Kevin Sutton, on my commentaries to his commentaries to Rubinstein:

>>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"?.
>
>First of all, Pablo, kindly bag the condescending tone.  It's unbecoming
>and unprofessional.  And as a matter of fact, I do know bunches of so
>called musicians who do nothing but eat sleep and hole up in practice
>rooms.

My apologies, sir!.  A condescending tone is less an attack to your person
than a matter of rhetorics.  We could argue a lot about how "unbecoming" or
"unprofessional" is it.  However, let's not drive ourselves out from the
thread.  Those guys who do nothing else but sleep, etc in a practice room,
are worst musicians because of that?.  I would dare to hold exactly the
opposite.  I have the greatest respect for people who spend their lives in
practice rooms, because that's a hard life.  Everybody can be easily more
or less "cultured" (or at least, it's relatively easy to get the reputation
of "cultured"), but not everybody seems bend to consacrate thousands of
hours to a musical practice.  It takes some guts and a real vocation.  So,
I find pretty snobbish and unprofessional the expression "so called
musicians" applied to those people.

>>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).
>
>Certainly some have.  And dozens more simply spin out accurate notage.

Well, sorry, but I have also a great respect for those musicians who
"simply spin out accurate notage".  I think that they're better than
thousands of so called "interpreters", who postulates themselves to our
admiration with their "personal" but mediocre ideas about a composition,
or than those who knows a lot about "historical performing practices and
historical cultural environments", but can't sing four damn bars in tune.

>>Some HIP performers c[o]uld be good examples [of people who don't know
>>anything except their own literature].
>
>Having performed with quite a few hipsters, I think they are amonst the
>more literate and informed of performers.  They have at least taken the
>time and effort to explore.

The other side:  many hipsters doesn't do research, they just copy what
they listen at Gardiner's CDs!!!.  I have known a lot of people who thinks
themselves authorized to teach us how to perform ancient music with the
only credential of having bought a vielle or being born a sort of natural
castrati.  If I had to choose, I must say that I can't stand close minded
people under the disguise of "literate" and "informed".  I rather prefer
straight close minded people.

>If all you have experienced is a practice room, then that's all you have
>to communicate.

Another cliche.  Who are us to judge what other people can or can not
express according to their own experiences?.  I've witnessed quite a few
surprises about this.

Pablo Massa