pinchas shark!

Vader shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Vader shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Vader shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Vader shark!

He's a grouch, doo doo doo doo doo doo
He's a grouch, doo doo doo doo doo doo
He's a grouch, doo doo doo doo doo doo
He's a grouch!

Silly man, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Silly man, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Silly man, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Silly man!

Yeah, I know, it's a bit repetitive.
And now we're off to wǔxiá-land where we fly over the trees.

Fly away, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Fly away, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Fly away, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Fly away!

O're the trees, doo doo doo doo doo doo
O're the trees, doo doo doo doo doo doo
O're the trees, doo doo doo doo doo doo
What a blast!

Vader shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Silly man, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Sing this song, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Now we're free!

It would be so so CUTE!

Further reading: '#BoycottZukerman' spreads online after master violinist's offensive remarks against Asians.

Sometimes stardom makes a performer stupid. Sometimes it even kills them. Why Henry Lau is more important than Pinchas Zukerman.

Stardom is unnatural

It often looks good from the outside, but from the inside it can be a hellish trap. Stardom killed Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, John Coltrane, Prince, and many others. Each of these musicians had an unhealthy relationship with drugs. Just why that is so, that’s not clear, and it certainly varies from case to case. Performance itself can be anxiety provoking; drugs can ease that. Stardom creates an ‘aura’ around the performer, a vicious magic circle that insulates and isolates them from others. Drugs can seem like a way of easing that, but they only amplify the isolation and make it worse.

But not all stars are consumed by stardom. Bruce Springsteen, Duke Ellington, Hilary Hahn, Leonard Bernstein, and Dolly Parton, all seem fine, many others too.

Stardom can stupefy

And some stars merely become stupid behind their stardom. Pinchas Zukerman, a classical star of the first rank, seems to be one of those. As you may know, Zukerman recently made the news for some insensitive remarks he made to a pair of young Japanese-American women participating remotely in a virtual ‘Masterclass’ (scare quotes because you can’t do the work of a Masterclass in that setting). He thought their playing too perfect, too technically clean. It needed to be more lyrical. They needed a touch of “soy sauce” (his term) in their playing.

As far as I can remember this has been a standard charge leveled by an older generation of musicians against a younger generation. It exists in the jazz world as well, though without the particular focus on Asians it seems to have in the classical world. Is it generally true? In some particular cases, probably; but generally, I have no idea whether things are better or worse on this score than they were 50, 100, or 150 years ago.

However, Zukerman didn’t stop there. He also observed that neither Japanese nor Koreans sing. Wherever did he get such silly ideas? I can understand bigotry, and if he doesn’t like Japanese or Korean singing, OK. But to flat out deny that they do it – I think he’s got to work pretty hard at being blind to the world in order to say such things in a quasi-public setting. Then again, maybe he doesn’t have to work at all. Maybe a star-struck world lets him get away with it.

I did a little sleuthing (take a look at the comments to my blog post on this incident) and found out that he’s been saying such things for some time. This is from a 2019 interview:

I think there have always been child prodigies ... People like Horowitz, Rubinstein, Rachmaninoff, Heifetz, these were all great prodigies. Probably in some ways they were even more amazing than those today, because they came from a culture that already understood the inner workings of music and art. Because of where it comes from: Europe, Russia—that’s where the music came from. Not India, or Japan, or Korea. It came from those countries and therefore those prodigies were amazing. They still are! Beethoven, Mozart—these are huge prodigies. They are the ones who have really cultivated the Western hemisphere in the last 500 years to make us who we are today as a society.

Does he really believe that the Japanese, Koreans, and (East) Indians do not understand “the inner workings of music and art.” It may not be Western art, but it is certainly art and the traditions go back millennia.

And then there is a Masterclass – a real face-to-face one-on-one Masterclass – he did with a Chinese violist who is working on the Sibelius Violin Concerto. There’s some crack about China seven or eight minutes in and at various points Zukerman gently shoves the student on his chest – for what reason? This Twitter note captures some stupid and demeaning remarks he makes at the very end:

Pinchas Zukerman: “What you need to understand is that we speak in English in a very different way than you speak in China. You understand? And that’s no fault of yours, that’s the way it is.”

[PZ does some faux-Chinese Ching-Chong talk]

PZ: “That’s not a violin sound.”

Scum. https://t.co/O9OnExCbpN pic.twitter.com/JuXcs065SV

— ninedragonspot (@ninedragonspot) June 29, 2021

Judging from these and other remarks I can only assume that Zukerman has been doing this for years and getting away with it.

Why did he get away with it? Because he is a star, he is The Pinchas Zukerman, Great Virtuoso. And stars have privileges. Apparently those privileges include being a jerk and not getting called on it.

No. I’m not buying it. He may be a star but that doesn’t exempt him from the demands of ordinary civility and decency. We must rid ourselves of practice of fetishizing and, yes, dehumanizing very talented people. It hurts them and it hurts as. It’s an affront to human dignity.

