Category Archives: Musical thoughts from Venezuela
Uncertainty
For years I explained to my cello students the art of overcoming uncertainty on an instrument whose bowing and fingering parameters don’t seem to have precise boundaries. The bowed instrument beginner should anticipate the geometry of hand-position shifts within a … Continue reading
Plato vs. MP3
Today, recorded music has the attributes of divinity: perfection (digital editions erased all flaws), ubiquity (the archives are everywhere and nowhere at the same time), intangibility (they no longer have a physical body), immortality (copiable ad infinitum), omniscience (music collections … Continue reading
Cultural Selection
The Spanish Empire took pains to build a colonial system with no room for intellectual or industrial development. Everything was forbidden: gatherings, travel between provinces, free trade, printing, and above all, reading books. (There was no printing press in Venezuela … Continue reading
Justus von Schoffel
My favorite composer? Schoffel, incontestably. Nobody in the car had heard of him; no doubt they thought I was being too precious. Since the beginning, Schoffel has always been full of surprises; it’s his transitions, the art of compressing history, … Continue reading
Montero Superstar
“Hello Radio Warsaw. What are these unknown works of our Frédéric?” asked the Poles during a live broadcast of a 1995 Gabriela Montero recital, when she won third prize in the Chopin Piano Competition. (Martha Argerich, president of the jury, … Continue reading
Herder and Watunna
Ever since indigenous voices infiltrated the stanzas of Juan de Castellanos, embellishing with multicolored phonetics his “Elegies on the Illustrious Gentlemen of the Indies,” written in Tunja, Colombia at the end of the 16th century, many writers have sought to … Continue reading
Windows
There is an inexplicable gap between the opera buffa performed by the principal voices of Venezuela’s political power and the opera seria crafted in the ranks of an institution such as our National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras [El … Continue reading
Zenith
The fascinating history of bowed instruments – the most modern of the orchestra – is the story of the evolution in the design of two halves: bow and violin. Traversing Christian and Muslim, oriental and occidental worlds since 1,000 A.D., … Continue reading
Samarkand
What few people think of when watching a symphonic orchestra is the modernity of the predominant instruments: the bows. The violin tends to be synonymous with antiquity: we imagine that, for lack of mechanisms, screws, and springs, it’s the oldest … Continue reading
