SLOW Movement

NY Times: A Hit That Has Outlasted 10,000 Chandeliers

 

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February 10, 2012

A Hit That Has Outlasted 10,000 Chandeliers

By PATRICK HEALY

“The Phantom of the Opera” will make show business history on Saturday with the 10,000th Broadway performance of an $8 million production that became an $845 million hit. But it is also something much more. It is the musical that has come to define modern Broadway by proving the purchasing power of women and tourists, the durability of repeat business and the lure of spectacle: ingredients for success embraced by producers of “The Lion King,” “Wicked,” “Mamma Mia!” and other smashes.

While “Phantom” has prospered from unparalleled word of mouth, a show as much for sightseers as for theatergoers, its unprecedented Broadway run has hardly been a foregone conclusion. When it opened on Jan. 26,  1988, big hits were few, and roughly half of Broadway’s theaters were empty. Yet thanks to persistent marketing, strict quality control and flexibility in ticket pricing (the worst seats can now be had for only $26.50), “Phantom” survived  — in fact thrived  —  when shows with bigger stars and better reviews brought down their curtains.

The show’s 2011 box office performance was its most lucrative, and in December “Phantom” earned more in a single week, $1,579,428, than in any of the 1,256 weeks since the musical reached New York.

It’s a windfall for investors like James B. Freydberg, who recalled recently that he and his business partner decided to put $500,000 into “Phantom” in 1987 because they figured they might do better than in the stock market, which had just crashed on Black Monday. They have gone on to earn about $12 million from “Phantom” through Broadway and national tours, and still receive regular checks of $100,000 from a show that Mr. Freydberg hasn’t seen since opening night 24 years ago.

“No one ever, ever expected this kind of wealth,” he said. “My only other investment that has performed better is my Apple stock.”

 From years of detailed audience surveys, the producers and creators of “Phantom” have honed the ways to maximize its appeal, whether emphasizing the show’s love story in advertising or offering sharp discounts so audience members will return. More than 40 percent of “Phantom” patrons have seen it at least once before, and a majority of “Phantom” audiences in 2011 saw no other Broadway show that year. About 68 percent were women, and nearly 60 percent were tourists.

“Based on all our data, we’re able to predict, for virtually each week of the year, what the demand for seats will be, what types of people will be coming and how to price the seats,” said Alan Wasser, the production’s general manager.

Katie Spohr, a 24-year-old from Illinois with an internship in Manhattan, is one of those people. “I wanted to pick a musical that was really well established, that everyone would like, and I’d heard it was something you can’t leave without seeing,” Ms. Spohr said outside the Majestic on Tuesday night. She bought tickets to take her boyfriend, Sam, visiting from Indiana. “He’s not a big theatergoer,” she added. Sam shrugged in assent.

Today’s Broadway formula often involves adapting brand-name movies into stage musicals and star-driven shows, but “Phantom” relies on a slightly different model. It, too, was an adaptation — of a 1909 French novel — and it arrived on Broadway on the tail end of a winning streak by its producer, Cameron Mackintosh, and its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber. But while its crashing chandelier drew much of the attention in London (where it still runs) and during its early days in New York, it’s the heart-filling, heartbreaking plot and lush music that provide staying power on Broadway, where only 30 percent of shows ever turn a profit.

“Any supersuccessful show depends on audiences’ coming back, and to do that a musical has to find a way to hit people in the solar plexus,” Mr. Mackintosh said in an interview. “There aren’t many epic love stories on Broadway anymore, like ‘South Pacific’ or ‘The King and I,’ where people get swept away.”

Reminded of the weak reviews from 1988, Mr. Mackintosh scoffed at the idea that “Phantom” had become the theatrical equivalent of comfort food. Mr. Lloyd Webber agreed, saying, “ ‘Phantom’ doesn’t exactly have the traditional leading man, or the traditional happy ending.”

The show’s weekly running costs have been tightened over the years to about $600,000, modest for any musical and low for one with such elaborate sets and costumes. As a result, the show turned a profit almost every week in 2011.

But Mr. Mackintosh has not stinted on marketing efforts that have cost millions over the years. While he declined to provide precise figures, he said he long ago learned to ignore theater executives who maintained that advertising could be pared back as positive word of mouth spread.

Instead, the show’s simple visual signature — the Phantom’s white mask — remains on a billboard in Times Square and on signs on New York City buses. That mask has become a cultural reference point, like the two yellow eyes for “Cats” and the cap-wearing waif for “Les Misérables” — the next two longest-running shows on Broadway — and, more recently, the ornate doorbell for the hit Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon.”

The musical also benefited considerably from the multimillion-dollar advertising budget for the 2004 film adaptation, which came when Mr. Mackintosh noticed Broadway sales weakening. The production grossed $31.4 million in 2003, before the movie’s release; in the three subsequent years, the box office receipts rose to $34.6 million, $41.8 million and $43.5 million. Indeed, before entering Tuesday’s performance, two women from Helsinki, as well as another pair from Houston, said they first learned about the musical from seeing ads for the movie.

The women from Houston said they were also drawn by the unusually inexpensive seats in the rear mezzanine, whose prices were reduced in the last couple of years after the show’s general managers calculated that more money could be netted by selling that frequently empty section at cut rates. The $26.50 seats are the flip side of the dynamic pricing strategy that has spread among most Broadway shows, which charge premium prices for the best seats.

“Phantom” did its best business ever last year, grossing $44.8 million, including that record final week of the year; $1.5 million is an enormous weekly amount for any show.

Harold Prince, who won a Tony Award for directing “Phantom,” said he believed its enduring buzz was the result of keeping the performances sharp. The 84-year-old Mr. Prince said he returned four times a year to see and rehearse the show, and that resident directors were on hand to pounce on signs of staleness.

Not every version of “Phantom” has had the success of the one on Broadway. A truncated production that opened in 2006 in Las Vegas at a cost of $75 million is scheduled to close this September. And a sequel, “Love Never Dies,” flopped last year in London, though Mr. Lloyd Webber said he hoped a retooled version from Australia might make it to Broadway someday.

Mr. Mackintosh said he was hoping to do better with a new “Phantom” production he was assembling to tour in Britain and, if successful, perhaps in the United States.

“After 25 years it seems right to try a new approach if you’re going to send ‘Phantom’ out again,” he said, noting that the musical had played in 27 countries and 145 cities. (The show has grossed $5.6 billion worldwide.) “But it’s not like the old ‘Phantom’ is going anywhere. It will be in London and on Broadway, forever we hope.”

