Sunday, May 09, 2010

Private Passions


I was the guest today on Radio 3’s Private Passions, where I get to choose half an hour of music and talk about it with Michael Berkeley. It can be heard here for the next seven days, I believe, but after that it vanishes into the BBC’s vaults. As ever with radio interviews, only afterwards do I realise what eloquent things I could have said in place of ‘um, you know…’. But I enjoyed it.

4 comments:

Gam said...

Yay, I don't feel quite as strange for being so inexplicably attracted to Hungarian music now! Even with culturally German composers like Schubert, Brahms, Liszt - I favor their Hungarian inspired music. It's just so... charming.

I'm also not used to hearing 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' played on piano - it sounds far less 'baroque' to me. Are Bach's keyboard works usually played on piano rather than harpsichord?

Julian Williams said...

I thought you got lots of good point across. I have read language instinct and presumed your book was on similar lines. I think I was not far off.

Have you thought of writing visual instinct, this is a really intersting subject since it is fairly much possible to transpose from many of these observations about how the mind works using grammer and patterns to appreciate and understand the visual world in time and space

Unknown said...
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Philip Ball said...

William,
I've mostly heard WTC on piano (not least because that's how I play it myself!). You're right of course that this isn't terribly 'authentic' - but I'm doubtful about the whole authenticity issue anyway for early music. Still, you've inspired me to give it a go on the rather good harpsichord mimic I have on my electric piano...
Julian,
A lot of the ideas, particularly the gestalt principles, transfer to vision (in fact they came from there in the first place). I'm very interested in that, and want to learn more about it. But there are already good people writing about it (like Semir Zeki), so I think I'll probably leave it to them.