How stardom threatens the future of music

Consider the final paragraphs of my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 280-281):

In 1992 the National Endowment for the Arts surveyed public participation in a variety of arts, including music. People were asked whether or not they had performed music in the past year. The following table presents these results expressed as percentages of the total population:

Public Participation in Music-Making
Type of Music	Private	Public
play jazz	1.7%	0.70 %
play classical	4.2	0.90
sing opera	1.1	0.24
sing musical	3.8	0.73
sing choral	NA	6.3

While this hardly covers all musics performed in America, the numbers, such as they are, speak for themselves: They are low.

Until the 20th century you couldn’t hear music unless you heard live performers. Some cultures musicked more than others, but everyone sang and danced regularly. This participation was critical for Western classical music. By the 19th century pianos graced the parlors of every middle-class household in Europe and America, and someone in those houses played those pianos. Similarly, the working classes of Europe and America were swept by brass bands in the second quarter of the 19th century, and these bands flourished well into the 20th century. That is the world that gave birth to jazz and nursed it into its cultural hegemony during the swing era.

How long can we continue to live on the cultural energy bequeathed us by traditions of active musicking that have become severely attenuated? Are the Western nations living out the consequences of an unholy alliance between Romantic veneration of artistic genius and recording technology? In proper measure, this technology makes a wide variety of music available to each of us, while an appreciation of genius encourages innovation. But the abject veneration of genius devalues the musical capacities of the rest of us and encourages us to substitute recordings for our own music. That path leads to cultural stagnation.

If we wish to hear marvelous new music twenty years from now, we must prepare the way by making our own music now. That music isn’t the responsibility of future geniuses. It is ours.

We must break the hold that genius has on our imagination and learn to make our own music, all of us, with whatever capacities we have. By all means, listen to music made by the very best performers. But remember, they are still human, like you and me. Do not make them prisoners of your admiration, pleasure, and desire.

Make your own music, with friends, family, and members of your community. It will give you pleasures of a kind you cannot get from listening to someone else make music, even if that person or group is a great artist.

Calling Henry! Calling Henry Lau! Pinchas Zuckerman just made made an ass of himself saying Asians don't make music with enough emotion

Javier C. Hernández, Violinist Apologizes for ‘Culturally Insensitive’ Remarks About Asians, The New York Times, June 28, 2021.

...Zukerman angered many of the roughly 100 students and teachers in the class on Friday when he invoked racist stereotypes about Asians, leading Juilliard to decide not to share a video of his master class afterward with participants, as it had initially intended.

At one point, Zukerman told a pair of students of Asian descent that their playing was too perfect and that they needed to add soy sauce, according to two participants in the class. At another point, in trying to encourage the students to play more lyrically, he said he understood that people in Korea and Japan do not sing, participants said. His comments were reported earlier by Violinist.com, a music site.

Whoops! And now he digs in:

He made the remarks on Friday while offering feedback to a pair of sisters of Japanese descent.

After the sisters played a duet, Zukerman told them they should try bringing more of a singing quality to their playing, according to participants in the class. When he said that he knew Koreans did not sing, one of the sisters interrupted to say that they were not Korean, adding that they were partly of Japanese descent. Zukerman replied by saying that people in Japan did not sing either, according to participants.

He knows WHAT? Is that why K-Pop is taking the world by a storm, because Koreans don't sing?

I think he needs to take lessons from some of the young genius musicians Henry Lau has been working with. And then he needs to do penance by going on TwoSetViolin and successfully completing ALL the Ling Ling challenges. Word of advice: Dude, take your head out of your ass before you pick up the fiddle.

And, Mr. Zukerman, while you're at it, listen to some non-singing Koreans:

* * * * *

Pinchas Zukerman: “What you need to understand is that we speak in English in a very different way than you speak in China. You understand? And that’s no fault of yours, that’s the way it is.”

[PZ does some faux-Chinese Ching-Chong talk]

PZ: “That’s not a violin sound.”

Scum. https://t.co/O9OnExCbpN pic.twitter.com/JuXcs065SV

— ninedragonspot (@ninedragonspot) June 29, 2021

If you scroll down through the comments you'll see that I've left a link to this whole master class.

* * * * *

Addendum: Posted to YouTube on July 13, 2021: 

이스라엘 출신의 세계적인 바이올리니스트 핀커스 주커만이 지난달 미국 줄리어드 음악학교 온라인 강연에서 한 발언이 논란이 되고 있습니다. 아시아계 학생들을 비하하면서 특히 한국인들을 콕 집어 "한국인들은 노래하지 않는다. 한국인들에게는 노래하는 DNA가 없다"고 말한 건데요, 학교 측의 비공개 조치로 현재 강연 영상은 볼 수 없습니다. 하지만 당시 강연을 온라인으로 지켜봤던 미국인 바이올리니스트이자 저널리스트가 주커만의 인종차별적 발언들을 폭로했습니다. 당시 주커만이 어떤 말을 했고, 과거 이력은 어떤지, 소셜미디어 비디오머그에서 직접 확인해 보시죠. 

영상취재 : 이상욱 / 편집 : 이기은 / 번역 : 인턴 신홍규 

 "한국인에겐 노래하는 DNA가 없다"는 발언의 목격자를 만났습니다 / 비디오머그

I'd add that the video pretty much speaks for itself.

