thirteenfingers's comments

This.

Fellow pianist-with-smallish-hands here. The string players' paradigm of having differently-sized instruments as one grows up works well because they carry their instruments with them. Pianists are cursed with having to play whatever instrument we find on location (unless you bring your own electronic keyboard everywhere, which isn't a bad idea if it's practically possible). Differences in stiffness/tone quality/whatever are annoying enough to deal with already, and differently-sized keys is going to be a whole 'nother league of confusing. I'd personally rather be stuck with the same standard for key sizes everywhere at the expense of not being able to play all the repertoire I'd like.

Examples? Happy to be proven wrong on this.

Speaking for myself, I would be willing to pay YouTube to opt out of ads. I post mostly classical music videos, which are totally ruined if video advertisements are inserted in the middle. (Granted, YouTube doesn't seem to do that to classical music videos quite as much as it used to.)

I'm already paying Vimeo for a low-budget data plan, and I only continue to use YouTube as my main platform because of the extra exposure.

If you're referring to in-video ads, then no.

At present, if you choose not to monetize a video, no ads get shown unless a third part makes a copyright claim on your video.

I'm not quite sure about the situation with ads that show up in the corner of the page - those are unobtrusive enough that I'm used to mentally tuning them out.

Oh man. I posted here about this before, but almost exactly four years ago a friend and I put on a concert of our own favorite Tom Lehrer songs to great enthusiasm. By what must be total coincidence, just a few days ago I had posted some videos of that concert to youtube, keeping my fingers crossed they wouldn't get copystriked... and now I wake up to this. I knew of his permissive attitude toward copyright, but I wasn't expecting him to make it official.

Mr. Lehrer, thank you for brightening our lives.

This bit in particular resonated with me, as someone who's had problems with nervousness giving piano recitals:

I have a psychological approach to nerves as well. We have to consider the so-called importance of our little place in the world. This Beethoven performance is unlikely to be of any significance in three hundred years—and in three thousand years, not at all.

It’s like standing on a different planet and looking down; let go and lose yourself. At the same time, we have to realize that the smallest gesture has enormous implications.

Man what an extraordinary guy. I love reading about people like Mr. Edquist who kind of live in the shadow of great artists like GG and make their art possible, especially when dealing with such artists requires a bit of head-butting.

Highly recommend the author's book "A Romance On Three Legs", which she mentions in the article.

Ms. Delaney has also written a full-length book, "Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem", which I haven't read all the way through but which appears to be a more thorough treatment of the material covered in this article.

(Disclaimer: personally acquainted with the author.)

There's no shame in moving back in with your parents, as long as they and you get along, and as long as you keep making something of yourself. I lived with my parents for seven and a half years after getting my bachelor's degree. The first two and half of those years I did music freelance, after which I landed my current full-time job in IT (but I've kept up the music too). I saved up a bunch and then a few months ago, shortly before turning 31, I bought a house.

I'd like to boast that it was very careful and farsighted financial planning on my part, but it really wasn't. I'm just good enough at appreciating the living moment that I didn't feel the same urge to move out that my peers felt.

What are some of the UX problems you're thinking of? Personally I've been pretty happy with it so far. (My main point of comparison is Sibelius, which I used until I went all-Linux three or four years ago.)

I've posted about this here before, but a lot of people who upload their own videos of classical music on youtube and get copyright-warned or copyright-striked are too spooked to file a counter-claim. If it was a bot that automatically filed the claim against you, there's a very good chance the claim will be automatically lifted if you counter-claim.

Yes, youtube will give you a big scary warning about how repeated violations could mean your account is shut down. Every time this happened I went ahead and submitted counter-claim anyway. On all but one occasion the copyright claim disappeared immediately. The one exception required a bit of escalation but I still wound up on top (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488897 if you're curious).

I understand a good many people simply do not feel comfortable risking their youtube account being shut down from contested claims, but I suspect that for many the risk is a lot lower than they realize.

Northeast US. Actually it appears to have come back maybe two or three minutes after my first comment.

It's down for me. Tells me my channel "has no content". I have a live stream scheduled in less than 24 hours - keeping my fingers crossed this is resolved quickly.

Very disappointed that the article doesn't mention that about 1734 Johann Sebastian Bach actually wrote a secular cantata (often called the "Coffee Cantata") telling the story of a father trying to get his daughter to stop drinking coffee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweigt_stille,_plaudert_nich...

https://www.bachvereniging.nl/en/bwv/bwv-211/

Yes. Even among those who hope someday to make music their living, many will opt to forgo immediate profit for experience and exposure alone.

