How IS Mozart just like the NCAA Final Four?

Great Debates
1

Because I pride myself on being a very up-to-date fellow, I was sitting at my new favorite diner at 19th street and 10th Avenue in NYC this morning. I was reading a New Yorker from December 16, 2002. Marc Singer wrote a fascinating article on pp.38-40.

In the article, he compared the recording of popular classical music pieces to a tennis match or baseball game. Or rather, he said people have said to him,

He then said,

I’ve been looking at clips of dozens and dozens of NCAA games, because I am working at a t.v. network and it’s March Madness season. While there are indeed variations on the themes, really- the games are numbingly the same to me.

I appreciate the guy’s analogy- you can own 5 recordings of Beethoven’s 2nd Violin Concerto ( or, Mozart’s Requiem Mass- my favorite piece of classical music ). Each one offers something different. Does each basketball game offer things that are different enough? Somebody has to win. Somebody has to lose.

Is there enough of a variation on plays, movements and scores that each individual basketball game can stand alone as a unique event? Don’t they really blur to the viewer of all of those games, after a while?? ( I’m honestly NOT baiting sports fans here, ok? I’m just asking how they view the subtleties of basketball ).

Now, to my end, I don’t own more than one recording of most classical pieces. I own three Requiem Masses by Mozart.

Cartooniverse

2

Unless you’re a conspiracy theorist, or watching pro wrestling, the difference between sports and musical recordings is knowing what’s coming next.

Now, that breaks down when you have Duke playing Outer Podunk University, but the idea is still sound.

3

If you’re not into the music, then owning different recordings of the same pieces does seem ludicrous. (I own three different recordings of Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor, with the E. Power Biggs version my all-time fave).

If you’re not into the game, then I suppose one basketball game may seem like another. I’m not a huge fan of college hoops, but I always perk up and take interest this time of year, especially after UAB took out Kentucky, Nevada beat Gonzaga, AND Alabama took out Stanford. This is a year for upsets, which always sparks interest. But every game is different; the players are different, and what happens when they interact makes a difference. If you don’t know what a pick and roll is, for example, you may not see the intricacies of the game in the same way that an informed an interested fan does. And I’m certain that my limited knowledge is nothing compared to the eye that an actual player or coach would bring to the game.

  • Rick
4

So, the analogy holds some water…

5

If it brings the analogy a bit closer to the mainstream…

http://www.secondhandsongs.com/song/424.html

Someone once said Come Together is the most covered song in the world. I’ve got… Soundgarden, Aerosmith, Beatles, Michael Jackson, Meat Loaf, Ike and Tina Turner… and some local bands… and they all sound very different.

I have four versions of Master of Puppets by Metallica. One from Master of Puppets, one off S & M, one off Apocalyptica, and one by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

They’re all different. Though less so.

Basketball’s not my thing. Baseball is. So I’ll use it. I’m sure that a lot of the more subtle points carry over one way or another.

Baseball… it’s a dynamic game. Where you are in the inning, where you are in the lineup, where you are in the country, all depend on what you’re going to pitch next. You watch for long enough, and you can see a dynamic little symphony going on between pitches… though the commercials they pack in these days tend to really break the rhythm.

I can tell you that a Yankees versus Devil Rays game in pre-season is going to be different than one in the regular season… and vastly different than one in post. (Last night, in the pre-season version, Derek Jeter ran across the field and rubbed Don Zimmerman’s head for luck. Don’s an old (1950s) Yankee, now coach, who… ah, left the team due to creative differences with the boss, is now with the Devil Rays… who happen to have another former Yankee as a head coach.
Now, this means that the pre-season game is old home week, it’s the players having fun, while doing the best they can.

Do it again midseason and it’ll be a friendly game, but more professional.

Do it again postseason and the two teams will be out to kill each other… like brothers.

You can see patterns. The Yankees have a strong lineup… but is anyone so much of a threat that they have to get walked if there’s two on? One on? One on first and third? Does the batter aim for the hole between first and second, between second and third, right up the first base line, or just for out of the park? How hard can you pull the pitch? Is the pitcher pitching in, in, away? Is he going to try to brush the batter back, or pull him in? And watch the way the catcher grabs the ball and pulls it up into the strike zone to convince the umpire. Watch the way the guy on first takes the lead… is he that confident? Is he going to steal? Is he going to go too far and let the pitcher take him off?
It’s not just about what is done… it’s about what, to who, when, why, and how that changes the menu of options for other people.

That help any?

6

The biggest difference to me is that I bet $100 on Alabama to beat Stanford. I did not however bet $100 that the Houston Grand’s version of Tosca would be better than the Dallas Met’s. Almost everyone I know bets on sports. I’ve never met someone who bets on Opera. Without gambling college basketball sucks.

