Geoffrey Gaskell:

>I suppose we may as well all take this opportunity to come up with a
>Homeric Catalogue of Alternative Competencies (whether musical or not)
>of great composers and performing musicians.

Gershwin and Schoenberg painted.  John Cage was an authority on mushrooms.
Ernest Bloch was a fine photographer.  Virgil Thomson is one of the great
American prose writers.  Arnold Bax was a decent, if minor, poet and
novelist.  The violinist Erich Friedman is, I believe, a dentist.  Walter
Piston was a wonderful technical draftsman (all the illustrations in his
Orchestration are his).  William Alwyn counts as a polymath:  he was
an award-winning translator of French poetry and a painter of talent.
Kreisler was a mathematician and ranked chess player.  Elgar had a decent
reputation as a Shakespearean scholar.  Harry Partch was a great carpenter.

Steve Schwartz