A Minute with Miles

If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus, or the play it was based on, you may have gotten the impression that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was some sort of giggling idiot who just happened to be really good at writing music. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.

One of the wonderful aspects of life as a musician: age differences among players don’t mean anything. What counts is what kind of person you are, and how you make music.

Professional opera singers often have to sing in languages with which they’re completely unfamiliar. And yet they’re expected to pronounce all the words correctly. How do they do it?

Like it or not, performers can’t help evaluating performance, especially in the cases of pieces we know or instruments we play.

It’s often easier to say what classical music is not, than to say what it is.

Most of what brass players do is done with the lips, and it’s invisible to us.

Chairs that are too low, too high, too hard, too slippery, or with seats tilted backward… they’re the bane of musicians’ existence.

Why should somebody else—anybody else, whether it’s a program annotator or a radio announcer—tell me that a piece of music is “sad,” or happy, or light, or charming, or profound, when no two people ever have precisely the same reaction to the same piece? One person’s “sad” may be another’s “noble,” and one person’s intense and penetrating may be another’s pretentious and annoying.

In the bad old days of symphony orchestras in this country, music directors were absolute dictators, and orchestra musicians had few protections. If a music director woke up in a bad mood and decided to fire an orchestra musician on the spot, he could… never mind that it might instantly deprive that musician of his livelihood.

Do you agree with the judgment that the two greatest composers of the late Baroque were Bach and Handel? Well, that means, unavoidably, that the rest of the late Baroque composers weren’t as good.

He may not be well know to the general public today, but, yet Philippe Gaubert was one of the most famous and important French musicians of the first half of the twentieth century.

I don’t suppose you have a pair of four-hundred-year-old pliers in your kitchen tool drawer, or a screwdriver made in the 1700s? No, probably not. Tools don’t tend to last that long. The tools of string players, though, are an entirely different story.

Have you by any chance been hanging on to your grandparents’ old 78 rpm records? Carting them around, perhaps, and storing them on shelves or in boxes whenever you’ve moved from place to place?

The riches that music has to offer, whether in times of great sorrow or great joy, are both incalculable and irreplaceable.

I play concerts for a living, so you wouldn’t think I’d need reminding of the dramatic difference between listening to a recording and hearing a live performance. But it was as an audience member, recently, not as a performer, that I had my reminder – and it was a pretty spectacular one, because I was lucky enough to attend a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

There are many great creative artists, including great composers, who have been mediocre human beings, not to mention any number who have been downright reprehensible human beings, or human beings whose private views we would find reprehensible if only we knew what they were.

The guitar, the lute, and the viola da gamba all have frets. Have you ever wondered why?

Have you ever wondered why, when we’re feeling sad, or lonely, or downright miserable, we usually prefer to listen to music that somehow reflects our mood, rather than music that might jar us out of it?

For those of us who don’t play a brass instrument, watching brass players play always seems a bit like watching a magic show. We hear the French hornists, trumpeters, trombonists, and tuba players playing plenty of different notes, but the number of times they move their fingers—or in the case of trombonists their slides—doesn’t nearly add up to the number of notes.

Why have Verdi's operas stood the test of time, while those of his contemporaries have not?