Improvised performance with Dong-Won Jeong, Henry hyung [Wife's Taste]

정동원 헨리 형과 즉석연주 [아내의맛]

정동원TV : Jeong Dong-Won TV

This appears to be some kind of TV program. I got the title of this post by plugging the top line of Hangul characters into Google Translate. Dong-Won Jeong is a young singer. Wife’s Taste? Sounds like a bad translation & I haven’t got a clue. The name of a TV show?

When the video starts he’s playing with a remote controlled model car on a large track. About 30 seconds in we see some character creeping around in the background. That’s going to turn out to be Henry. Maybe those women making comments from the sides are those tasty wives, as it were. Anyone, creeping Henry is discovered at about 01:36 and the side women are saying, “Henry?” “Henry?”

He’s been found out. At 02:10 or so we get a clip of him performing on two pianos. Then violin. And then we see Jeong on alto sax. Things and stuff. Things and stuff. They play with the cars. A bit after 6 minutes in they enter a music production studio with some kind of gaming table in the middle. Now things are going to get interesting. They unmask at about 7 minutes in and pretend they didn’t have a clue about who each other was – at least I think that’s what’s going on. They do a little mirror mine routine (07:22). They play at the table for awhile. The chat. Shake hands. And share a meal (we’ve been here before). Henry feeds Jeong. Jeong feeds Henry. Where’s this leading. Now they start singing to one another.

I hope all you anthropologists out there are keeping track of how ritualized this all is.

But when are then going to get down to some serious music making. We all know that that’s what this foreplay leading to, no? (Besides, I’ve peeked ahead, so I know.)

Something slipped. At 13:31 all of a sudden Henry has a violin in his hands. At 13:34 he doesn’t. And then at 13:39 they’re doing some kind of routine together. Did someone slip up in the editing room? But who cares? Let’s go on. At 14:30 they trade off singing while touching one another’s throats at the vocal chords. How long can they keep up with this musical foreplay? Back to the table to chow down.

While all this has been going on we’ve been getting side-commentary from men and women who are, in effect, acting as a Greek chorus mediating between the two jokesters in the middle and us, the audience.

And now we get a clip of Henry playing one of those pesky Paganini pieces all the kids are playing in Korea. Back to the table, Jeong is explaining something over background music. Now we see Henry with his bow and fiddle. Now (c. 17:43) Henry starts playing. And then puts it down for a bit of beat-boxing and popping. Now they’re talking. I haven’t got the foggiest idea of what they’re saying, but it sounds serious. The word “stupid” shows up several times in a row out of Henry’s mouth. He plays something on the violin while looking sad and pretending to cry (c. 18:45). Short stuff laughs and the Greek chorus gives us their 2 cents.

At last! At last! They get through with all this nonsense and step to the music area (19:38) of the room. We hear the word “feel”, it’s echoed in the chorus, and short stuff steps to the trap drums and Henry to the keyboard. Shake hands. Henry steps to the drums and shows that he can play them.

I'm glad Henry can play drums. Short stuff’s going to go into a beat box routine, then move into some dance steps. And they’re going to play around making music. The Greek chorus comes to its feet and applauds.

I’m going to go light on the commentary. We get a clip of Henry outdoors doing an industrial music routine (“Believer”). Back to the studio. More playing around. Some real-time musique concrète with duct tape and other things. They make music with whatever’s round. Sixty years ago these shenanigans were avant-garde performances for European aesthetic elite – or material for a Frank Zappa bit on Steve Allen's TV Show. Now they’re day-time entertainment for Korean housewives. The music segment ends at about 29:13. I don’t know what happens next because I didn’t watch it.

Three performances by Henry Lau [remix, Korean style]

Having presented some of Henry Lau’s work with young musicians, I thought I’d take a look at the kind of music that made him a K-Pop star. Be warned, I know almost nothing about K-Pop. I heard about Psy’s “Gangnam Style” back in the day, but if I watched the video or heard it, I don’t remember. I’d never heard of BTS until I posted a TwoSet Violin video where they parodied BTS, with Eddie Chen doing the dancing. Afterward I went scouting for a BTS video and saw them dancing in Grand Central Terminal in New York City.

So there’s a sense in which I don’t know what I’m seeing and hearing. Which is fine. But, as a consequence, I might say something that’s silly and/or stupid because I don’t understand the cultural context. But that’s the kind of world we live in these days.

Monti’s Czardas and Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean

This video is from 2014. I’m guessing this is not typical of K-Pop, as it consists of a violin and piano duet. They start out playing a classical piece, Monti’s well-known “Csárdás”, transition through something I don’t recognize [1], and then on to something I do, Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”.

Henry(Super Junior) & SHIN JIHO (Violin and Piano Perf.)

I’ve heard “Billie Jean” many times, though I’m hardly a Michael Jackson fan. I don't have anything against him; in fact I think he is terrific. I'm just not a fan. Back in the 1980s you couldn’t avoid “Billie Jean” unless you were dead. I even thought about arranging it for a band I was in, The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band.

