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