Kevin Sutton:

>I think that one of the reasons that Rubinstein was a great pianist was
>his openness not only to other genres of music, but to other genres of
>art and life for that matter.

I think that the real thing was in his fingers.  The rest is literature, as
Verlaine said once.

>He once said that unless you spent more of your life "living" than
>practicing, you would never be able to fully communicate through your
>music, as you would have had no experiences to relate.  (or words to
>that effect.) I agree with this ...

My dear Kevin, this is simply a cliche, and you know that.  Do you know a
single person who spend more hours of his life "practicing" than "living"?.
Everybody "lives", even the lowest narrow minded dolt.  And some of them
communicated us their lives very well....(art is a sort of miracle after
all).

>I have seen too many pianists, singers, violinists,
>etc who know nothing about anything other than their own literature.  Not
>only are they uninteresting as musicians, they are also boring people.

Cliche again.  There are millions of musicians around the world who "know
nothing about anything other than their own literature", and certainly are
great musicians in spite of this (or thanks to this, I would dare to say).
Some HIP performers culd be good examples.  By the other hand I have known
a lot of pop musicians (I'm 30), who were very interested in balinese,
afgan, african and dodecaphonic music, and I found them to be a very boring
bunch of poor guys, whose music was still less interesting than themselves.
That means nothing, however, because one can find a lot of examples of the
opposite case.  So, we can't deduce any general law about the relationship
between musical quality and mind-open angle.  I still think that being open
minded doesn't make you by itself a bettter or worst musician.  I don't see
why it should.

Pablo Massa
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