An old idea… a new perspective

Further to my earlier thoughts about the nature of art, I notice an interesting way in which the idea of scientific rigor and has spilled over into the creative disciplines.
One of the great triumphs of the scientific method is that it is by nature a communal process and therefore far less prone to error than [...]

Several years ago, Gramophone, the venerable classical music publication, did the world a great service by digitizing pretty much everything they ever printed, allowing visitors to their website to search for articles going as far back as the 1920s. Tonight I was browsing through the archives looking for reviews of Glenn Gould’s recordings dating from [...]

Reading through the most recent issue of International Piano, I came across an article describing the latest Van Cliburn competition. Naturally the focus was on the controversy generated by choosing a blind pianist, Nobuyuki Tsujii, as one of the gold medallists and also on the fact that all the winners are very young (19, 20 [...]

Quite a while back the classical music press was beside itself with praise over a large number of recordings supposedly by British pianist Joyce Hatto. The truth soon emerged however, and it turned out that most if not all of the tracks were stolen from other pianists and altered just enough so that they wouldn’t [...]

Horowitz’s Variations on a Theme from Bizet’s Carmen is a classic of the virtuoso piano repertoire, and that’s despite the fact that it’s never been published in sheet music form! Over the years, several enterprising people have made transcriptions after listening to Horowitz’s own recordings and watching videos of his performances. There are now a [...]