I’m more familiar with the “Csárdás”, which I practiced for many hours as a young trumpet player. My first music hero, the great Rafael Mendez, arranged it and performed it:

I mastered (more or less) the first part. But I never quite got the hang of the second part (starting at about 2:02), the fast part (with those lyrical interludes). It involves a technique known as double-tonguing, which is tricky. Mendez’s double-tonguing boggles the mind – at least if you play a brass instrument and so know how difficult it is – it is so sharp. Note, however, that while I was astounded by Mendez's technique, it was his passion that attracted me to him, a passion that lived even in his astonishing virtuosity.

Is that what attracts Lau’s fans to his music? his passion, for passion is certainly there. And those dance steps, they go through Michael Jackson back to Bill Bailey and Cab Calloway. Many worlds flow through his music.

One of my favorite performances of this csárdás (the general name for a type of Hungarian dance), however, is one where the incomparable Victor Borge, a Danish-American comedian and musician, accompanies a Hungarian violinist named Anton Kontra. Borge knows the piece but has never performed it and doesn’t have any sheet music. What does he do? He does what Henry Lau teaches his young protégés to do, go free style and play what you feel. Borge makes something up.

Watch how the two men interact with one another. There are points where one or the other doesn’t know what’s coming up. So they have to look at one another to coordinate. From about 3:04 to about 3:09 Borge improvises a simple counter melody. Then he plays some elaborate sounding ham-handed nonsense while Kontra is sawing away on the fiddle faster than the speed of sound. And then, at 3:22, he gives us another little counter melody. Finally, I bet if Henry watched this he'd chuckle at the end where Borges gives us, not one, but two downward glissandos, something he taught Seo Yul Shin in Episode 6 of Henry Together (see this post).

The moral of the story: when Lau and Shin Jiho mix Monti’s “Csárdás” with other musical material, they’re simply doing what musicians have always done, mix things to suit their performance needs.

Getting released from Carmina Burana [Trap]

헨리(HENRY) 'VIOLIN INTRO + TRAP' Live (PUBG Mobile Club Open 2019)

While this performance is from 2019, the song dates from 2013.

As it opens, Lau is standing on the hood of an over-sized military-style vehicle (a bit like a HumVee). He’s playing electric violin. We get 20 seconds or so from Orff’s “Carmina Burana” as background, which pretty much everyone has heard at some time or another in some context, though I don't think it's yet made it into supermarkets and elevators. We hear this fragment of the lyrics:

O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis

Which translates as:

O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable.

That’s how this song about being trapped opens. We're pawns in the hands of fate.

Now we’re left with the problem – for that’s what it is, an aesthetic problem to be solved – of making a transition to Lau’s original conception, which opens with him playing piano. What do we do in the music while Lau is moving from that HumVee to the stage where his piano awaits? This transition takes awhile, a bit over a minute. Lau plays the violin for awhile, and then at about 1:39 the stage goes almost dark for a minute (so Lau can get off the hood of that stage prop?), music continues, dancers get started (about 1:50), and then once again the stage goes dark, the music stops and...We hear piano chords (2:13), the lights come on and we see Lau seated at the piano. He plays a bit, starts singing, then grabs the microphone and jumps up onto the piano and continues singing.

At this point the performance format is much like the original 2013 version. Where that version began with Lau playing a short piano prelude this version begins with the elaborate “O Fortuna” violin tableau. Lau sings and also dances, along with background dancers. In the 2013 he shares the vocal, while he carries the vocal alone in this version. The choreography is different in the two versions, but the basic format is pretty much the same. In both versions Lau finishes back at the piano.

Beyond this, well, figure it out for yourself. As I said up front, I’m not familiar with this kind of music, with its conventions and routines. In particular, I’m not familiar with the elaborate staging; the simple presentation in the previous video is more my style.

What interests me is simply the use of “Carmina Burana” and the exploitation of Lau’s abilities as a classically trained violinist and pianist – I'm guessing that most K-Pop stars don’t have his classical training. Something very interesting is going on here. Maybe if I listen to 50 or a 100 more tunes I’ll have some idea of what it is.

Despacito [Fiddle Impossible]

The original “Despacito” had a vocal; this is pure instrumental. Nor is there elaborate staging – no props and costumes – other than some (fairly elaborate) lighting effects.

But there is a surprise. At about 1:05 he stops playing the violin and begins dancing to percussion. At 1:11 he plays a trill while the accompaniment plays the “Mission Impossible” beat and backing riffs. He improvises violin riffs, some dancing, and somehow he gets to the melody (1:42), such as it is (some repeated riffs). Riffs and dance moves to the end.

Again, we have multiple sources pulled together, a recent pop song from Puerto Rico and a now iconic movie theme written by the Argentinian composer, Lalo Schifrin. Is this eclectic virtuosity typical of Henry Lau’s music, or of K-Pop in general? I haven’t got the foggiest idea. But it has me intrigued. 

* * * * *

[1] [later] If I'd just read the onscreen text before I wrote, I'd know what that that unrecognized stretch was. Actually, it's two pieces, both from Phantom of the Opera, which I don't really know. I've heard bits and pieces every now and then, but not the whole thing.

