Itchy Blister On My Bottom

"He had lost his right arm in World War I, had many opportunities to see how - every time we put a fingering of a new composition - his stump participate in the process . Several times I said that I should trust his choices, because he still felt every finger of his right hand. starmene Sometimes I sat in silence as he closed his eyes and his stump, stirring continuously. This is now when he lost his arm for many years "

Letter Erna Otten, a student of the Viennese pianist Paul Wittgenstein.

is not the first time we hear of phantom limbs. I heard about it for the first time after a case of amputation of a lower limb occurring to a relative of mine, that although he had no leg, he continued to feel pain, something that puzzles us, as to cast doubt on the health mind of the unfortunate.

For a long time doctors have regarded the arts as mere ghost psychic hallucinations, due to the loss of the limb.

In "Musicophilia" book came to light in 2007, written by the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks, among other things, we talk also the case of the pianist Wittgenstein, and the research conducted by Silas Weir Mitchell, a neurologist who had the "luck" (it sounds bad considering the context, but luckily I mean a case of purely scientific opportunism) to hear the stories of many soldiers wounded in 'hospital "Stump Hospital in Philadelphia during the American Civil War. Convinced of the omnipresence of the "phantom limb" in all amputees, Mitchell demonstrated the real presence explained as "neural representation of the limb in the brain." So the case of neural representation dependent on integrity of the brain and spinal cord and portions of the survivors of sensory nerves and motor activity.

Movement the "stump" (ie what is left arm amputee) mentioned by Erna Otten in the letter addressed to Oliver Sacks, is simply the result of excitement over these areas resulted in neuro-sensory-motor.

All Mitchell's thesis has been confirmed by modern Neurofisiobiologia, which has also discovered that after the amputation, done a real reorganization of the brain with special "awareness" of the cortex (from which the neural impulses ) regarding the "stump."

The reorganization of the brain is a very important phenomenon and worthy of curiosity for musicians who want to understand a little better operation your brain for learning.

How often it happens, when we are going to study a complex technical passage on the piano, to discover that the study "mental" is at least as productive as the instrument? My teacher always told me: "shut the piano and desk study !"... eh ... but that effort though, especially if we consider that doing so is less of a player they need most: the ... those sound vibrations that reach our ears and we call music. It is not difficult to understand that the table will never give us back the joy of music, let alone a nice shiny desk. I enjoyed discovering

Then, while attending a course in psychology of music, held by Antoinette Prof.Maria Lamanna and especially through the use of the text "a Teaching Tool - Reflections and methodological proposals on the linearity / complexity - by Anna Maria Cool," which extensive research in neurological explanations are giving to those who were just "speculation."

Research Neurofisiobiologia of the movement are showing that the learning of complex motor skill consists of two phases.

1 - Learning fast, momentary, simultaneous operation performed on the instrument.

2 - Pre-Post-training: that is the phase after the exercise in which is a true reorganization of the brain, which promotes learning, assimilation in the mental and stabilization of the motor representation (reorganisations and transformations brain demonstrated by Parsons and PET - Positron Emission Tomography). Simply put, we are talking about the stage (it seems to be especially during the first 6 hours post-exercise) in which the brain is organized and works in silence, giving us the ability to better deal with the transition studied.

Returning to the book by Sacks ...

"Musicophilia" deals with a fairly limited range of issues revolving around the psycho-musical. It would be impossible to mention all the cases, the examples and the diseases described by the author.

We start from a real case in the story of Dr. Musicophilia chicory struck by lightning in a phone booth. After risking death, the protagonist of the story wakes up filled with an incredible desire to make music, it begins to study piano and composing music by himself.

I can also perform with a fair result.

Equally interesting, as disturbing are the cases of patients (musicians or not) with epilepsy. During the seizures "feel" unconsciously music without being able to identify the source, and, after the seizure, they can not remember the music played mentally. Sacks talks about true and their "Aurea music associated with the attack" . Instead appear to be several cases of epilepsy musicogenic, meaning those seizures induced by music as in the case of Mrs. N., who almost accidentally finds the connection between its crisis by listening to Neapolitan music. Underwent a partial lobectomy Thunder and the disease is eradicated.

Then we deal with mental associations, namely the ability to "draw" the music mentally, "on command", and "ear worms (ear borers) or better brainworms " (worms in the brain - why is it that the problem exists in the brain), ie those tunes that remain etched in the mind and of which you just can not leave. Beautiful example, reported by Sacks, in which a patient is haunted for days by reason of "Poor Rigoletto," and then constantly hear the "seven sets of pairs" that make up the ground.

