The Ultimate Piano (™)

[fredbucket]

should my unmade bed be made

No, this would contravene the second law of thermodynamics

Regards
Fred

[Arjuna]

You mean the ones with broken strings, missing hammers, pedals that don't work and chip wrappers inside?

I didn't see the chip wrappers...

Seriously though, I hope you're exaggerating. For any pianist, whether student or not, playing a piano that has not been well looked after is soul destroying.

Regards
Fred

All the things I mentioned I actually saw and the Con - though not on the same piano.

On a different tack, maybe John Cage's 4'33" shouldn't get any publicity, being
a nothing work. Lasting a tedious 273 seconds, it is perhaps significant that the
negative of this number represents absolute zero on the Kelvin temperature scale,
which is probably how numb with cold his audience feels when they realise that
they've actually paid to 'hear' this nonsense.

At the risk of sounding extraordinarily pretentious I think Cage's 4'33'' is actually quite a remarkable work (and I mean that in a good way). It's not supposed to be 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, but 4 min. and 33 sec. of ambient sounds, which, if you're REALLY listening can actually be quite beautiful, especially if what precedes it is a lot of noise. It's like when the refrigerator stops humming and you then start to hear other noises - crickets, wind, somebody breathing etc.
Still.... I wouldn't buy a recording.

[Timtin]

The question of what constitutes conceptual art is a tricky one. Presumably it's meant to be
thought-provoking either visually or aurally. I believe that it was Damien Hirst who described
the Twins Towers attacks as a form of art. Well, one wonders if he'd have thought the same
thing if he'd been trapped on one of those two doomed planes?

[rob]

The question of what constitutes conceptual art is a tricky one. Presumably it's meant to be
thought-provoking either visually or aurally. I believe that it was Damien Hirst who described
the Twins Towers attacks as a form of art. Well, one wonders if he'd have thought the same
thing if he'd been trapped on one of those two doomed planes?

He a clever self-publicist with very little talent other than self-publicity.
It's amazing that anyone falls for it. Conceptual art is often shocking - that's just the point.
But what constitutes a shocking act is not necessarily art. Hirst wants to shock.
But being thought-provoking in that way is not always constructive - sometimes it's just silly and puerile.

[Arjuna]

Surely you can't exclude the artist's/creator's intentions from the equation. The twin towers attack was an act of terrorism precisely because that is what was intended.
I could be wrong but I'm not convinced that Cage's 4'33'' is conceptual art. I believe it is music because that is what was intended. A lot of Cage's work was created under the principal that anything can be music, and I think he truly believed that. I'd be willing to bet that he wanted his audience to listen to 4'33'' and not to think about it.

...And that's why the Stuart and Sons is the ultimate piano.

[klavierelch]

The question of what constitutes conceptual art is a tricky one. Presumably it's meant to be
thought-provoking either visually or aurally. I believe that it was Damien Hirst who described
the Twins Towers attacks as a form of art. Well, one wonders if he'd have thought the same
thing if he'd been trapped on one of those two doomed planes?

He a clever self-publicist with very little talent other than self-publicity.
It's amazing that anyone falls for it. Conceptual art is often shocking - that's just the point.
But what constitutes a shocking act is not necessarily art. Hirst wants to shock.
But being thought-provoking in that way is not always constructive - sometimes it's just silly and puerile.

Tim, small correction: It was Stockhausen who said this about 9/11 shortly after in an interview. And he caused quite a scandal with this statement here in Germany. But well, his brain certainly rested on Sirius at this point of time...

[Timtin]

Well, it seems that both men may have come up with some similar nonsense.

This was a newspaper article at the time about Hirst's views:-

The artist Damien Hirst said last night he believed the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks "need congratulating" because they achieved "something which nobody would ever have thought possible" on an artistic level.
Hirst, who is no stranger to controversy, said many people would "shy away" from looking at the event as art but he believed the World Trade Centre attack was "kind of like an artwork in its own right".
In an interview, Hirst told BBC News Online: "The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually."
Describing the image of the hijacked planes crashing into the twin towers as "visually stunning", he added: "You've got to hand it to them on some level because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America.

This was Stockhausen's view of the work of 'art':-

Asked at a press conference on Monday for his view of the events, Stockhausen answered that the attacks were "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos." According to a tape transcript from public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, he went on: "Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world."

Since both of them will go down in history as great artists and I certainly will not, maybe they're right and I'm wrong.

[Arjuna]

Since both of them will go down in history as great artists and I certainly will not, maybe they're right and I'm wrong.

I hope your not

[davida march]

crotchet piano.jpg

Especially for PaddyS but I think I meant a crochet piano.
dm

[fredbucket]

Ok, back on topic (sorry, DM). This may be of interest (please allow for the mispronunciation of the pianist's name...)

http://www.abc.net.au/ra/connectasia/st ... 933492.asx

Regards
Fred