Kids and Music 6: Get Aboard Henry Lau’s Freestyle Express [Born to Groove]

Let’s pick up where we left off with my previous post on Lau, Born to Groove, Kids and Music 3: Henry Lau has a good heart & knows how to work with kids [kawaii alert!]. We know he was born in Canada to Chinese parents and was headed for a career in classical music when SM Entertainment sent him to K-Pop stardom. Last year he started a series of videos in which he appeared with various young Korean musicians, Henry Together. My earlier post featured a young violinist, YoEun Seol. I also covered his work with Kwak Dakyung, a young jazz musician, at the end of my previous post in this series.

Henry worked with twelve musicians in the first season of Henry Together. Now we’re ready for a second season. But first...

Music Genius friends from Henry Together

Some of the musicians from the first season got together and did a collaborative performance of one of Henry’s songs, “Trust Your Face.” The music was arranged and the project coordinated by the guitarist, Sean Song.

Listen to how all the voices and instruments work and coordinate together.

Kids these days!

Now we’re ready for the first post of Season two, after which we’ll return to season one. It’s confusing, I know, but this isn’t about chronology.

Can We Do A Concert Through Zoom?

They’re all on screen chatting with Henry. Have they become a community? Henry suggests they get together and perform that tune that we’ve all heard a jillion times, “Canon in D.”

And so Henry leads them through putting an arrangement together. I don’t know whether or not it simply happened online Just Like That, or whether there’s been some behind the scenes work, and how much editing has been done. None of that really matters. What matters is that Henry is showing us that music doesn’t just fall from the sky. It has to be planned out and arranged.

So they give it a try (at about 3:32). Sounds a bit disorganized, no? Still, Henry is encouraging. They give it another try (about 4:24). They run through it, but we don’t hear most of it. They finish, Henry’s encouraging, but they all know better. After all, they are good musicians. They’re not fooled by this well-intended positivity. They work on things and we get the finished version, with Henry joining on violin (about 6:01).

Henry’s family having a little recital

Let’s leave Henry Together for a minute and see him with family and friends. His brother plays some stride (boogie-woogie), with Henry joining. His mother sits down at the piano, then his father.

Nine Year Old Piano Prodigy’s Fast Hands

Let's return to the first season of Henry Together. Henry meets young pianist, Seo Yul Shin in episode 6.

They chat. She tells Henry she’s ten “this year” (c. 2:04) and that she’s seen every episode of Henry Together. And she thinks that she’s a better pianist than Jichan (Episode 1). What does she want to eat? Chicken. He orders two fried chickens.

She says she was nervous in the car coming over, but not now. It’s cool “to see someone from TV sit right in front of me” (2:51). Ah, the melding of two worlds, TV world and the Real World. He brings in the chicken and they eat – as you may know by know, sharing a meal is part of Henry’s protocol for these meetings. And then, out of nowhere, she asks him his blood type (3:14): “Just the ideal type for a lot of people,” a remark she regards with well-justified bemusement. I'm sure many of Henry's fans want to know the answer to that question, but a ten-year old? Back to eating and more chit-chat. They talk about music lessons and stuff. “More cola?”

To music. She plays Chopin, Waltz No. 3, aka “Cat Waltz” (about 5:07). When she’s finished we hear off-screen clapping. Henry’s impressed. How does she react? “I made a lot of mistakes.” She may be a child, but you don’t get as good as she is without being rigorously self-critical.

Henry suggests that they play some Paganini together, remarking that eye contact is very important in collaboration (c. 7:13). After they’ve finished Henry gives the piano a glissando from the upper register down. She follows, doing it in the middle-to-lower register. “I’ve never tried scraping before.” “You’ve never done this? Try again. Mom’s not watching, right? Because my mom didn’t let me do this stuff either.” They play around until they get together on a gliss and a final note.

She starts playing a Piazolla tango (8:26). Henry joins in on violin (reading music laying on the piano), occasionally having intonation problems. I can’t really tell whether he’s sharp or flat, but he’s definitely a bit off here and there. But who cares? They’re getting acquainted. At the end she throws in a gliss to a high note.

Now Henry gets serious (at about 9:31). “Let’s just play what we feel.” She’s puzzled. He shows her, playing some arpeggios on the keyboard. She follows. “You’ve only been playing off the sheet music so far. Forget the sheet music for now. Today you just play what you feel. So far you practice a ton and you try to be perfect, but music is also about being free.” He works with her a little. She plays two hands. Henry joins in, one hand. They stop. Chat a bit. Start again, she’s on piano, he’s on violin. The video ends.

See what he’s going? Do you understand why I’ve entitled this post Henry Lau’s Freestyle Express?

Henry and Piano Prodigy Perform a New Song

Here’s their performance. They open with one of many sets of variations on something by Paganini – ending with that glissando she learned from Henry. Then Seo Yul Shin plays a solo (don’t recognize it, couldn’t make out the title on the screen), and another, Chopin’s “Cat Waltz.”

They conclude with the song they made up during their “getting to know you” phase (6:30). She decided to call it “Wind.”

Season One Reunion

Henry opened season two with a reunion of the musicians from the first season. Here it is almost without comment. Henry does say that he learned from his young prodigies, that they forced him to new music. Any reason to doubt him? No.