WSJ: Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker

LIFE & CULTURE
FEBRUARY 11, 2012

Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker

Why does Adele's 'Someone Like You' make everyone cry? Science has found the formula

By MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF

The Wall Street Journal (illustration) Associated Press (photo); Universal Music Publishing (score)

Adele slightly modulates her pitch at the end of some long notes, adding to the tension.

On Sunday night, the British singer-songwriter Adele is expected to sweep the Grammys. Three of her six nominations are for her rollicking hit "Rolling in the Deep." But it's her ballad "Someone Like You" that has risen to near-iconic status recently, due in large part to its uncanny power to elicit tears and chills from listeners. The song is so famously sob-inducing that "Saturday Night Live" recently ran a skit in which a group of co-workers play the tune so they can all have a good cry together.

Adele, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter performed "Someone Like You" from her latest album "21" at WSJ Cafe

What explains the magic of Adele's song? Though personal experience and culture play into individual reactions, researchers have found that certain features of music are consistently associated with producing strong emotions in listeners. Combined with heartfelt lyrics and a powerhouse voice, these structures can send reward signals to our brains that rival any other pleasure.

Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an "appoggiatura."

An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. "This generates tension in the listener," said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. "When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good."

Chills often descend on listeners at these moments of resolution. When several appoggiaturas occur next to each other in a melody, it generates a cycle of tension and release. This provokes an even stronger reaction, and that is when the tears start to flow.

"Someone Like You," which Adele wrote with Dan Wilson, is sprinkled with ornamental notes similar to appoggiaturas. In addition, during the chorus, Adele slightly modulates her pitch at the end of long notes right before the accompaniment goes to a new harmony, creating mini-roller coasters of tension and resolution, said Dr. Guhn.

To learn more about the formula for a tear-jerker, a few years ago Dr. Guhn and his colleague Marcel Zentner found musical excerpts—from Mendelssohn's "Trio for Piano" and Barber's "Adagio for Strings," for example—that reliably produce the chills and then measured the physiological reactions (heart rate, sweating, goose bumps) of listeners.

Chill-provoking passages, they found, shared at least four features. They began softly and then suddenly became loud. They included an abrupt entrance of a new "voice," either a new instrument or harmony. And they often involved an expansion of the frequencies played. In one passage from Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 (K. 488), for instance, the violins jump up one octave to echo the melody. Finally, all the passages contained unexpected deviations in the melody or the harmony. Music is most likely to tingle the spine, in short, when it includes surprises in volume, timbre and harmonic pattern.

"Someone Like You" is a textbook example. "The song begins with a soft, repetitive pattern," said Dr. Guhn, while Adele keeps the notes within a narrow frequency range. The lyrics are wistful but restrained: "I heard that you're settled down, that you found a girl and you're married now." This all sets up a sentimental and melancholy mood.

When the chorus enters, Adele's voice jumps up an octave, and she belts out notes with increasing volume. The harmony shifts, and the lyrics become more dramatic: "Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead."

Adele, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter performed "Rolling In The Deep" from her latest album "21" at WSJ Cafe

When the music suddenly breaks from its expected pattern, our sympathetic nervous system goes on high alert; our hearts race and we start to sweat. Depending on the context, we interpret this state of arousal as positive or negative, happy or sad.

If "Someone Like You" produces such intense sadness in listeners, why is it so popular? Last year, Robert Zatorre and his team of neuroscientists at McGill University reported that emotionally intense music releases dopamine in the pleasure and reward centers of the brain, similar to the effects of food, sex and drugs. This makes us feel good and motivates us to repeat the behavior.

Measuring listeners' responses, Dr. Zatorre's team found that the number of goose bumps observed correlated with the amount of dopamine released, even when the music was extremely sad. The results suggest that the more emotions a song provokes—whether depressing or uplifting—the more we crave the song.

With "Someone Like You," Adele and Mr. Wilson not only crafted a perfect tear-jerker but also stumbled upon a formula for commercial success: Unleash the tears and chills with small surprises, a smoky voice and soulful lyrics, and then sit back and let the dopamine keep us coming back for more.

—Ms. Doucleff is a scientific editor at the journal Cell.

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

NY Times: Sound, the Way the Brain Prefers to Hear It

 

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September 5, 2011

Sound, the Way the Brain Prefers to Hear It

By GUY GUGLIOTTA

LOS ANGELES — There is, perhaps, no more uplifting musical experience than hearing the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” performed in a perfect space. Many critics regard Symphony Hall in Boston — 70 feet wide, 120 feet long and 65 feet high — as just that space.

Some 3,000 miles away, however, a visitor led into the pitch-blackness of Chris Kyriakakis’s audio lab at the University of Southern California to hear a recording of the performance would have no way to know how big the room was.

At first it sounded like elegant music played in the parlor on good equipment. Nothing special. But as engineers added combinations of speakers, the room seemed to expand and the music swelled in richness and depth, until finally it was as if the visitor were sitting with the audience in Boston.

Then the music stopped and the lights came on. It turned out that the Immersive Audio Lab at U.S.C.’s Viterbi School of Engineering is dark, a bit dingy, and only 30 feet wide, 45 feet long and 14 feet high.

Acousticians have been designing concert halls for more than a century, but Dr. Kyriakakis does something different. He shapes the sound of music to conform to the space in which it is played. The goal is what Dr. Kyriakakis calls the “ground truth” — to replicate the original in every respect. “We remove the room,” he said, “so the ground truth can be delivered.”

Dr. Kyriakakis, an electrical engineer at U.S.C. and the founder and chief technical officer of Audyssey Laboratories, a Los Angeles-based audio firm, could not achieve his results without modern sound filters and digital microprocessors.

But the basis of his technique is rooted in the science of psychoacoustics, the study of sound perception by the human auditory system. “It’s about the human ear and the human brain, and understanding how the human ear perceives sound,” Dr. Kyriakakis said.

Psychoacoustics has become an invaluable tool in designing hearing aids and cochlear implants, and in the study of hearing generally. “Psychoacoustics is fundamental,” said Andrew J. Oxenham, a psychologist and hearing expert at the University of Minnesota. “You need to know how the normally functioning auditory system works — how sound relates to human perception.”

The field’s origins date back more than a century, to the first efforts to quantify the psychological properties of sound. What tones could humans hear, and how loudly or softly did they need to be heard?

