Notes from TED Talk on Classical Music
- The speaker's father was named Ted, and much of the speaker's musical life is a continuing dialogue with him. Ted was a New Yorker, a self-taught illustrator and musician, and profoundly hearing impaired sharing how music witnesses where it can take you.
- Ted improvised in a Tin Pan Alley style believing only two things mattered in music: "what" and "how."
- Classical music is an unbroken, living tradition over a thousand years old distilling music of everyday life to its essence, creating a new language that speaks about who we are and continues to evolve.
- Music is a design of pitches, silence, and time. Reactions to these combinations are complex, emotional, and not fully understood with appreciation inherited from centuries of changes.
- Classical music's evolution can be accurately followed due to notation enabling musicians to imagine music on a vaster scale, recording inspired improvisations and making intricate designs.
- In the 8th century, the main goal of music was to praise God. By the 14th century, music aimed to mirror God's mind as seen in the night sky.
- The focus shifted from mirroring God's mind to following human emotional turbulence using Harmony, stacking pitches to form chords, became the means of representing emotions.
- Printing put music scores in the hands of performers everywhere. Improved instruments enabled the age of the virtuoso as composers like Beethoven could share lifetime insights in these architectures of time.
- The moment when the music stops poses a question: Where does it go? What's left? What sticks with the audience as technology democratized music but also pushed composers to extremes.
- The speaker shares a story illustrating how much music can mean to someone, even after everything else is gone taking every performance seriously, never knowing who might be absorbing it and how it will affect