Classical
Hans Zimmer Releases Trailer for European Concert Tour; Johnny Marr May Join [WATCH]
Beethoven Influences 'John Adams: Absolute Jest & Grand Pianola Music' [REVIEW]
Diving in as close to an artist's mind as possible is an obsession for most art-lovers. For musicians, our heroes of composition are especially aloof because of the language they use: a language that exists to say what words could never say. This makes it extremely difficult to get inside their head... yet we always feel like we know them. Composer John Adams seems to feel this way towards Beethoven, as he told Classical NPR's 'Deceptive Cadence'. When examining the influence of Beethoven in John Adams's latest album, 'Absolute Jest & Grand Pianola Music', the first of its two pieces (his eponymous concerto) could almost be likened to a matryoshka doll, or "nesting" doll. 'Play a Rubik's Cube Like a Piano' With Group Theory & TED Ed from Michael Staff
Playing piano can be difficult. Although, as a pianist, I’d argue that solving the Rubik’s cube is more difficult…way more difficult! It all depends on your perspective of course, but music theorist Michael Staff on TED Ed is showing us how those two perspectives are, in fact, one and the same. In his video, “How to Play a Rubik’s Cube Like a Piano” [below], Michael Staff exhibits how each process (playing the piano and solving the Rubik's cube) relies on the same properties of mathematics, properties that make up a system called group theory.
