Klarinet Archive - Posting 000327.txt from 2005/03

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] The Test
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 08:42:11 -0500


Dan Leeson wrote,
> But only one perseon, and he half-heartedly, has said,
>"I'll take the test." During the discussion is was "I'll
>take your test in a heartbeat."
>
>My reaction thus far, is that those who are convinced
>that there really is an identifiable German sound are
>not responding to the challenge or rising to the occasion.

I'm not planning to take the test, because I don't believe I can identify
players by nationality. I think musicians travel so much these days,
listen to each other so much and change teachers so frequently that by now,
regional styles that may (or may not) have developed in isolation decades
ago are pretty thoroughly shaken and stirred.

However, when I turn on the radio in the middle of a performance, I do
recognize specific recordings, if they happen to be among those that I
listen to on commercial CDs in my own collection. That brings up a
peripheral issue. Dan, if you do find enough people willing to take this
test to make it worthwhile for you to administer it, you're going to get
useless results unless you have a *lot* of test subjects. Two or three
test subjects won't be enough to give you any statistically meaningful
result.

A peripheral issue: One person with an idetic memory ("photographic
memory," though I wouldn't use that term for musical memory) who simply
*recognized* all of the recordings could foul up the statistics in a small
sample. That might sound farfetched, but I used to know such a person, an
amateur cellist, professional music critic and gay rights advocate named
Bill Gripp. Bill wrote music criticism for several publications, including
a column, "Classical Music," for the _Atlanta Gazette_. I've been out of
touch with Bill for several years, but when my husband and I lived in
Atlanta, back in 1974-5, Kevin played in a piano trio with Bill, who has an
idetic memory for music. We hung out with him a lot and we used to "play
guessies" with him, although as it turned out, Bill never guessed. Bill
owned a vast collection of recordings (tapes and 78 and 33 rpm records, in
those days), but whether he owned a recording or not, if he'd heard it
once, he remembered it forever--and it seemed he'd heard everything. If he
hadn't heard the specific recording, usually he'd heard the performers in
other recordings, and could identify them instantly, the same way any of us
recognize friends' voices on the phone.

In the beginning, for each session of guessies, Kevin would make a tape
recording of five or six fiddlers, cellists or singers performing the same
passage. He would play that unmarked, homemade tape for Bill and challenge
him to name the performers. Bill always called out the piece of music
within a note or two. Sometimes the first things out of his mouth were the
recording company and the studio, identified by the acoustics, before he
named the soloist. Bill could identify a singer or a violin or cello
soloist within a maximum of a few bars. Often, he'd hit the stop button
and tell us everything about the recording, from memory, after hearing just
one or two notes. Kevin taped records in libraries and in private homes
everywhere we went. He'd walk into somebody's house and ask if he could
look through their records. He tried mightily to buffalo Bill with dozens
of obscure recordings, including private label bootlegs. Then we branched
out into symphony orchestra and chamber music recordings, with the same
result. Most of us recognize our favorite recordings that quickly, but in
a year of playing the guessies, Bill hardly ever had to admit he was
stumped and couldn't identify a recording. He almost always did name the
performers -- and he never identified anybody wrong. I mean never as in
*never*.

If Kevin had asked the wrong question--if he had asked if Bill could tell
the nationalities of the performers--then he could have reported accurately
that Bill identified nationalities nearly 100 percent of the time. That
data could have been misleadingly reported as an ability to identify
national schools of playing. In reality, Bill knew the soloist's and the
orchestra's nationalities because he recognized that recording and
remembered everything significant about it: he could recite a whole
biography for each soloist, and often he'd go on to state the date of the
recording, the circumstances and so forth. Sometimes he'd recite verbatim
from the liner notes! I've never met another Bill Gripp, but a test for
people's ability to name a nationality would have to rule out that type of
wild card in order to get a meaningful result.

Lelia Loban

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