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My godfather, Eugene Hochman, was born in Hungary, 1900, into a family so poor that they sometimes “ate poetry” (as he told me) instead of food. As a teen-ager, he won the Hungarian national prizes for poetry-writing, essay-writing and mathematics. The first two came naturally to him; the mathematics, not; so his brother–who had won […]

News flash! “Lobster sauce” is so called not because it contains lobster—it doesn’t—but because it goes well with lobster. So I was wondering whether soft pedal is so called because it makes a sound that goes well with soft playing.

Like many malcontents, or seeming-malcontents, my old friend the Curmudgeon is an idealist. He’s a fine pianist, and a superb teacher—kind, humorous, patient, and resourceful—

My friend Gerry Sussman, of MIT, called to ask if I’d anything to say on parallelism of art and engineering. (He was preparing a talk.) I did have a remark that I’d never shared with anyone. “A work of art,” said I, “is a machine with an esthetic purpose.” Gerry got a kick out of […]

Tuesday, Week Two: on the fifth floor, I run into Mr. K., with whom I worked last week. He complains passionately and despairingly that he’s suddenly unable to play simple trills in Scarlatti’s “Pastorale” sonata (K.9, D minor); but adds that he can still play double trills!

In ninth-grade English one day, we were going around the room reading aloud, and I suddenly realized that, with just two exceptions, every good reader in the class had gone to the elementary school I’d attended. More than that, we’d all had the same first-grade teacher. I was impressed that the difference she made was […]

Sit quietly and ask yourself what it would be like if

The self returned to the self, or should we say, the soul returned to the self? Dramatic and joyous view of beneficial effect of music, with comments by the great clinician/writer Oliver Sacks, M.D. Look what happens starting at 2:35. All of Dr. Sacks’s books are marvels, with music and other significant sound showing up […]

Classical music good, jazz

I once had an 8-year-old student — a delightful boy, a real charmer — and at the first