Pitch could be measured in hertz and loudness in decibels, but other phenomena were not so easily quantified. Human hearing can discern the movement of sound with a surprising degree of accuracy. It can distinguish timbre, the difference between a clarinet and a saxophone. It can remember patterns of speech, to immediately identify a friend in a phone call years after last hearing the voice. And a parent can effortlessly sift the sound of an infant’s cry from the blare of a televised football game.

Finally there were the imponderables, things we do with our hearing simply because we can. “Everyone knows the sound of a bowling ball as it rolls down the alley,” said William M. Hartmann, a Michigan State University physicist and former president of the Acoustical Society of America. “What is it about that sound that we can identify?”

For much of the 20th century, engineers devoted themselves to developing acoustical hardware like amplifiers, speakers and recording systems. After World War II, scientists learned how to use mathematical formulas to “subtract” unwanted noise from sound signals. Then they learned how to make sound signals without any unwanted noise.

Next came stereo. By recording two tracks, engineers could localize sound for the listener. “Simple enough,” said Alan Kraemer, chief technological officer for SRS Labs, an audio company in Santa Ana, Calif. “If something’s louder on one side, you’ll hear it on that side.”

But stereo had no real psychoacoustics. It created an artificial sense of space with a second track, but did so by dealing with only one variable — loudness — and enhanced human perception simply by suggesting that listeners separate their speakers. 

The digital age changed all this, allowing engineers to manipulate sound in ways that had never been tried before. They could create sounds that had never existed, eliminate sounds they did not want and use constant changes in filter combinations to deliver sound to listeners with a fidelity that had never before been possible. 

Digital technology has led to innovations that have been critical in improving sound reproduction, in tailoring hearing aids for individual patients and in treating hearing impairment and developing cochlear implants — tiny electronic devices linking sound directly to the auditory nerve of a deaf person.

“Hearing aids are not the same as glasses,” said Dr. Oxenham, at the University of Minnesota. “It’s never been just about hearing sound; it’s also about understanding sound and separating it from background noise. We can help with microprocessors. Without them it would have been impossible.”

Despite recent advances, however, psychoacoustics has shown engineers that they still have a long way to go. No machine can yet duplicate the ability of the human ear to understand a conversation in a crowded restaurant. People with cochlear implants have “a terrible time” with background noise, Dr. Oxenham said. They also have trouble with pitch perception and distinguishing the sounds of different instruments. “Hearing loops,” which are transmitters that broadcast sound signals directly to a receiver in a hearing aid, are catching on in concert halls, places of worship and even subway booths.

“The technology is really being strained,” said Dr. Hartmann, at Michigan State. Because of psychoacoustics, “we know so much more, and therefore we can do so much more,” but “there is so much more to do.”

One factor that slows the pace of innovation, Dr. Hartmann suggested, is that the human auditory system is “highly nonlinear.” It is difficult to isolate or change a single variable — like loudness — without affecting several others in unanticipated ways. “Things don’t follow an intuitive pattern,” he said.

It was this anomaly, in part, that led Dr. Kyriakakis in the 1990s to venture into psychoacoustics. He, his U.S.C. film school associate Tomlinson Holman, and their students were trying to improve the listening qualities of a room by measuring sound with strategically placed microphones.

“Often our changes were worse than doing nothing at all,” Dr. Kyriakakis recalled. “The mic liked the sound, but the human ear wasn’t liking it at all. We needed to find out what we had to do. We had to learn about psychoacoustics.”

The trick was to establish a baseline for what sounded best, and there was no guidebook. So Dr. Kyriakakis and his students went to Boston Symphony Hall in 1998 to conduct a series of sound tests and to record the “Messiah.”

At that time, acousticians had long known that a shoebox-shaped concert hall like Boston’s offered the best sound, but what was important for Dr. Kyriakakis was to know why the human ear and the human brain that processed the signal felt that way.

Back in Los Angeles, his team began a series of simple experiments. Listeners were invited into the labs to hear the Boston tests and music and to rate the sound, using a scale of 1 to 5. Researchers shifted the sound to different combinations of speakers around the room.

Statistics showed that speakers directly ahead, combined with speakers 55 degrees to either side of the listener, provided the most attractive soundstage. The “wide” speakers mimicked the reflection from the side walls of the concert hall by causing the sound to arrive at the listener’s ears milliseconds after the sound from the front. Sound from other angles did not have as great an effect.

Next, the team asked listeners what combination of speakers gave the best impression of “depth of stage.” Here again, statistics showed a clear preference for speakers in front of listeners and high above them. This sound — also slightly delayed — gave the ear and the human brain a sense of where the different instruments were on a bandstand.

With these results as his template, Dr. Kyriakakis founded Audyssey. His idea was to make dens and living rooms sound like concert halls and movie theaters. Microprocessors made it possible to filter sound to minimize distortion and add the delays that make the music sound nearly perfect to the human ear from anywhere in the room.

Audyssey’s first product, MultEQ, started with a five-speaker configuration, but for a full concert-hall-like effect, it now offers what Dr. Kyriakakis calls an “11.2” system: three speakers in front of the listener; two elevated speakers; two wides; two speakers slightly behind the listener, and two speakers directly in back. Audio-video receivers with Audyssey’s latest MultEQ technology cost $1,000 to $2,000.

For the unsophisticated listener, top-of-the-line sound equipment by itself seems good enough, but it is not like the psychoacoustically adjusted version. A video of the Eagles singing “Hotel California” sounded nice to a visitor until Audyssey’s hardware director, Andrew Turner, pointed out that there was no bass when the volume was low. He flicked a switch and the bass returned, enriching the music with startling effect.

“At the concert itself, where there was a big room with a lot of high-volume sound, you could hear the low tones,” he said. “But here in the studio, your brain is filtering them out as irrelevant at low volume. So you have to restore them.

“It’s pure psychoacoustics.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 7, 2011

A picture in some editions on Tuesday with an article about advances in psychoacoustics was published in error. It showed the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan — not at Symphony Hall in Boston, which is regarded by many critics as an acoustically perfect space.

The curry song by Mr Brown - Hilarious :)

A follow-up on my post of "Cook and Share A Pot of Curry on 21 Aug 2011". Nice adaptation of "Vincent". Have a good laugh! :)

Will you be cooking curry today? :) Participate in this meaningful event and spread the importance of intercultural understanding between countries and also between the different races and nationalities within one country!

