Manic Mondays: Impossible Art

I admit I wrote this one at the same time as the last Manic Monday. Apologies, but I find the concept of "impossible to play music" fascinating. Or really "impossible to understand" anything.

This started with the Rite of Spring, largely considered impossible to perform. And Paganini's 24 Caprices. But there's Eruption by Eddie Van Halen, which was a mind-blowing guitar solo that 16 year olds play now. You get into slightly trickier situations with composers like Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff had massive hands. He could play an octave and a half on each hand, and he played with exceptional clarity compared to his contemporaries. The problem is, if you don't have octave-and-a-half hands, you're going to struggle playing his concertos.

But the amazing thing, and the great testament to humanity hidden within, is that none of these pieces are impossible, anymore. They're technically difficult. I don't know how much you know about music, but playing Paganini's 24 Caprices is still not an easy task. The violinist who wants to attempt it has to play left-handed tremolo while still bowing, or perform double and triple stops, or ricochet bowing, or God Damn left-handed pizzicato.

Trust me, those are not easy things to do. Even though we understand them better now, it's no longer a matter of "just Niccolo Paganini can play these songs."

No matter the artform, humans need two things: they need skill and they need understanding. The issue with Paganini wasn't that he was so much more incredible at playing the violin. He was amazing, no doubt. But the reason he was so revered and unique is because, at the time, he was the only one who understood how those songs worked. He was the only one at the time ricochet bowing twelve or more arpeggiated tuplets

You see it in other forms of art. Understanding can be vital to any sort of art making sense. I'm looking at Dadaism. When you just walk through a museum and see a urinal with Marcel Duchamp's signature on it, you think it's just fucking weird. Until you learn why it happened: a museum said "anything people make is art" and Duchamp chose to push it.

And he proved his point: even though he "modified" the urinal and called it "water fountain," they didn't take it. So not everything could be art.

Or look at the Piss Christ. What if we didn't understand the significance of urine as filth, or all the meanings of a crucifix. The Piss Christ would mean nothing to us. It wouldn't be famous, and it's not particularly attractive. But because there's understanding, we can see it.

It fascinates me to think what kind of understanding we're going to have soon. Back to music, there's a piece now that is arguably the most difficult to play in the world today, because it's simply not something we can conceptualize well. Ben Johnston's 7^th String Quartet is written not in notes, but in tones. The piece is notated by cents. Minute degrees of variation, smaller than even quarter steps. We can't even always hear the difference between two notes, because they are 4 cents apart. A cent in music is one hundredth of the tonal difference between semitones. So, a hundredth of the difference between A and A-flat. That small.

When we understand that, what will come along to fill the gap? What is there in writing that we can't conceptualize? Or any other art form. I love the idea of pushing the far boundaries of what we can actually do.