My personal attitude (in general, I haven't contributed to this site) is that it's incredibly difficult and even soul-sucking to try and earn a decent living in music performance, let alone composition, so I don't even try. Instead, I have a day job - I work in IT for my alma mater - and in return for reduced time available for music, I get complete freedom to pursue the musical projects I want at my own pace. This way I can be sort of my own patron. Sure, getting paid for music would be nice, but I'm not going to insist on it for a given project unless that was the only way to make said project worthwhile to me, in which case I probably wouldn't undertake it in the first place. I suspect there are a good many freelance musicians nowadays who also take this approach.

Classical pianist here. I've been through youtube's broken copyright enforcement system several times. I'll post a video of myself performing some composition that is in the public domain and it'll get "identified" as a copyrighted recording by someone else. Of course youtube doesn't give you an option for "mistaken claim", you have to choose between "this content is entirely my work" (which isn't quite true in my case, since I didn't write the music) or "this video counts as fair use". I typically select "this video counts as fair use" because it's the least untrue of the available options. Nineteen times out of twenty the claim disappears immediately. (I don't even monetize my videos. I just don't want ads on my videos at all, and I especially don't want ads on my videos if the revenue is going to some completely unrelated party.)

There was, however, one time when I had to deal with an escalated claim. The piece in question was the slow movement of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony. The Symphony has long been in the public domain. However, the slow movement was adapted into the song "Goin' Home", which is still under copyright, and there is a long-standing myth that the song was the inspiration for the Symphony rather than the other way around. Thus when I challenged the copyright claim on my New World video, the claimant came back and insisted their claim (on "Goin' Home") was valid. This notice was of course accompanied by the scary warnings about how if I persisted it could count as a strike against my youtube account.

I called their bluff. I responded with links to every online source I could find showing that Dvorak's work came first and was in the public domain.

I don't know what I would have done had they continued to dig in their heels. Happily, they ended up releasing the claim - days before their claim would have expired anyway - with no elaboration. I'd be curious to hear from anyone else who stuck it through the scary youtube warnings and what the outcome was.

[EDIT: thanks for the clarifications on "own content" and "fair use". I never thought of it that way, but now it seems obvious.]

I'm a pianist with an active performing schedule and I'm the same way. I'll listen to music at work if I have relatively mindless tasks to get out of the way, but when it comes to actual coding or anything requiring careful thought, forget it. All music ends up being distracting, either because I really enjoy it or because I find it really annoying.

I'd be curious to know if there are any serious musicians here who can concentrate on writing code or any other similarly mentally-intensive task while listening to music.

A year and a half ago, an actor-singer friend of mine and I decided to give a concert of our personal favorite Tom Lehrer songs. Turnout was tremendous. The bulk of the audience was of that age where they would have been in high school or college when they first heard him, but there were plenty of older and younger people too. It's fantastic how his songs continue to resonate with people after so long.

The problem with performing Tom Lehrer's music nowadays is that your potential audience basically falls into two groups: those that know about Tom Lehrer, and know all the intros and lyrics by heart already, so they don't laugh quite as much anymore; and those who don't know about Tom Lehrer and don't get his humor.

Classical composer and performer here. You just hit upon the one aspect of my chosen genre that drives me batshit insane.

I've had countless arguments with other performers about how rigid one has to be when performing any given classical composition. I'm told over and over again that, for example, Glenn Gould's unorthodox interpretations "aren't musical", but when I press my interlocutors for a justification of that statement, all they can offer is "it's not what the composer intended", which only begs the question. Composers aren't infallible, and they definitely don't always see or hear all the possibilities inherent in their own music.

The whole division-of-labor between composer and performer is, I think, both a strength and a weakness in classical music. It's a strength because it's allowed composers to concentrate on exploring the possibilities of musical ideas and working out something marvelously and intricately crafted in advance. It's a weakness because it encourages this hard-set absolute-textual-fidelity mentality among performers, and discourages them from really leaving their individual mark on a performance (unlike in jazz). The great classical composers are among my heroes, but they weren't gods, and performers shouldn't treat them as such.

Fellow composer here - I completely agree, and I suspect the great classical composers often felt as much, that their own musical ideas led them in a totally different direction than they originally intended.

My personal feeling about Eno's approach is that it almost deserves a different label than "composing" - maybe "incubating" (you know, like a startup incubator). For me, and I suspect for a great many music lovers, "composing" implies a process that may be evolutionary to some degree but is still overseen and directed from beginning to end by a particular artist. Contrast that with the case of traditional music from $REGIONAL_CULTURE where the process is more truly evolutionary as songs are passed from one generation of bards to another.

(I don't mean to say that Eno's approach to making music is somehow less legitimate than any other. It just seems better described by some other word.)