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=254441147918239

Foodie

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Economist: Peggy Sue got old

Media's ageing audiences

Peggy Sue got old

Viewers, listeners and readers are ageing fast. Oddly, media companies don’t regard that as a catastrophe

Apr 7th 2011 | from the print edition

A FEW years ago Universal Music Group spied a gap in the market. How about a CD for people who grew up in the 1950s and wanted to revisit the pop music of their youth? The label pulled together songs by British and American artists, some well-known (Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison), others largely forgotten. “Dreamboats and Petticoats” was released in time for Christmas 2007.

That gap turned out to contain a seam of gold. “Dreamboats and Petticoats” has sold enough copies to be certified as double platinum. It has inspired a West End musical and three follow-up albums, with another due in November. In total the series has sold 2.3m copies, mostly in Britain—a country where fewer than 120m albums were shifted last year. And virtually everybody who bought the album forked over money for a compact disc. “They don’t download, and they don’t want to download,” says Brian Berg of Universal.

“They” are consumers in late middle-age or beyond, who increasingly drive the music market. In Britain people aged 60 or over spent more on pop-music albums in 2009 than did teenagers or people in their 20s, according to the BPI, a trade group. Sony Music’s biggest-selling album worldwide last year was “The Gift”, by Susan Boyle, a 50-year-old Scot whose appeal derives in part from her lack of youth. And what has happened to music has also happened to other forms of entertainment.

The noisy disruption of media business models by the internet in the past decade has obscured a profound demographic transformation. Whether they are buying music, listening to the radio, reading newspapers or watching television, media consumers are ageing even more quickly than the overall population. Rather than trying to reverse this trend by attracting younger people, many companies are attempting to profit from the greying of media.

Grey anatomy

In America the audiences of all four big English-language broadcast networks are looking middle-aged. Since 2003 the median age of a prime-time CBS viewer has increased by three years, according to Nielsen, a research firm. Viewers of ABC and NBC are five years older; Fox’s, seven and a half. In that time the median age in America has probably risen by a year and a bit. Some shows are greying faster than the networks that carry them, in part because they have fan bases that are ageing naturally. The audience that tunes in for the desperate housewives of Wisteria Lane is approaching 50 (see chart 1).

Indeed, every network except Fox had a median age of 50 or over last year. That is significant because advertisers tend to be most interested in how a show rates among people aged between 18 and 49. As Alan Wurtzel, head of research at NBC, puts it, a growing proportion of viewers are becoming almost invisible to marketers—“forgotten but not gone”.

If broadcast television is growing old gracefully (helped by Botox injections), newspapers are racing towards senescence. Between 2002 and 2010 the proportion of American papers’ regular readers who were aged 55 or more rose from 37% to 46% (see chart 2). Fully 43% of readers of Britain’s Daily Telegraph and Daily Express are at least 65 years old, according to the National Readership Survey. Such papers are littered with advertisements for comfortable shoes, cruises and stairlifts.

The reason why newspaper readers are ageing so quickly is simple: the young are abandoning print faster than everyone else. They may pick up free papers to read on public transport, but when reception is good they tend to plump for mobile phones and the internet. The Pew Research Centre, an American think-tank, finds that 65% of 18- to 29-year-olds describe the internet as their primary or secondary source of news. Only 14% of people aged 65 or over say the same.

In music, too, the young have drifted to illegal file-sharing and, more recently, to free streaming services such as Spotify. By and large, the middle-aged and old have not. David Munns, who manages Bon Jovi, a rock band that was formed in the early 1980s and is still going strong, notes that older fans have more money and more scruples. They also regard illegal downloading as “too much work”, he says. Bon Jovi’s “Greatest Hits” was the 15th-biggest-selling album in the world last year.

As the young cut back on conventional media, their elders consume more of it. In Spain 54.2% of people aged 55 to 64 routinely listened to the radio last year—up from 46.6% in 2000. As a result, the Spanish radio audience has greyed even as overall listening has risen. Japanese baby-boomers carry on buying music at an age by which earlier generations had largely stopped. Singers who appeal to the middle-aged and old, such as Hideaki Tokunaga and Junko Akimoto, rule the charts.

The same is true of television. British 55- to 64-year-olds spent an average of five hours and ten minutes a day watching television last year—50 minutes more than in 2001. The middle-aged and old now have free digital channels dedicated to their tastes, such as ITV3, home of wrinkly detective dramas, and the highbrow BBC Four. They have seized on easy-to-use gadgets like digital video recorders, which increase their enjoyment of television.

The young are not watching less TV. But some of their viewing is now done through computer screens. And much of it is of unconventional channels. Instead of the evening news, American 20-somethings watch “The Colbert Report”, a spoof news show. MTV has moved beyond music videos into reality shows, and is enjoying its best ratings in years. Media outfits that appeal to immigrants and their children often have youthful audiences. Univision, a Spanish-language broadcast network, boasts a median age of 37.

Now they’re 64

Greying audiences are causing discomfort among media executives. But not as much discomfort as you might expect, given the industry’s long preoccupation with youth. The ageing of the large baby-boom generation means there are a lot of potential customers in their 50s and 60s. Furthermore, the executives argue, people of this age are worth much more than in the past.

The practice of measuring television audiences by the number of 18- to 49-year-olds they contain is simply an historical anachronism, argues Mr Wurtzel of NBC. David Poltrack, his counterpart at CBS, agrees. It used to be assumed, he says, that older people had already worked out which brands they liked and could not be persuaded to try new things. But the middle-aged have taken to toys such as e-readers and iPads. Mr Poltrack has devised an alternative way of classifying viewers that emphasises tastes and attitudes to media (for example as “sports enthusiasts” or “surfers and streamers”) rather than age.

It is not surprising that ageing television networks should argue that the old are becoming more valuable. But the West’s economic slump has given force to their claims by sapping the earning power of the young. In March the unemployment rate among Americans aged 20 to 24 was 15%. For 16- to 17-year-olds it was 29%.

Lack of work has combined with tighter lending standards to squeeze young people’s buying power. Between 2007 and 2009 average spending on new cars and trucks by Americans under 25 fell by half, according to the Consumer Expenditure Survey. It fell by 31% among people aged between 25 and 34. By contrast, expenditure by those over 65 was flat, and the over-75s actually spent more, on average. The young also spent less on audio-visual equipment and services—that is, television sets and cable TV—while the old shelled out more. This helps to explain why advertising money has flooded back to the ageing broadcast networks since the recession. Advertisers are not so in thrall to the cult of youth that they are prepared to overlook such a shift.