Coaching Bonus

Henry is doing a lot of coaching with these young musicians. I have two other posts involving coaching:

An interesting example of vocal coaching, Oct. 16, 2014, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/10/an-interesting-example-of-vocal-coaching.html.

Ride the Lizard, Valkyrie, Ride It!, November 15, 2013, http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/11/music-ride-lizard-valkyrie-ride-it.html.

Kids and Music 5: Kwak DaKyung, Jazz Trumpeter [Born to Groove]

While I’m not sure it makes much sense to say that one musical instrument is more difficult to play than another, getting a sound out of, say, a violin or a piano is easy, while getting a sound out of a trumpet is difficult. Anyone can press keys on a piano keyboard; even kittens can do it, but did you ever hear a kitten play the trumpet? And while kittens don’t play violins, even very young children can do so. Thus you will find many videos on YouTube of young children playing the violin or piano, often astonishingly well. But you won’t hear many videos of young children playing the trumpet, at all.

Kwak Dakyung, a young Korean girl, is an exception. Here she is playing the trumpet at a very young age:

Notice that she rests her trumpet on a stand. In a year or two she won’t need the stand and her tone will improve.

Confirmation

It did. This video was uploaded on March 30, 2021. She’s fronting a jazz quartet playing Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation.”

Charlie Parker was one of the inventors of bebop, a jazz style that emerged in the early 1940s. It emphasized rhythmic complexity, angular melodic lines, and instrumental virtuosity.

Many regard “Confirmation” as one of Parker’s best original tunes. While it is based on a standard AABA harmonic foundation (each letter stands for eight bars of music), the melody is more complex, more like ABCA, where the final eight bars start out like the first eight, but the final four bars are different, both harmonically and melodically. The melody is complex – wide intervals, complex phrases – and thus is difficult to play smoothly.

Dakyung (her given name) plays the melody well; she has mastered its rhythmic complexity. She improvises well too. If you aren’t familiar with the tune, you might not even know when she starts improvising (at about 0:51). The repeated figures at 1:08 are nice, and she marks the bridge well (1:08). Notice the repeated figure she uses at the opening of the last eight (1:25). The way she opens her second chorus is brilliant (about 1:34). It is simple, obvious, and common to conclude one phase at the end of the chorus and then begin the next chorus with a new phrase. Dakyung does something much more interesting. She creates an ascending phrase in the last bar (of the first chorus) which reaches its apex at the beginning of the second chorus. It then starts down, in effect, becoming a new phrase. The initial phrase of the second chorus thus serves two function: 1) it continues a phrase from the previous chorus while 2) also initiating a new chorus.

I could go on, but I’ve made my point: she’s thinking about music in a sophisticated way.

Carnival of Venice

Her performance of “Carnival of Venice” is a different kettle of fish. Flashy? Yes. But the foundation isn’t quite there yet. She's young and hasn't had time to build up the endurance required to perform this.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back in the 19th century Niccolo Paganini, the famous violin virtuoso, took a simple folk tune and elaborated it with twenty variations, entitling the final composition “Il Carnevale Di Venezia.” The theme was then picked up by other instruments and provided with virtuoso accouterments and horseplay appropriate to each. A French cornet virtuoso named Jean-Baptiste Arban wrote a set of variations which he included in his method book, Complete Conservatory Method for Trumpet, which is perhaps the core pedagogical book for ‘classical’ style trumpet and cornet.

Arban’s set of variations on “Carnival of Venice” has thus become a rite of passage for students of the trumpet. Accordingly, you will find many performances of it on YouTube. Some are by well-known virtuosi of the past and present – Sergei Nakariakov, Wynton Marsalis, Maurice André, and Timofei Dokshizer for example – while others are by relatively unknown professionals and advanced students. Some of these performances are better than others, but all of them are brilliant.

That’s the point of the piece, brilliance. But interesting music it is not. “Confirmation,” for example, with its rapid chord changes, complex melody, and off-kilter rhythms, is much more interesting. “Carnival of Venice” is a virtuoso display piece in which the soloist goes a few rounds with Mike Tyson, tight-rope walks over Niagara Falls, rescues a young child from an out-of-control Tesla on full-automatic, leaps tall buildings with a single bound, and threads a needle with a drunken sailor.

That’s the musical mosh pit Kwak Dakyung entered when she performed Arban’s “Carnival of Venice” when ten years old. This was uploaded on December 4, 2019:

Impressive? Yes, alas, for a child.

I began getting worried at about 2:56; the tempo seemed a little slow, not quite up to the mosh pit standard. My worries increased at about 3:52; we’re still a little slow, and this variation involves wide interval leaps from the middle to the lower register, which are difficult. The bottom notes were there, but not speaking loudly enough. At 4:10 we have the first displays of double-tonguing – don’t worry about just what that is; it’s difficult and you put points on the board if you do it well. (But I never heard Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker’s brother in bebop, double tongue. If Dizzy doesn’t qualify as a trumpet virtuoso, the term has no meaning.) And then, whoops!, at about 4:45 some notes don’t speak at all. It passes quickly and you probably wouldn’t notice if you weren’t intimately familiar with this music. Then at 4:49, another flubbed passage, but it passes quickly. And so it goes.

