The Black Liszt

Franz Liszt: 210

This week is the 210th anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt on Oct 22, 1811. I wrote a couple highlights about Liszt for his 200th anniversary. Aside from loving his achievements in life, he was the inspiration for this blog.

Liszt was one of those rare people who was world-class brilliant and also appreciated the valuable work of others, supporting that work in word and deed.

One way he demonstrated this was by championing the work of other composers by transcribing their work and performing it for audiences who might otherwise not have a chance to hear it. He made amazing transcriptions of operas and many other kinds of works. Probably the most impressive transcriptions he made were making piano versions of all nine Beethoven symphonies!

Oddly enough, the symphony transcriptions were largely ignored in the world of music, even by Liszt's pupils. It wasn't until Glenn Gould recorded a couple of them in 1967 that they began to appear on the scene. But they remain obscure, even among classical music lovers.

I thought I knew all the Beethoven symphonies, but hearing a Liszt piano transcription performed was like hearing it for the first time. After a great deal of struggle he finally managed to transcribe the fourth (choral) movement of the ninth symphony. And did it again for duo pianos.

Frederic Chiu has recorded the 5th and 7th Symphonies for Centaur Records. In his program notes he suggests that "Liszt's piano scores must therefore be taken as a sort of gospel in regards to Beethoven's intentions with the Symphonies" because of Liszt's unique perspective, having met Beethoven in person, having heard collaborators and contemporaries of Beethoven perform the Symphonies, having studied and performed the works both as a pianist/transcriber and as a conductor in Weimar. No one in history could claim to have as much exposure, insight and journalistic integrity as regards Beethoven's intentions around the Symphonies.

I personally recommend the recordings by Konstantin Scherbakov. You will be listening to the unique inspiration of Beethoven, further enhanced by the incredible genius of Liszt.

Listening to these transcriptions can pull you out of normal physical space into a dimension filled with drama, beauty and inspiration, one that, unlike the austere, timeless beauty of math, drives through time from a start to a conclusion.

Paul Simon, Wynton Marsalis and Music from the Realm of the Invisible

 

I attended a concert featuring Paul Simon, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, a couple days after hearing Philip Glass talk about "where" music is. Wynton made strikingly similar observations

Just looking at him, seeing him move and listening to him, I wouldn't have believed that Paul Simon was over 70 years old.

At the end of the concert, Wynton Marsalis (below on the right) publicly thanked Paul Simon

(photo credit)

for his participation and wonderful music. The musicians had had an amazing time collaborating, infusing various jazz flavors into Paul Simon's compositions.

Among other things, Wynton said that music comes from "the realm of the invisible," a place where emotions and thoughts are -- and also love. For "thoughts," I heard "thoughts like math and computer software."

Where does Software Come from? What is Software?

What is software, anyway? Where does it come from? It is very reasonable to compare a computer program (i.e., software) to a music program (i.e., a musical score). The eminent composer Phillip Glass says that music is a "place," a place that once you've been there, you want to return. I'd say the same of software: it's a "place."

Philip Glass and Music

I attended a conversation between Chuck Close and Philip Glass at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last night. At the end of their informative and entertaining conversation (for example, I didn't know that the sculptor Richard Serra -- here's one of his steel sculptures, with a person in the picture to give a sense of scale --

was close to both of them, employing Glass at one point), an audience member asked Glass how he got started in music.

Glass replied that he started "getting serious" about playing music around age 8, when he started wondering where music came from. He thought that if he played and composed a lot, he could find out.

Decades later, he still didn't know where it came from, but started wondering what music is. He said that without thinking about it, an answer popped out of his mouth the other day: music is a place, a place like St. Louis or Chicago. It's a place that, once you've been there, you want to go back all the time.

As a programmer and music lover, his comment resonated with me.

Music and Software

I'm far from alone in feeling music and software (not to mention math) to be intimately related. We write software, a time-sequenced set of instructions, that a computer later "performs." We write a score, a music program, a time-sequenced set of instructions, that musicians or a computer later perform. While music appeals more to the emotions and software to our thinking, both are abstract, mathematically precise, abstract representations that human beings can create.

Donald Knuth, for example, is one of the deep greats of modern software, author of the multi-volume Art of Computer Programming. Here is one of the instruments in the music room of his house.

While Knuth "executes" many "music programs" like this (the main theme of Bach's Art of the Fugue):

on his pipe organ, he reads and writes many computer programs like this

in the rest of his life.

Software is in a Place

Software is in an abstract, conceptual space that I can't see with my eyes, but which I experience visually as a place. When thinking about Glass' comment about music, I remembered describing some software in a small group. While describing it, it was present to me in the space between us. I used my hands to indicate where a proxy server was, in front of two back ends, which I indicated, one with each hand. I reached out to show where a browser was, pulling my hand in to where I had shown the proxy to be as the request came in, and then showing how the request could be passed on to either or both back ends. I was seeing everything static (code waiting to be executed) and dynamic (data flowing through blocks of code) happening at a place in space.

All my thinking about software is highly visual in this way.

Conclusion

Music and Software are intimately related. They touch a lot of the same things in us. While I can't say just where it is, I think that software, like music, is in a place -- a place not too far from the place where music is. They are places I've spent a lot of time, and they feel comfortable.

Franz Liszt: 200

2011 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt.

Liszt's music is recognizable by anyone who (like me) watched early cartoons, like this one:

[OOops -- removed from YouTube. Search for Hungarian Rhapsody #2 cartoon]

(Image credit.)

Beyond that, he is significant to me as is obvious from "BlackLiszt," as I briefly explained in the first post of the blog.

Liszt is one of the greatest, and most under-rated composers of music. This article says it well:

BBC Radio 3 is beginning Franz Liszt's bicentenary year with...wall-to-wall Mozart. Nothing could make clearer something that has bugged me for years: the critical, snobbish, misinformed and persistent denigration of a musician who was the very embodiment of Romanticism.

It is possible to admire Liszt simply because you like listening to his music. Here are some of the additional reasons I admire Liszt, with obvious parallels to computing:

• He had complete technical mastery of his instrument, which he achieved by hard work and relentless practice.
• He started with nothing and earned his way to fame and fortune. He was one of the most accomplished and generous teachers, helping countless talented younger people to make themselves better.
• He deeply appreciated the accomplishments of others. He showed the seriousness of his appreciation by promoting the people and works he admired. He showed the depth of his understanding by making transcriptions that are themselves works of art.
• He took the current standards of his day seriously and mastered them; and then smashed the conventions to make things better.
• He felt deeply and acted on his feelings. He felt and expressed the deep connections of music to the human spirit.
• In spite of his position and accomplishments, he spent his life learning and exploring.

Personally, I never need much of an excuse to bring Liszt into a conversation; but I'm glad it's his anniversary year, because it makes performances easier to find and I don't need to work quite as hard to bring the conversation around to one of the greatest performers, teachers, creators, appreciators and pioneers who ever existed, an inspiration to us all.

Introduction

When I was in college, one of my passions was the music of Franz Liszt. Not that I could play it -- way too many notes. But I still loved it. So I created and hosted a weekly radio show about his music called Black-Liszt. Pretty obvious, and pretty punny, which increased its appeal.

All these years later, I'm still into computers, still into Liszt, Liszt still has way too many notes, I still use way too many words, and I still haven't "outgrown" puns -- so what better title for a random list of thoughts by me?