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Who says social media is bad for you?

Outside of grocery stores, my favorite places to visit while traveling are museums. The latter help me to think and learn about a ideas of musical performance practice:

1. Effective performances are not necessarily the performances most “authentic” to the time and place in which a work was created.
2. The importance of making connections between artistic disciplines historically, culturally, and procedurally, which helps us not only make better art by giving ideas about style, but increases our capacity to make new neural pathways through multi-disciplinary learning.
3. Honing the skills of noticing and parsing details is essential to great music-making. These skills are easily practiced outside of musical domains.

While I’m going to flesh out these notions with regard to art museums next time, I couldn’t help but notice that, rebuffing whoever argues that social media is not healthy, three of my favorite social media accounts demonstrate this triumvirate of principles nutritionally, humorously, and blissfully.

Sandwiches and Interpretation

In Sandwiches of History, our host Barry makes/cooks/assembles/constructs a bevy of historical sandwiches, culled from cookbooks ranging from the 1880s to the 1970s, and more recently including options suggested by Chat GPT.

I know I’ve spoken about SoH many times, but Barry’s process is extremely familiar to classical musicians, hewing to Alfred Brendel’s own opinions about the stages of learning a piece of music (quoted below from his “Afterthoughts on Busoni”):

We don’t see Barry articulate step 1, but there are hints he does—guest appearances from other historical food accounts, frequent asides about how few recipes articulate quantities of ingredients, his subtle eyebrow motion at the mention of certain cookbooks, etc.

From our vantage point, we see Barry follow the recipe to the letter. If there exists an ambiguity (how much mustard? Sweetened or unsweetened ketchup?), he makes an educated guess based on his experience making other recipes and his (admittedly shallow) research into historical condiments and meats. He tries the sandwich, using his own mental representation to judge both its flavor profile and its effectiveness.

Then, the clincher. Barry offers one or more “plus-ups,” additions of condiments, techniques, or all-together new ingredients to increase the flavor profile of the sandwich and, in his words ”plus them up for the modern palate if they have potential.” Ah, interpretation!

Notwithstanding that his practice routine is very of a type with classical musicians—consistent, almost rigid, daily, unwavering (just take a look at his post history)—Barry’s adventures are very similar to the journey musicians make when they endeavor to learn, interpret, and connect with communities around a piece of music. We strive for authenticity , incorporating the original text and everything we can find historically that supports and illuminates that text. But, we know that some of these elements have to be changed in order for the impact of the ‘art’ (I use that term loosely with some of these sandwiches: “yeast sandwich” I’m looking at you!) we care so much about to land with contemporary listeners and eaters. Authenticity is terrific, but authentic can be so “othered” that it tastes…bad!

Art but Make it Sports

In each post, LJ Radar pairs a photo from a recent sporting event (captured at a moment of peak emotional expressivity) with a visually work of art, ranging from Medieval iconography to Renaissance portraiture to Baroque bacchanals to Bauhaus abstraction.​Radar goes to great lengths to highlight that he does not use AI, rather drawing upon his memory and often using his own cache of photos.

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The author’s impressive memory notwithstanding, AbMiS (abbreviation my own) shows me the value of making connections across disciplines. Not all connections are such low hanging fruit as a direct visual and expressive connotation, but some are. And in the case of AbMiS, I’m reminded of how, when thinking of a musical ‘topic’ or digging deep into a musical text, looking at parallel or perpendicular works of art or culture can be powerful reckoning and contextualizing tools. At the same time, AbMiS shows us that sometimes memory can be faster than technology.

Uni Watch

Finally, another blog I wish I could write is Uni Watch. Since those heady early days of blogging, pre RSS-feeds and before “scroll 20 meters to see the recipe that was in the title of the post,” Paul Lukas has been dissecting the minutiae of sports uniforms. His tagline, “for people who get it,” speaks to a community of minutiae-obsessed sports fans whose proclivities would, I wager, make them excellent musicologists. Did one player wear the wrong sock? Were those real stirrups or fake? What would be the worst combination of team colors to meet in a high-profile game? Does this NBA team’s center court logo pass muster? Did a uniform re-design slightly change the Pantone color of a team? How did a team handle a player whose last name is too long to fit on a jersey: by curling it, or reducing the size? How about a player with a II or III in their name? These questions (and more) have been tackled by Lukas.

​The Strange Saga of Troy Aikman’s NFL 75th-Anniversary Patch​

​What's up with Nick Ahmed's C-Flap?​

​An Important Overlooked Detail from the MLB All-Star Uniforms​

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In the past, Lukas had a “reader mail-bag” section, where readers would write in their observations and questions, many of which centered on very minor inconsistencies in uniforms. Sorry, equipment managers!

Would that I could observe such details in the music I study!

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