Let’s skip to the very end. She’s finishing a variation that punctuates rapid twiddley figures in the middle register with rapid wide-interval leaps into the bottom register. Those leaps burn your chops and tax your air supply. They are exhausting, especially coming at the end of a long and taxing blow. This is the point where you act like you could keep playing for hours no sweat! if it weren’t for the fact that the stage hands would have to be paid double-overtime, which would break the budget. Of course you can’t actually do that. You’re almost dead. But you’ve got to put on a show. And she’s not quite up to it. She’s exhausted. You can hear her reach for breaths (c. 9:24 and after) and her tongue staggers just a bit at the end. 

Here's the point: Minor faults like those would be of little consequence in a jazz improvisation where everything else is fine, the rhythm is sure and the melodic line is fluid. In that context technique is subordinate to imagination and soulfulness. In a piece like “Carnival of Venice,” however, technical brilliance is the focus of the piece, its reason for being. In this context even minor technical flaws undermine the performance.

There’s no doubt in my mind that in a couple of years she will be able to paint the town red with her technical brilliance. But she might have more fun working on the repertoire that the great Rafael Mendez left behind. The sheet music is readily available and there are plenty of Mendez clips on YouTube – I don’t know about availability on CD, much less vinyl. The music is full of technical challenges and, best of all, it’s real music, not stunt music. Mendez’s repertoire will help her develop her musicality, not just her technique.

Back to jazz. 

[See the coda at the end for a different performance of “Carnival of Venice”.]

All the Things You Are

“All the Things You Are” is a show tune from 1939 that quickly became a favorite of jazz musicians because it puts some interesting twists on the standard 32-bar AABA form. Once again DaKyung fronts a quartet. This performance was uploaded on April 15, 2021:

I won’t belabor this performance with long commentary, but I would like to note the transition into her second improvised chorus, starting at about 1:34. It’s a sequence of 4-note arpeggios followed by a short descending figure that lands her exactly on the first note of her second improvised chorus as 1:40. I don’t know whether she worked it out in advance or just hit upon it in process – both are possible – but it is very clever. She was clearly anticipating that transition. She closes out the second chorus with some nice runs at about 2:17 and after. After the piano solo, starting at 5:06, she leads the group in trading phrases with the drummer before the final chorus. Notice that the piano player tosses in a line based on “Fly Me to the Moon,” one of DaKyung’s favorite tunes.

She’s not just running through the chord changes in a quasi-mechanical way. She’s a very thoughtful musician.

Kids and Music 4: Born to Groove @3QD [a three step plan]

My most recent 3 Quarks Daily piece is up: Born to Groove: Up from Mud and Back to Our Roots.

It’s about music, more specifically, children and music. I’ve been watching lots of YouTube clips about kids and music – there are tons of them, of all kinds – and decided to build a 3QD piece around them.

The piece opens with, shall we say, ordinary kids, then has a central section about prodigies, and ends with formats where children and adults can me music together on an equal basis. The central section is the longest one for various reasons, but mostly because I wanted to deal with our cultural ambivalence about musical prodigies (but, by implication, all gifted children). We admire them for their talents but we also fear and resent them for those same talents.

Prodigious Ambivalence

I deal with the issue by using two videos by TwoSetViolin, one in which they comment on videos posted of five violin prodigies and one where they perform a Paganini caprice, with virtuoso Hilary Hahn (who had been a prodigy), while they were all spinning hula hoops. I suggested that what TwoSet was able to do in this videos is, in effect, distinguish between musical skill, which the prodigies had in abundance, and moral worth. In a fiercely competitive society like ours (by which I mean primarily the United States of America, but the problem is all over the place) ability tends to collapse into moral worth. In the face of prodigies it is all too easy for people of more modest abilities to feel themselves unworthy and to then resent prodigies for that. That’s very destructive to all.

This is an issue that’s very close to me. Though I turned out to be a fairly talented musician, I certainly wasn’t a prodigy. But I was intellectually brilliant, and that was a problem, one I didn’t know how to handle. I remember when, sometime in middle school, one kid called me “Einstein.” My immediate (unvoiced) reaction was, yippie, I’m recognized. But the next day I realized it was a trap. The nickname stuck.

Years later, in my first year in graduate school at SUNY Buffalo, I had my master’s thesis on “Kubla Khan” with me. That, plus my teachers’ recommendations, is what got me in. I’d analyzed the poem in a way no one had done before – I tell the story here. My teachers at Johns Hopkins recognized it as a brilliant piece of work. So did those to whom I showed it at Buffalo. During my second year I signed up for a course in modern poetry and asked the professor to read the thesis, which he was glad to do. Next week, when he returned it to me just before class began, he got down on his knees and bowed before me. 

It was embarrassing for him, embarrassing for me. It didn't do anyone any good. I didn’t ask for that, certainly didn’t want it. I just wanted him to like the work I'd done and perhaps say something useful about it.

That’s one thing, talent. But talent isn't moral worth.