Well, it must be nice to feel all day " the RA RA RA RA RA RA Ra "! (Beautiful episode, among other things, the work of Giuseppe Verdi).

- Hallucinations of music, music that is real circuits in mind, repeated obsessively, as the iPod in mind (all examples of neurological hallucinations, psychotic and never). It also addresses diseases such as amusia, rhythmic, as in the case of Che Guevara, and Distimbria simultanagnosia. This disease is caused by a lack of connection and integration between the factors affecting the perception of music, something that can be compared to what happens in cases of intoxication from cannabis or hallucinogens, so a musical composition is received in a strange way , chaotic, in which all musical elements seem scattered. Sacks gives the example of Anthony Storr, who Music and the Mind, tells us about his play under the influence of mescaline.

"I was aware of the vibrant and pulsating quality of the sounds that reached me, bite del'archetto on the rope of a direct appeal to my emotions. The appreciation of form, but it was completely compromised. Each time a theme is repeated, we welcome as a surprise. Taken individually, the subjects could kidnap me, but the relationship between them had disappeared "

It is the experience that anyone who may have lived, smoking a joint, drinking a little more, it happens that we focus our attention on an instrument (drums, guitar ...) will capture the attention to detail but all will disintegrate into a thousand fragments, generating a similar perception to disharmony, there is no sense of chords and all the music is perceived as a separate contrapuntal lines , and the sense of time is compromised, so a 3-minute song may seem that hard hour.

For Oliver Sacks I would give a nice 9:30. Good book, interesting both as a doctor for a musician.

Joseph

DF

I Burnt My Hand On A Pot

The Chaconne of Bach: the charm of the transcript and discovery

At one point Guido said the violin. It was for that night unless the accompaniment of the piano, running the Chaconne. Ada gave him a violin with a smile of thanks. He never looked at her, but looked at the violin as if he wanted to segregate him with inspiration. Then he began living in the midst of turning his back on most of the small company, it fell the strings with the bow slightly to tune and also made some arpeggio (...) Then, you put me against the great Bach himself. Never, before or later, I came to feel that way the beauty of that music came on those four strings like an angel by Michelangelo in a block of marble. Just my mood was new to me and was ecstatic ow that led me to look up, as what Novissima (...) I was assaulted by the music that grabbed me. It seemed to me saying my illness and my sorrows with indulgence and mitigated with smiles and caresses (...), but Bach proceeded sure as fate. He sang with passion and high down to seek the ostinato bass that surprised as the ear and the heart they had anticipated: the right place! A moment later and the song would have vanished and could not be reached by the resonance, just before and would have overlapped with the hand, strangling. Guido was not the case, not even a trembling arm tackling Bach, and this was a real inferiority (...)

Thus spoke Cosini Zeno, Svevo's hands, that is beautiful in that novel "Confessions of Zeno ". The quoted passage, played by Guido, is the Chaconne, the last movement that concludes the Partita No. 2 (BWV 1004) for solo violin by Bach, very well known for its beauty and difficulty.

Here is the violin version of Milstein:

A song so beautiful could not be transcriptions and adaptations of all kinds and for various instruments or even orchestra (We strongly recommend the approach to the most famous orchestral versions of Stokowski or Casella, both in bad taste), only for piano, in fact, there are several versions: Carl van Debrois Bruyckere (1855), Ernst Pauer (1867), Joachim Raff (1865); Wilschau C. (1879), Count Geza Zichy (1880); Schubert FL (1858); W. Lamping (1887), Johannes Brahms (1877-78); Hans Hartman (1892-3), Ferruccio Busoni (1897); Sievking Martinus (1914), Alexander Siloti (1924), Isidore Phillip (1925), Emmanuel Moore (1936); Briskier Arthur (1954); Pilney Karl Hermann (1968) ; Lars Mortesen for harpsichord in the key of A minor instead of D minor (2002);

The two most famous are those of Brahms and Busoni. The first, in chronological order, is that of Johannes Brahms in 1877 for left hand alone is different from that of Ferruccio Busoni in the next twenty years (1897). My favorite is undoubtedly that of Busoni. As part of the third volume of "Bach-Busoni Ausgabe," in an exemplary way the Chaconne reflects the idea of \u200b\u200bthe composer's transcription Italian who, with intent certainly uncertain, partly explicable by the desire to "be inspired by the violin virtuoso" (an attitude shared by many composers including Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Rachmaninoff and others) part of the intention to demonstrate to what point, the language and style of Bach could be developed on an instrument so different from the violin, the piano as precisely, and all made the means of expression available to the modern era.

