Geoffrey Gaskell <[log in to unmask]>:

>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.

The list is long indeed.  Henryk Szeryng, for example, had an abilty
to identify with great precision the different dialectal accents of the
Spanish language.  I suppose that he could do it with all the languages
he spoke, but I know this fact by an anecdote told once by an Argentine
critic (I would like to quote the source exactly, but sorry, I read this
long time ago).  This critic was interviewing once Szeryng at Buenos Aires,
and they were at a coffee-shop. The owner of the coffe-shop was a native
from Galicia, and when he adressed Szeryng to take his order, the violinist
asked him "You are from Pontevedra, right?".  The owner, surprised,
responded: "Yes sir, how did you know it?.  "It's your accent", said
Szeryng.  Then the man said: "And you are a musician, right?".  "Yes,
how did you know it?".  It's your ear, sir".

>Xenakis, for example, was also an excellent mathematician, not
>surprisingly & could have become a great architect.

I've heard that he was not precisely an "excellent" mathematician.

>Furtwaengler thought of himself more as a composer than as a conductor &
>Gesualdo was a very competent murderer....

Competent, but very far from the level that he reached in music.  In fact
according to De Quincey's criteria, he would be just an average assassin.
A murder by knife and due to passional reasons in XVI century Italy....
uff, what a commonplace!:-)

Pablo Massa
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