GIve your harp a hug! Alisa Sadikova

Here's one that simply blew me away. There are plenty of YouTube videos of child prodigies performing, but this one tops them all. Harp is one of the most difficult instruments to play, not just for the multitude of strings but for expression: it doesn't produce vibrato or rubato or glissando or any of those other "o"s that make music vibrant and alive.

I suspect that all instruments are attempts to mimic the human voice, and this one seems static by comparison. So the artist has to rely on what's called "decay": the little fade-off at the end of each note or phrase which kind of blurs the individual tones together. (Musicologists, I know you're wincing at this! It's just the way I see it, or hear it.) It gives harp-notes that golden sound and richness, no doubt only attained through long practice. But how can you attain anything through long practice when you're only seven years old?!

Stories of musical prodigies always seem to end sadly. There are rare examples, such as Yehudi Menuhin, in which the child goes on to a long and brilliant career, but more often that promise is never fulfilled. The brilliance dims, the playing settles into something still better than average, but no longer at genius level.

It's hard to peak at seven, or ten, or twelve. A documentary was made years ago about such an artist, who eventually came to ruin. Trouble is, I can't remember his name, or the name of the film! Never mind, the internet will provide, but only if I keep hunting.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Edison phonograph cylinders (1888): Handel - Israel in Egypt

(I seem to have lost the ability to format these posts, so they're all running together into one blob/blog. I hope to straighten it out soon.) These used to scare the shit out of me - I mean, old recordings. I don't know why, because they also fascinated me. Even now, sleuthing around on the net, I want to push the date as far back as I can. The 1880s is pretty far. But not the farthest. In the 1870s, a man named Lambert created something called the "talking clock", which wasn't much except a sound experiment. He recorded his voice saying, "One o'clock. . . two o'clock. . . ", etc. Not very exciting, and there are weird sounds that no one can interpret. It's recorded on an iron cylinder, a medium no one else wanted to try. Oh, and: a guy found a piece of black paper a few years ago with little etchings on it, fed it into his computer, and it sang, "O claire de la lune. . . ", just one line of it. It's of historic value, of course, but it'll never make the Top 40. Apparently it's from 1860 or 1840 or the war of 1812 or something. Frankly, I think it's a hoax, like that guy that claimed to have a recording of Chopin playing the Minute Waltz (which, by the way, referred to that other meaning of "minute" - small - and NEVER played in a minute like Liberace did.) It was the same technology, after all, pieces of black paper with soot on them. Good thing the maid didn't see them. Then things went to wax, which didn't sound much better. The cylinders distorted and even melted in the heat, and shattered when they dried out. Only a few survive, transcribed to modern sound to save playing them to death. (Though I think you can probably read them with a laser by now.) There is a whole site on these eerie Crystal Palace recordings, supposedly the first recorded music in history. I was happy to catch up with these excerpts here. A legend has grown up around them. Supposedly there were four thousand voices gathered to sing Handel's Israel in Egypt. (The Crystal Palace site says it was only 3,000: a thousand people missed practice and were told they couldn't participate.) That's kind of hard for me to believe: for one thing, I don't think this Crystal Palace would accommodate thousands of singers unless it had the dimensions of a football field. For another, with all those decibels I think the recordings would have been a little more distinct than this. But it's ghostly and a little ghastly to listen to this dim wavering voice from the past. It keeps wafting in and out, but at times it's strong enough that you can hear distinct Handelian chords and harmonies. Then it just sort of wafts back into the distant past. Still scares the shit out of me.