Desperate, but not for younger viewers

Another reason why media companies are not too worried about the ageing of their audiences has to do with a change in business models. A firm that depends on advertising needs to attract valuable consumers. A firm that relies on subscriptions, by contrast, cares only whether its consumers pay their monthly bills. And perhaps the strongest trend in media in the past few years—stronger even than ageing—is the growing reliance on subscription as a means of paying for content.

BSkyB, Discovery Communications, ESPN, Netflix: many of the media industry’s best-performing companies and hottest stocks of recent years rely on subscriptions. The recession may have slashed advertising and discretionary spending. But most people carried on paying the bills for entertainment. As a result, subscription-based businesses were able to sustain spending on content. So clear are the advantages of these businesses that even firms that have habitually relied on advertising are moving to copy them.

As newspaper advertising has declined, publishers have raised the prices of subscriptions and single copies. Last year 41.3% of the New York Times’s newspaper revenues came from subscriptions—up from 28.8% in 2007. Similarly, broadcast networks are battling for “retransmission fees” (essentially a cut of subscriptions) from cable and satellite distributors. As the broadcasters become less dependent on advertising, sheer numbers will come to matter more than demography.

The clearest sign of this shift is the appearance of online paywalls. Last month paywalls went up around the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News. The websites of Britain’s Times and News of the World began to restrict access to subscribers last year. Hulu, an American website that carries broadcast TV programmes, and Spotify, a European music-streaming service, are both pushing subscriptions.

One good reason for media firms to erect paywalls is that new media are beginning to age, too. The proportion of people aged 65-plus who get most of their news from the internet may be only 14%—but in 2006 it was a mere 2%. Online video streaming began as a young person’s hobby but has increasingly become mainstream. “Often it’s the young who adopt a technology, but others follow them,” explains Patricia McDonough, a television analyst at Nielsen.

With a few exceptions, media firms have found it hard to make money online. Consumers seem to tolerate fewer ads, and rates are low. When digital media were the province of youth, this did not matter much: media firms could argue that they were at least promoting their brands to young people, while deterring them from piracy. But let the middle-aged and the old, too, discover they can have entertainment for nothing? That would not do.

from the print edition | Briefings2

森の木琴

A well executed commercial for a mobile phone in Japan - Johan Sebastian Bach's 'Jesu Man of Joy Descending' played on a really wide xylophone and a ball. Enjoy :)

FT: Downsides to upgrades

Food for thought... from one of my favourite FT columnists.

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Downsides to upgrades

By Harry Eyres

Published: March 25 2011 22:03 | Last updated: March 25 2011 22:03

All systems at the Slow Lane offices have recently been upgraded. These upgrades might be considered small beer in the Fast Lane but they have caused no little disruption to our world. First, we had to get a new cordless phone, as the old one, inherited when we bought the house, had begun to die in the middle of conversations.

You might think this would be quite straightforward but my experience of living in the wonderful new digital world is that nothing is straightforward. I purchased the cheapest and simplest model I could find, on special offer in John Lewis, and I imagined it might be a simple matter of plugging the thing in and getting going. How naive can you be?

I found myself faced with an instruction manual 74 pages long – the size of a substantial novella or a collection of poems – including instructions on matters such as “writing text messages”, “adding a new birthday (organiser) alarm” and “using a handset to put the base in registration mode”. There is a whole section on games (I can’t quite imagine what could induce me to play games with a telephone) and another one on security, which is the most bizarre and arcane of all. Maybe “modifying the base code” might come in useful if you were buying equipment for a place such as Guantánamo Bay but it all seems a bit excessive for a home phone.

Needless to say we still haven’t got the hang of this new phone, keep pressing the wrong buttons and have had to deactivate the answering machine (too complicated).

So far I’ve had better luck with the new printer/scanner/photocopier but can’t help feeling this magnificent, and absurdly cheap, piece of machinery, capable of producing colour prints to a professional standard, is altogether too magnificent. Perversely, I find myself missing the modest old Canon, less than half the size, which kept going loyally for more than a decade.

All of these feelings are amplified in the case of the throbbing heart of Slow Lane systems, the new laptop computer. When I mentioned to people that the old one was seven years old, their mouths gaped open as if I’d been talking about a penny-farthing bicycle or a wind-up gramophone. Seven years does not seem such a great age for a well-constructed machine – I recently retired the speakers of my hi-fi system after 40 years’ service – but computers, for all their modernity, or because of it, have no staying power; they age much faster than dogs, as fast as rats, perhaps.

The old laptop was getting slow and absent-minded and every now and then had one of those alarming blue screen episodes (senior moments, you could call them). The new one is faster and a bit sleeker and doubtless has more gigabytes of whatever you’re meant to have gigabytes of.

This machine, and this goes for any modern computer, has truly amazing capacities and powers. Linked to a search engine such as Google, it can scour the entire cyberuniverse in milliseconds. It forgets nothing, unlike this poor human brain of mine. It is incapable of making a Freudian slip; it is, I suppose, equally incapable of dreaming.

Our machines get better and better, more and more powerful, faster and faster (though not necessarily more reliable). We, on the other hand, do not. What is the effect of having this inhumanly powerful thing squatting in the centre of our lives? The computer and the web are miracles of connectivity but, as the journalist and blogger Nicholas Carr argued in The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, “the web’s connections are not our connections”. Might they not make us feel inadequate?

Old-fashioned instruments are not like that. They don’t intimidate us with their superior power. I don’t find my piano or my bicycle or my pen and notebooks intimidating – they are made on a human scale, they are designed to help me express myself in a human way. The piano will respond to my touch like no other; in that way it is more like a person than a computer, which responds to all touches in the same binary way.

I was not among those lucky enough to get seats to Sir Simon Rattle’s concerts in London last month with his orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic. But that splendid, flawed, beleaguered, democratic institution the BBC gave all of us here in the UK the luxury of the best seats in the Berlin Philharmonie hall, relaying two concerts the orchestra gave in its home city.

I happened to catch parts of two of them while out driving and each time I had to pull in to the side of the road. Playing as beautiful as this – in the fourth movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, and in Stravinsky’s Apollo – might cause accidents. Apollo is Stravinsky’s Apollonian answer to his own Dionysian Rite of Spring, concerned with the assuaging powers of art, not its disruptive ones, content to convey nothing but its own magnanimities of sound. In this case the sound of 34 stringed instruments, old-fashioned things, in no need of an upgrade.

