Monday, July 30, 2012
Classical musicians performing at the Grant Park Music Festival use earplugs to silence sound, improve performance
WBEZ 91.5 Chicago: Imagine an artist who puts on clouded glasses in order to paint. Or a ballerina who adds weights to her feet. Now consider a musician who puts in earplugs: not a rock star, who’s protecting his ears from deafening noises, but a classical soloist who by comparison works in near silence, and who believes that filtering out sound leads to a more nuanced performance.
Meet pianist Steven Osborne and cellist Alban Gerhardt. They’re both world-class soloists who will be featured at Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival, which starts Wednesday in Millennium Park. And they both consider earplugs as essential to their music-making as the instruments they play.
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2 comments:
It's an unusual idea, to be sure, but what the title of the article neglects entirely to address is the fact that the musicians, Osborne and Gerhardt, aren't silencing sound, they're filtering it. There's a big difference between trying to play music while hearing nothing at all and doing so while listening to certain parts of the sound. Other than that, it's entirely understandable why taking out certain "calibrated amount(s) of noise" would in some cases be beneficial to a musician; it allows the performer to focus more closely on the essence of the music.
I'm a musician, and one of the key things I learned when playing with groups is that you have to listen to the other musicians in order to blend in. However, the two people mentioned in the article are soloists, so they don't need to worry about blending in with the rest of the orchestra that they're playing with. I feel like this would also be a good technique to use when practicing by yourself, since it definitely would make the player become more aware of the sound and have to focus deeper since the sounds would be muffled. The article definitely intrigued me and I'm going to have to try this out sometime soon.
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