Using all the resources of the piano, explored and developed, so to speak, through the piano by Franz Liszt, in transcribing the "Chaconne," Busoni performs an act making it eminently clear and enhancing creative harmony and polyphony implied in the original text. About

original text would be open a little side note: I listened a while back, a CD titled "Morimur. The CD offers the performance of the Partita in D minor BWV 1004 for solo violin, including the Bach Chaconne by eight choirs. Christoph Poppen run the game using the baroque violin and The Hilliard Ensemble performs choral alternately to "dance" of the game. And so everything is quite normal. The peculiarity is the last track of the CD in that it proposes again the Chaconne, Poppen always performed by the violin, but the implementation of the choirs simultaneously sung by the Hilliard Ensemble in the attempt, that's incredible (!!!) to reveal the hidden choirs, messages, and the alleged theological encrypted numerical symbols in the score.

be honest. The first hearing has caused me some discomfort at the lack, in my opinion, the uniformity between the sound of violin Poppen and the Hilliard Ensemble interventions.

I found out later that this CD ECM New Series is the result of a search for a professor of Düsseldorf, Helga Thoen, which claims to have discovered all the mysteries hidden behind the notes of Bach's music and this recording would seem to reveal the world. It seems that encrypted messages, enigmatic structures, encrypted references - the names of Bach and theology to a well encrypted and noted - already revealed in the sacred works, are also present in the instrumental works of the composer of Eisenach as the games for solo violin, for example. The entire score is filled with references to encrypted the Holy Scriptures, the Trinity, a choral Easter, Resurrection and hope of eternal life. The famous Chaconne, according to Professor Thoen would be a real "musical epitaph, written by Bach in honor of his first wife Maria Barbara died prematurely. How true? studies and research are worth respect, but the results do not seem to be irrefutable. Someone compared them to conjecture "forced" that archaeologists love to do on the correlation between the pyramids of Egypt and the constellations in the sky.

Puzzles aside, the musical result can like it or not though, personally, buys only your charm for any connections to the transcendent, nothing more ...

Chaconne Returning to the piano, the work of Ferruccio Busoni transcriber and recreation point especially to highlight the harmonic variations, the possible changes and discoloration of the basso ostinato of "Chaconne" by Bach conceived, and at the same time developing polyphony from monody, all while maintaining a degree of stylistic unity in the composition. From the purely technical side

-piano, Busoni uses the entire range of the keyboard towards the goal of greater diversity Most evidence of color and timbre to the formal structure of the piece. The virtuosity takes a back seat when compared to the bare tension of the original melody for violin, and the extension of means, well adapted to the purposes of the transcript, does not generate overrides; Even the great exploration of the records and especially the systematic use serious than that - something that makes the Chaconne a song very pleased at the edge of perception, if played badly crushed in a low register - as the basis of the structural composition, are justified by the fact that the bottom of the "Chaconne," the very foundation of the following variations, Bach could not indicate in most of the time, except that in "earlier, veiled "in the manner of an allusion (for obvious limitations of a purely instrumental violin) and piano by Busoni in the text it is fully realized in all its function and harmonic foundation course in all its beauty.

Busoni used elements also new compositions (not just the melodic material boundary and new items that may be useful in drawing contrapuntal), not present in the original score but in line with its development on the piano, thereby accentuating the character of extensive and continuous variation of all parameters of the composition (melody, harmony, polyphony, rhythm, timbre), coming very close to the example given by J. Brahms, the supreme master of the change.

As for the signs and agogic dynamics, timbre and orchestral indications specifically requested (in many cases made by a prudent and carefully fingering suggested by the auditors) apply not only to interpret what is left in the Bach taste of the performer (we know that the original text has no indication of timing and dynamics), but also build a musical composition well balanced despite the nuances and contrasts fielded.

The theme, which initially appears on the left hand (but not necessarily involves: I, for example, I often performed by dividing between the two hands, and entrusting the dominant of D minor to the right hand to infuse more depth, subjective choice ... obvious ...) high, in time, "Andante maestoso, but not too slow," returns at the end strong after a strain on the eighth king low, heavy and "large majestic, in a typical piano arrangement of Busoni's writing (that is made up of agreements with eight or nine sounds that fill large areas of the keyboard) and has almost the meaning of a real transfiguration of the mystical feeling that reigns in the song, made desirable, expected and reinforced by the many changes that precede the final.

Returning for a moment to address previous on the discoveries of Professor Thoen, I would say that there are different approaches to a song like this, when you discover that intimate connections between the author, his music and extra-musical elements, however, related to the life of the musician, in this case with the memory of Maria Barbara, the truth of the conjecture of musicologists.

In these cases, limit ourselves to listen to music in silence.

Damiano Franco

I suggest listening to the "Chaconne" by Bach-Busoni in one of the many different interpretations of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.