[email protected]

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

Muppets: The 12 Days of Christmas :)

TED: Miwa Matreyek's glorious visions

Using animation, projections and her own moving shadow, Miwa Matreyek performs a gorgeous, meditative piece about inner and outer discovery. Take a quiet 10 minutes and dive in. With music from Anna Oxygen, Mirah, Caroline Lufkin and Mileece.

John Lennon Google Doodle

Nice! The 32-second track in a video player demonstrates Google's innovation through Lennon's popular song "Imagine." 

FT: Sound advice

Sound advice

By Mike Southon

Published: October 1 2010 17:50 | Last updated: October 1 2010 17:50

Having the right image is vital for success in business. Significant effort and expense is devoted to marketing materials and websites – and we might even check ourselves in the mirror before a meeting. Rather less thought, however, is given to how our businesses sound.

But many customers are auditory, more interested in sounds than pictures. The clues are in the way they speak; they like the sound of what they are being told and say they would like to hear more.
A wise salesperson should continue talking, rather than showing pictures out of a brochure.

Julian Treasure understands the effect of sound in commercial environments. He began his career in advertising and then moved into contract publishing, producing in-house magazines for high-technology customers. At the same time, though, he pursued a parallel career as a musician, playing on two BBC [John] Peel Sessions and even making the final of 1980s talent show New Faces. He then brought his interests together to form the Sound Agency, a consultancy that helps its clients achieve better results by optimising the sound they make in every aspect of their business.

This includes making the sound in their branding and marketing communications congruent with their visuals, as well as designing and installing appropriate soundscapes for shops, offices and corporate reception spaces.

Treasure explains his techniques – and the benefits of having the right sound in the business environment – in his book Sound Business (Management Books). We are constantly suppressing unwanted noise such as traffic, he writes, so our relationship with sound is largely unconscious. Some effects are physiological, such as the sound of an alarm clock, which increases the secretion of the hormone cortisol, normally associated with stress. Other sounds have a positive effect, such the sound of the sea, which has a similar tempo to the breathing patterns during sleep, and is therefore relaxing. Listening to several people speaking at once has a negative effect: Treasure explains that people working in open-plan offices are 66 per cent less effective in their jobs than those working in a peaceful environment. His advice for those who have to work in noisy environments is to use headphones and to play the sound of birdsong.

Most important in a business context are the behavioural effects of sound. Treasure shows that retail environments can drive away up to 28 per cent of business by playing the wrong music. The songs that the managers and staff enjoy may not be the same as those that encourage the customers to linger, browse and buy.

The unconscious relationship we have with sound was illustrated perfectly by the members’ club where Treasure and
I met. I had been there many times without noticing the unfortunate acoustics of the room, which were not helped by regular interruptions from the cappuccino machine. The hand dryer in the men’s bathroom was only a few decibels short of an aircraft taking off, and there was a noticeable change in mood when the venue put on some background music late in the afternoon. The volume of conversation in the room suddenly increased and several people left.

All of us have songs that take us back to special times in our lives. The key is ensuring they are not also the sound of customers heading for the door.

www.thesoundagency.com

[email protected]
Follow Mike on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mike
southon
More columns at www.ft.com/mikesouthon

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

Song: Wo Zhen De Bu Zhi Dao (我真的不知道）

我真的不知道...

Song: Bu Ru Bu Jian (不如不见)

 

Song: Edith Piaf - Non, je ne regrette rien

I regret nothing...

Non, je ne regrette rien

No, nothing at all, I regret nothing at all
Not the good, nor the bad. It is all the same.
No, nothing at all, I have no regrets about anything.
It is paid, wiped away, forgotten.
I am not concerned with the past, with my memories.
I set fire to my pains and pleasures,
I don't need them anymore.
I have wiped away my loves, and my troubles.
Swept them all away.
I am starting again from zero.

No, nothing at all, I have no regrets
Because from today, my life, my happiness, everything,
Starts with you!

===

Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait
Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal
Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien
C'est payé, balayé, oublié
Je me fous du passé

Avec mes souvenirs, j'ai allumé le feu
Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs, je n'ai plus besoin d'eux
Balayées les amours, avec leurs trémolos
Balayées pour toujours, je repars à zéro

Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait
Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal
Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien
Car ma vie car mes joies
Aujourd'hui, ça commence avec toi

Song: Wo Huai Nian De (我怀念的）

我问为什么
那女孩传简讯给我
而你为什么
不解释低着头沉默
我该相信你很爱我
不愿意敷衍我
还是明白
你已不想挽回什么

想问为什么
我不再是你的快乐
可是为什么
却苦笑说我都懂了
自尊常常将人拖着
把爱都走曲折
假装了解是怕
真相太赤裸裸
狼狈比失去难受

我怀念的是无话不说
我怀念的是一起作梦
我怀念的是争吵以后
还是想要爱你的冲动

我记得那年生日
也记得那一首歌
记得那片星空
最紧的右手
最暖的胸口
谁记得
谁忘了

想问为什么
我不再是你的快乐
可是为什么
却苦笑说我都懂了
自尊常常将人拖着
把爱都走曲折
假装了解是怕
真相太赤裸裸
狼狈比失去难受

我怀念的是无话不说
我怀念的是一起作梦
我怀念的是争吵以后
还是想要爱你的冲动

我记得那年生日
也记得那一首歌
记得那片星空
最紧的右手
最暖的胸口
谁忘了

我怀念的是无言感动
我怀念的是绝对炽热
我怀念的是你很激动
求我原谅抱得我都痛

我记得你在背后
也记得我颤抖着
记得感觉汹涌
最美的烟火
最长的相拥
谁爱得太自由
谁过头太远了
谁要走我的心
谁忘了那就是承诺

谁自顾自地走
谁忘了看着我
谁让爱变沉重
谁忘了要给你温柔

我怀念的
我还有想要爱你的冲动
我记得那年生日
也记得那一首歌
记得那片星空
最紧的右手
最暖的胸口

我放手
我让座
假洒脱
谁懂我多么不舍得

太爱了
所以我
没有哭
没有说

 

江美琪：我多么羡慕你

歌曲：我多么羡慕你
歌手：张洪量
专辑：全世界只有你不知道

歌词:

有时候风太急
禁不住挂念起你
这一刻离我遥远飞行
有时候夜太静
拦不住回忆的心
于是泪每个夜里如繁星
我多么羡慕你
总可以转身飞远远的
我的爱是你沉重行李
绊住你追新梦的决心
我多么想念你
当时间都失去了意义
穿越思念后等成信箱
让你需要的时候可以
投递
告诉我
沿途中
想与我
分享的心情

五月天：突然好想你

突然好想你 突然鋒利的回憶 突然模糊的眼睛

FT: Notes on the brain

Excerpt:

It’s no surprise that music training alters your brain: any kind of learning does that, just as physical exercise changes the body. The interesting question is what these changes are. It is, for example, surely a metaphor for the nature of music itself that musicians seem to have a thicker corpus callosum, the part of the brain that mediates contact between the left and right hemispheres. Although the popular notion that the left brain deals with logic and the right with emotion and intuition is simplistic, there’s some broad truth in it. But music needs both Logos and Eros, and so the brain responds by integrating the two.