All Together Now

Then, once I posted the piece and I looked over it, I realized something else. In the first segment I’d posted a video of one Colt Clark, a professional musician, making music with his kids, something they’d been doing since the pandemic lockdown began. That’s one setting for music-making, one that must have been much more common in the many years before sound recordings became available.

The last segment started off with Charlie Keil and his passion for getting kids dancing and making music. What he’d really like to bring about is that every daycare center and every kindergarten devoted devote time every day for kids to dance and make music. The idea is that would blossom into self-sustaining music and dance in each local community. That’s another thing.

The third, which is very much on my mind as I wrote that piece, is what Henry Lau is doing with prodigies in Korea. I didn’t mention that in the piece itself – you can’t do everything – but my sister, Sally, introduced it into the comments. Henry Lau is a K-pop star who is a skilled pianist and violinist – he saw himself headed for a career as a classical violinist before he got tapped to become a member of a boy group. Now he’s doing videos where he works with one prodigy at a time. In effect, he becomes a performance coach. He accepts them for what they are, and then gently nudges them in new directions. He produced twelve set of videos (two with each child) in his first season (the second season had just started). Here’s a video that some of them did for him at the end of the first season:

The music was arranged by the guitarist, Sean Song.

So, we’ve got these three things: 1) music in the family, 2) music in the school and community, and 3) nurturing talented young musicians. Somehow we’ve got to get these three circles of activity connected with one another: Colt Clark, meet Charlie Keil; Charlie Keil, meet Henry Lau; Henry Lau, meet Colt Clark. Now get busy, as Arsenio Hall used to say.

Born to Groove, Kids and Music 3: Henry Lau has a good heart & knows how to work with kids [kawaii alert!]

Who is Henry Lau? His mother is from Taiwan and his father is from Hong King. Henry, as he is generally known, was born in 1989 and raised in Toronto. He plays violin, piano, and guitar and planned on a career as a classical violinist but then SM Entertainment, a Korean firm, recruited him in 2006. He was on his way to K-pop stardom, and more. He left SM in 2018 and started his own studio.

Starting in the spring of 2020 Henry released a series of videos on YouTube under the rubric “Henry Together.” The first video in the series shows how he got the idea. The videos come in pairs. In each pair he teams up with a talented young musician. The first video in each pair shows them getting acquainted. They share a meal, chat, and play around getting to know one another’s musical skills. In the second video they present a little concert, a “collabo” as they call it.

I’ve watched some of them, but not all. Here’s a pair he did with a young violinist, YoEun Seol. She started playing when she was two years and eight months old and is now nine. Here’s their first video, the “getting to know you” one.

Notice that he eases us into things. We see him finding her YouTube channel, and then a series of snippets following her progress from three to about six. And then she comes peeking in through a window and he invites her in, violin case strapped to her back. Obviously some things were worked out ahead of time, but their interaction doesn’t seem scripted, though what we see has obviously been edited from more extensive footage. They chat a bit and he offers her a meal (c. 2:00).

He asks if she’s seen him on TV. Nope, don’t have a TV. But she has seen him play the violin. Asks her who’s better. She smiles, hesitates, laughs, declines to answer. Henry leans back.

Think about what just happened.

She knows that she’s better. But he’s an adult and a musician; she’s reluctant – to tell him the truth? to hurt his feelings? But he accepts her judgment. And she plays some Paganini while he’s suitably impressed. They’re cool.

See how this goes? Food (c. 3:00). He fixes some noodles for her. “They’re very nice and chewy.” Then: “Do you work at this restaurant?” “Yes, so if you’re ever hungry, just come here and ask for me, okay?” “Yes.”

The violin comes out, she tunes (c. 4:17). “How do you know that’s the right tune” “I know by ear.” “No way.” She has perfect pitch; Henry’s suitably impressed. She plays Paganini; Henry’s suitably impressed. Now he gets his violin out; she offers to help him tune (c. 7:16). They trade phrases from Paganini. See how this is going? They continue with dueling fiddles. Guess which one gives up? It’s not the nine-year old. Henry strums the violin like a guitar. YoEun smiles and laughs.

He switches to piano (c. 9:34). She suggests that she’ll play the accompaniment, “three-four time.” They make something up. Together. They play a tune from Frozen. Then “My Favorite Things.” YoEun: “And then, next, go to major.” “Yes, mam.” He gets out his violin and they play “My Favorite Things” together; Henry works out a harmony line.

All of this obvious in the video. You don’t need me to spell it out. I do it, though, because it helps me think about what’s going on, and it creates a verbal record of their playfulness. They’re playing – adult and child – not merely in the sense of playing music, but in the deeper sense of having fun, playing with one another, while also making music. They really are in this together. And we, the audience, get to see music as it is being made, not merely as a finished and polished performance.

In this next video we see them performing together. I’ll present this without comment beyond pointing out how fully YoEun is present during her playing. Watch her move. Had me laughing several times it was so much fun.

Notice that they start with the technically difficult, and therefor showy, showpiece and then they play three songs. Why?

Judging from what I’ve seen of the other video pairs, that’s how it goes with each kid:

Getting to know you.
Let’s make music.
Together.

* * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * *

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

Born to Groove, Kids and Music 1: Three Examples

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.