(Via .)

“‘Knowing the score’—the expression implies mastery, but it doesn’t suggest the sustained and solitary study that’s required to achieve it. There are a few miles of roadway that I have driven often enough to navigate them faultlessly in my mind: I know every pothole, every deer crossing. A conductor needs similarly detailed recall of an enormous musical terrain. In the weeks I spend fussing over just my six minutes of Mozart, Gilbert conducts Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande; symphonies by Mahler, Brahms, Dvorák, and Beethoven; and assorted pieces by Webern, Bruch, Berg, Bach, Corigliano, Dutilleux, Haydn, Sibelius, Wagner, Janácek, and Mozart—dozens of hours, millions of notes, pieces he has performed for years and pieces he’s never seen before. During one session, Gilbert demonstrates for a percussionist how to get the right sound on the triangle, corrects a bowing in the violin part, sings the bassoon line, and points out a subtle harmonic shift—all without glancing at the score. ‘I haven’t looked at this piece in five years,’ he says, ‘but it’s still in there somewhere.’ If the entire symphonic tradition were incinerated, a team of conductors could write it all out again….

“It’s amazing how beautifully we play,” a musician says, “when we don’t know what the hell the guy on the podium is doing.”. “

The show is still about a month away and the groups are busily practicing their hearts out as they prepare. I’ve still got a lot to do (final key changes, chart book assembly, final locked CDs, show track mastering, final score delivery, and on and on), but for now a big milestone has been passed. Onward!

Skip forward to 11:30 for the Guinness Record attempt. Jaw-dropping.

I guess they have the clock next to him so that you can tell it’s not sped up footage. Otherwise I would totally call bogus. That’s amazing.

If you’d like to hear me blab narcissistically, you can listen to it online here. Erin can’t understand how I can blithely go on the radio and just jabber. Guess it comes from standing in front of large groups of people and having them do what I say. After doing that for so long it’s a natural assumption that people would be interested.

He soon saw that he could transform more complex chords the same way. Three-note chords occupy a twisted three-dimensional space, and four-note chords live in a corresponding but impossible-to-visualize four-dimensional space. In fact, it worked for any number of notes — each chord inhabit ed a multidimensional space that twisted back on itself in unusual ways — a non-Euclidean space that does not adhere to the classical rules of geometry. A physicist friend told him that these odd multidimensional spaces were called orbifolds — a name chosen by the graduate students of Princeton mathematician William Thurston, who first described them in the 1970s. In the 1980s, physicists found a few applications for orbifolds in arcane areas of string theory. Now Tymoczko had discovered that music exists in a universe of orbifolds.”

A Grand Unified Theory of Music. I’m deep into writing the charts for this years’ show, and certainly believe that some kind of symmetry exists in all these notes. Of course, that could just be the result of blurry eyes.