===

Notes on the brain

By Philip Ball

Published: June 4 2010 22:15 | Last updated: June 4 2010 22:15

Becoming a musician messes with your brain. But in a good way. The cognitive benefits that a musical training can produce are so diverse and impressive – improved visual, spatial, verbal, mathematical and motor skills, for instance – that you could be forgiven for thinking this is why all children should have one. But think twice before you make this the reason to enrol little Phoebe for violin lessons. If we start valuing music only for its advantageous cognitive side-effects – as a kind of multivitamin for the brain – and not because it cultivates our humanity, we’ll have forfeited its soul.

Besides, it isn’t going to impress a child slogging through her scales that she might be gaining eight to nine IQ points. Tell them that they may be enhancing their subcortical auditory and audiovisual processing, and you deserve it if they shoot back: “Whatever.” And if you think that being a musician will make anyone a better human being – well, just ask a few musicians if that’s true of their colleagues.

The real reason to get excited about how musicianship changes the brain is that it offers some clues about how great musicians perform their extraordinary feats of dexterity, imagination and emotional sensitivity. We get a glimpse of what’s going on inside their heads. Some of that will be revealed in a series of talks and workshops on music and the brain during the Aldeburgh Festival this month.

It’s no surprise that music training alters your brain: any kind of learning does that, just as physical exercise changes the body. The interesting question is what these changes are. It is, for example, surely a metaphor for the nature of music itself that musicians seem to have a thicker corpus callosum, the part of the brain that mediates contact between the left and right hemispheres. Although the popular notion that the left brain deals with logic and the right with emotion and intuition is simplistic, there’s some broad truth in it. But music needs both Logos and Eros, and so the brain responds by integrating the two.

Both in performing and listening to music, the brain delegates different jobs to different regions. We must pick out the pitches of a melody and stitch them together into a coherent stream. We must separate the timbres of different instruments – distinguishing the singer’s voice from the accompanying piano, say. We identify rhythm and harmonies, and longer-scale structures such as phrasing and themes. All these things feed our emotional response. And performers need fine-tuned muscle movements and coordination between hands, eyes and ears. In ensembles, players need to be almost subliminally sensitive to what the others are doing.

The musician’s brain uses specialised modules to accomplish this multitasking. One of the big unresolved questions is whether any of these modules deals only with music, or whether they all have more general cognitive roles. For example, the motor skills at the pianist’s fingertips may be no different to those of the touch-typist. Pitch perception is important to make sense of speech, not least for discerning emotive intonation. And there is good evidence that the mental machinery that identifies an unexpected “wrong” chord in a typical sequence (a favourite trick of Prokofiev) is the same as that which spots syntactic oddities and mistakes in language. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has suggested that all mental processing of music may just take advantage of abilities acquired by the brain for other reasons: that music is an evolutionary free-rider.

This was widely but wrongly interpreted as implying that music is a disposable extravagance – an impression hardened by Pinker’s apparent dismissal of music as “auditory cheesecake”. Many scientists studying the origins of music would rather believe that it was adaptive, somehow helping our ancestors to survive, and therefore became genetically hardwired into our brains. Yet until someone discovers a music-specific brain module, there’s no compelling reason to think so.

These arguments somewhat miss the point that music appears in any event to be an innate feature of the human brain because of our instinct to make sense of our environment by searching for patterns. An ability to form a coherent mental picture of our surroundings by grouping and organising stimuli certainly does have a survival value, and this may be why music connects directly to the emotions: emotional rewards encourage us to look for regularities in the first place. Neuroscientists have used the brain-imaging technique of PET scanning to show that experiencing “intensely pleasant emotional responses” to music activates a part of the brain that is also involved in euphoric feelings associated with sex, drugs and food.

All this goes on in the brains of performer and listener alike. But what’s special about the musician’s brain? One remarkable recent discovery is that musicians literally have a “map of musical space” imprinted on their brains. Many people liken music listening to being taken on a journey, but for musicians that trip has a particular cartography. They recognise that certain chords are closely related to others, for example a major key and its so-called relative minor, an association exploited in the Beatles’ All My Loving.

Music theorists have proposed maps of this “harmonic space”. in which related keys lie relatively close together. In 2002, US-based neuroscientist Petr Janata used MRI scanning to show that different areas of the prefrontal cortex of a musician’s brain light up when they hear different chords, in basically the same spatial arrangement as the theoretical maps. This part of the brain adjoins areas that deal with purely cognitive processing (such as pitch recognition), emotions and memory, suggesting that the harmonic map is used to integrate all these functions.

One of the most fetishised of “special” musical capabilities is absolute pitch (AP): the ability to identify, just by hearing a note, whether it is an A flat, a D natural, or whatever. In westerners this ability is rare: only around 1 in 10,000 people possesses it. Partly for that reason, and partly because AP is disproportionately common among musicians, it has been deemed a sign of musical giftedness. But it is nothing of the sort. The prevalence of AP among musicians is a consequence, not a cause: the ability can be acquired if musical training begins before the age of six or seven – very young musicians simply learn it. There is no evidence that those with AP are any better at performance or composition than those without.

It’s still not known if AP is inherited (that is, genetic) or acquired. But it probably has more to do with language than music, being much more common among people whose first language is tonal, such as Chinese. In one study, half of the new students at a top music school in Beijing were found to have AP, compared to just one in ten for a comparable American school. And musicians with AP have an enlarged region of the brain associated with speech processing.

Musicians do, however, seem better at handling pitch – hearing the relationships between the notes. They have denser “grey matter” in a part of the brain called the superior temporal gyrus, involved in pitch processing. The grey matter is also boosted, literally, in brain regions involved in motor skills and visual perception. Some of these differences between musicians and non-musicians could conceivably be innate, but much if not all comes from practice: the differences are greater for professional than for amateur musicians.

