The Fredösphere

These days I'm listening to short cantatas for choir and orchestra by Brahms, namely Schicksalslied and Nänie.  Imagine the richest, darkest Belgian chocolate you've ever tasted, melted and mixed with a twelve year old single malt scotch whisky, then poured over a perfect Cuban cigar.  Mmmm, mmm!  It's that good.

Meanwhile ... how odd.  We've been enjoying that great Evangelical pastime, the group Bible study.  Last Sunday, our study guide quoted Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, a book I now include in my Amazon wish list.  (Any grateful reader of this blog who is overcome by the impulse to buy me something is urged to deal with that impulse by ... giving it to me.)

The book describes a pottery class experiment.  Half the class was graded by quantity:  50 pots gets you an A, 40 pots gets you a B, etc.  The other half of the class was graded on quality:  turn in only one pot, your best one, and your whole grade depended on it.  You can guess the result.  The quality group was paralyzed by perfectionism.  The best pots came from the quantity group.  I'll bet the worst pots also came from the quantity group, but who cares? 

An amusing detail is the way the authors treat Mozart as the icon for effortless genius.  You see, everything came easily to Mozart, but since the rest of us are not Mozarts, we need to practice our craft.  I refer you to one of my favorite blog posts ever, in which Lawrence Dillon explains that Mozart was no Mozart:

In fact, Mozart completed almost 300 pieces before he started writing anything that would put him in the history books. If that doesn’t show the benefit of practice, I don’t know what does.

Now, just to undermine the underminers, I ask you to search music history for another genius, the one composer who effortlessly created an enduring masterpiece while still in his adolescence.  One whisky and chocolate-soaked cigar to the first person with the correct answer!