7

Beethoven has more than one violin concerto? :confused: Has he written a new one recently?

Probably a better analogy to “more than one recording of the same piece” is “more than one performance of the same play” (or maybe a remake of a movie).

Watching different basketball games might be analagous to scientists performing the same experiment multiple times.

Much of the fun and excitement of watching a ball game comes from pretending that it matters who wins. (Kinda analogous to suspension of disbelief when watching a movie or reading a novel?) Or betting on the game, so that it does matter who wins.

8

It makes little sense to own multiple recordings of orchestral pieces unless a friend gives you a recording of a great piece (Shostakovich’s 7th or such) played by a second-rate orchestra as a gift.

Solo pieces are a whole different story. As far as Chopin goes, Vasary’s and Rubinstein’s interpretations are in a class of their own and distinct from each other. Frankly, I’m a Chopin fanatic and dislike the excessive rubato in Rubinstein’s recording but it’s entirely a question of preference - most classical addicts would want to own both. There’s probably a similar distinction with other composers, violin solos, etc.

9

Oh this is way too tempting. I’m laying $ 2,500.00 that says that Luciano Pavarotti will sing on the stage at the Met again within 3 years.

–Monopoly $$$, of course–

Side bet? That Pinky Zuckerman flies in from Ontario to guest conduct it. Fiddy dollahs.

:wink:

10

Beethoven only wrote one violin concerto.

For any given masterpiece of music, it is simply not possible for any single performance (intepretation), however great, to offer all possible insight contained within the composition. Different performances (sometimes even by the ssame performer) offer different insights, and consequently different musical experiences.

I own five recordings of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, including three conducted by Leonard Bernstein (one with the New York Philharmonic, two with the Vienna Philharmonic). While I admit there is one among them I don’t listen to anymore, I would not be without the others, because all of them bring something different to enjoy and discover in the piece. This is true even of the three Bernstein recordings: aside from the two different, and different-sounding, orchestras (which alone distinguishes the recordings significantly), the recordings come from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and in each case Bernstein rethought his interpretation at least slightly, corresponding with aging and increasing time spent with the piece.

A better comparison would be to a play. Could you imagine any filmed version of ‘Hamlet’ containing all the possible interest and insight available in a peformance of that play?

11

I am a big fan of the band Phish. Their famous live shows vary greatly from night to night–rarely is a song repeated in a four-or-five show stretch, and most of the songs are largely improvisational in nature so they’re different from one night to the next anyway.

When Phish comes to town, they sometimes play more that one night, and most fans will try to go to all of them. This doesn’t make sense for most bands, whose live shows vary little from night to night (not that this makes them any worse–it just reduces the desire to see more than one show).

I’ve found that the people who understand it are sports fans. When there’s a great matchup at the stadium for a three-game series, you’d like to go to all three games if you could. Someone who isn’t a baseball fan might find one to be a whole lot like the others, just as people who are not fan’s of Phish’s music find it repetitive and boring.

Dr. J

12

It’s a matter of description. What sports and musical compositions, have in common, is that they both come with certain predetermined elements, but aren’t completely described.

When performing a musical piece, elements like the exact tempo, or the exact timbre of the instruments or how “soft” a sound should be, might not be described, since there aren’t(weren’t) any reliable or concrete symbols that can communicate these elements. But that doesn’t mean that the original authors didn’t have a firm vision of how these elements should be. These are then subject to interpretation. But the described elements aren’t, like which note comes next. If you change that, you are no longer interpreting the piece, you are improvising on it.

In sports, you have the hard predetermined elements, like rules of the game, structural divisions like quarters or halves and their durations, number of players, shape and construction of the playing stage, and you have the soft predetermined elements, like game strategy, effective functions of each player, game plays. With experience and repetition, some of these soft elements, which in theory, should be pretty malleable, become hard, since non-effective variations are purged and winning variations are kept from wild experimentation. As an observer, more you are exposed to these elaborations, depending on your affinity, you either appreciate the naunced variations or they become monotonous.

So, I think you can have make a decent analogy between musical interpretations and sporting events.

13

I can buy the analogy in the OP far more readily than one between sporting events and day-to-day happenings in the business world. Geez, I wish they’d can those ads showing some office nerd in a slow-mo celebration because he got the third-quarter statistics in on time.

E. Power Biggs is one of the all-time great names in classical music.

Wouldn’t have had quite the same resonance if he’d played the piccolo, though.

14

According to Guiness it’s “Yesterday” which has been recorded over 1,600 times. I thought it would have been “Roll Over Beethoven” or some other Chuck Berry song.