Learning to play a fingered instrument such as the piano organises the motor cortex, forging links between particular groups of brain cells and fingers. At Aldeburgh euro-scientist Eckart Altenmüller and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard will explore how the brain adapts to the extraordinary demands of coordination between the left and the right hand. The left hemisphere of the brain controls the right half of the body and vice versa, and in right-handed people the motor region of the left brain is more dominant and literally bigger. But two-handed training introduces more balance: the control centres of the left hand are anatomically enlarged.

Neuroimaging has shown that practising an instrument purely in one’s head really works: the motor cortex signals associated with each finger get stronger without the pianist actually moving them, and eventually the finger movements trigger audible tones inside the head. Vladimir Horowitz is said to have practised this way to avoid “contaminating” his finger movements with the different action of pianos other than his own Steinway, while bon-vivant virtuoso Arthur Rubinstein did it just to avoid having to sit for long hours at a piano.

But too much practice can rearrange the motor cortex in faulty ways, blurring the neural representations of the fingers. This disrupts muscle control, causing pain and making the affected fingers curl and seize up. It is called focal dystonia or “musician’s cramp”, and it affects about one in every 100 musicians. It can ruin careers: Robert Schumann suffered from it at the age of just 21, and had to abandon his plan to be a concert pianist. He apparently composed his fiendishly difficult Toccata Op. 7 so that it could be played with barely any use of the afflicted middle finger of his right hand.

One of the most famous modern victims, the American pianist Leon Fleisher, lost the use of his right hand to this condition in 1963. For years he was forced to rely on the small left-handed repertoire, particularly the pieces written for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein by Hindemith, Prokofiev, Ravel and others after he lost his right arm in the first world war. Fleisher regained the use of his right hand in the mid-1990s after courses of Botox injections and deep massage, and he will speak about the experience at Aldeburgh, where the acclaimed documentary of his journey Two Hands, made in 2006 by Nathaniel Kahn, will also be screened.

Studies of the developmental changes to musicians’ brains are eroding the myth of inborn genius. In one study, young student violinists rated most highly by their professors were found to put in roughly twice as much practice (10,000 hours) as their mediocre peers – this amounts to two hours of practice every day for 14 years. And if that doesn’t mean anyone can become a Paganini, it does suggest that most people could be good enough to play at Aldeburgh if they set their heart on it.

Philip Ball’s ‘The Music Instinct’ is published by The Bodley Head

The Aldeburgh Festival runs from June 11 to 27; for details and tickets visit www.aldeburgh.co.uk

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

Yiruma: If I Could See You Again

Nia...

FT: Blessings that grow with age

Blessings that grow with age

By Harry Eyres

Published: January 16 2010 00:09 | Last updated: January 16 2010 00:09

Nikita Magaloff (pictured in 1986, aged 74) was, by the age of 70, able to play Chopin’s Études without practising

One of the most interesting and heartening conversations I had over the quiet holiday period was about the advantages of ageing. Despite more or less patronising acknowledgements of “how much older people still have to offer”, I have the feeling that these older people are still envisaged as harmless buffers or placidly smiling grannies. It is rarely accepted that older people might actually be better at doing certain things than younger people, let alone that they might pose a threat to them.

Maybe the director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson (52), was thinking along those lines when he agreed to be interviewed on New Year’s eve by the 89-year-old novelist PD James. She reduced him to a stuttering wreck, muttering about “top dollar” and unable to articulate the core purposes and values of the corporation.

My conversation was with a distinguished pianist and the theme was how it can become easier to learn and play music as you get older. My interlocutor recalled the great Bulgarian pianist Nikita Magaloff saying to her that “one of the great things about reaching 70 is being able to play the Chopin Études without practising”.

Then she reflected that even Magaloff was outdone by the amazing Pole Mieczyslaw Horszowski, who was still playing aged 100. She finds nowadays – in her middle years – that she can learn pieces much faster than before; the only disadvantage is that they don’t stick so long in the memory.

The pop music world is of course fixated on youth (with exceptions such as Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison); the classical music world used to be less so, but then in the early 2000s a marketing drive from record companies conflated the youthful looks of certain nubile violin virtuosi with musical stature; now that drive seems to have extended to conductors. My pianist friend was far from complimentary about some of the hyped youthful show-ponies of the piano; one (no names) was described as belonging to the circus, another as being “100 per cent machine”. But her point was not to disparage the young, merely to point out that the art is long and the life short, that it takes a good part of a life to begin to know how to learn and play works that could sustain many lifetimes.

Another myth – apart from the one about the essential physical crumbliness and uselessness of older people – is that people mellow as they get older. There may be examples of this, but quite the opposite can also happen. Inspired by that turn-of-year conversation, I took out a rather obscure CD from my collection, a live recording of a recital given by Wilhelm Backhaus at the Salzburg Festival in 1966.

Few, I imagine, would choose this as one of their “desert island discs”. Backhaus is remembered, if at all, as a rather dour exponent of the Objective school of German piano playing, a counterpart of the harsh, aggressive Neue Sachlichkeit movement in painting. Then there are the facts that the recorded sound, in mono, is somewhat dry, and Backhaus was 82 at the time of the concert; he would continue playing for another three years, before dying immediately after his last recital at the monastery church of Ossiach in June 1969. Mellow music-making? Not a bit of it. There is a profound joy in these performances, surprising charm and tenderness in the two Mozart sonatas, but above all there is urgency and the forward drive and momentum that always marked Backhaus’s playing. He begins with two Bach preludes and fugues, given with tremendous rhythmic energy, making many contemporary performances sound mannered.

Then after the Mozart come two of the Beethoven sonatas that were always the core of Backhaus’s repertoire, the Appassionata and the last Sonata in C minor opus 111.

The advanced age of the pianist has given his playing an extra edge of intensity. The shadow of mortality (there are slips and smudges that Backhaus might have avoided when he was a young lion) gives an even more piercing communicative power; these, among Beethoven’s last words for the piano, are being played by a man who knows he may not have many more chances to communicate his thoughts about them. His response is not to play safe but to go for broke; the tempi are brisk and there is no holding back, no slowing up. Especially in the furious ending of the Appassionata, and the sublime quiet close of the sonata, this is an artist who, in company with Emily Dickinson, “could not stop for Death”.

All this has given rise to what is not exactly a new year’s resolution, but a hope for the decade just coming to birth. If the last, unlamented decade, was really the decennium of “kidulthood”, as a BBC television series recently argued, of grown-ups pretending to be children, may the next decade be one which recognises the benefits and blessings of ageing.

[email protected]
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.