Étude, Brute? The case for Chopin - <AUTHOR> https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/etude-brute/ <comment><USER2> I usually see this idea of a heroic great artist (compared to artists who presumably don't have what it takes to merit being mentioned) in discussions around classical music. When people talk about visual art, there is more focus on the quality of the work, and the artist's distinct voice. Consider an example: a work by Picasso looks like Picasso made it, and that's what gives it its value. By contrast, derivative works that merely copy another artist's style are usually not held in high esteem. Chopin's work scores very well according to quality, and his distinct voice usually makes it obvious that the piece you're hearing is a Chopin. The visual arts are a lot better at allowing more artists to become established than the classical music world is for composers.

This may be a consequence of the properties of the creations. People who want to listen to a concerto will share the experience with many others, and typically won't be able to buy it all just for themselves. People who want to be involved in the contemporary art world can and often do buy physical works of art for themselves, and it doesn't matter whether or not the artist could convince a theater of people to pay to sit down together and appreciate it for 30 minutes. If art patrons want to buy physical pieces for themselves, you need a bigger pool of artists to serve them; but if you want to fill opera houses, it's better to have a few artists that everybody has agreed to like.

<comment><USER3> I don't think your thesis is accurate. When it comes to classical composers, its rather easy to tell them apart once you've studied classical music long enough. The issue is the painters are limited to certain materials, and their paintings are originals that decay and age even as new better materials for painting come out. Contrast that with composers, whose originals were not recorded and whose works are generally performed on vastly superior instruments, in far more formal and much larger venues than the composers would ever have used. Chopin for instance very rarely performed in venues larger than a rich person's salon and his instrument was much less powerful, had less sustain, and even more notes are added to the keyboard over time. So, for me, your thesis is not true when these technological and temporal variations are considered

<comment><USER4> > whose works are generally performed on vastly superior instruments, in far > more formal and much larger venues than the composers would ever have used. > Chopin for instance very rarely performed in venues larger than a rich > person's salon and his instrument was much less powerful, had less sustain, > and even more notes are added to the keyboard over time.

Chamber music actually sounds a lot better with historically accurate venues _and_ instruments, albeit the latter is not generally possible. In fact there's a bit of a refocusing on chamber music lately in the "classical" world, now that the quality of recorded media is better and big concert halls have become less important. Performing Chopin's music in a huge, modern-day concert hall means trying to turn it into something quite different than what it actually was when Chopin wrote it.

<comment><USER5> Venues are fluid for pianists. It's extremely difficult to move a piano vs another instrument, obviously.

I highly doubt Chopin only intended his music for a specific space. Chopin's music translates to large concert halls (with proper concert grands, of course) quite well. Every great pianist will adjust for the room.

Of course this will always be a debate. Some believe Bach's WTC should only be played on keyboards from Bach's era (ignoring the piano.) What a shame that would be to us all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The great thing about Chopin, as a pianist, is that as you grow in technique you can not only tackle the more complex pieces (Revolutionary Etude, Ballade no. 4 etc), but you can go back to some of the simpler ones and really work on the finer technique and artistic interpretation.

There's a good reason Chopin is a solo piano staple.

<comment><USER7> I can't agree more.

I've been playing solely Chopin for the better part of 3 years. I started on Preludes, now I stumble through Nocturnes and poke a bit at the Ballades, Etudes, and Scherzos.

People really need to learn about Chopin's music. There's juts so much to unpack in each Nocturne, each Ballade, it's truly incredible.

I started from very little skill, but by practicing Chopin almost daily I have gotten much better at sight reading and gained a new appreciation of his music.

<comment><USER6> Wow - that's great work!

My absolute favourite is Nocture op. 9 no. 2, apart from the very ending it's _fairly_ simple to play if you are an intermediate or better pianist, but the difference in just hitting the right notes and actually _playing_ it is night and day, and something that when you come back to the piece you can really gauge your progress with.

I had the privilege of playing it at a wedding a few years ago, on a beautiful Ibach concert grand piano, in a centuries old church ... the acoustics were fantastic and it was a very fitting piece.

<comment><USER7> I love op 9 no 2, yeah it's not too hard although the ending is a little tricky! That sounds like an amazing experience, do you have a video or something?

edit: not too hard but I should say I don't feel I'm at the point I can really do it justice emotionally, as you say, haha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tried reading this - but the website sent me through an endless loop of signing up for the free newsletter to unlock the article (which I tried various times).

That said, this line certainly raised an eyebrow for being pretty sensational:

>Of the well-known composers of the 19th century, Fryderyk Chopin (as his name is spelled in Polish, his native tongue) is the only one whose complete works continue to be played regularly—indeed, without cease.

When was the last time you heard his piano trio performed outside of a music school, for instance...?

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it's hard to take anything in this article seriously when you're one line into it and the premise:

"Of the well-known composers of the 19th century, Fryderyk Chopin is the only one whose complete works continue to be played regularly"

...is incorrect. There's not a single composer whose "complete works" get regularly played, and even given Chopin's fairly small catalog (for a major 19th century composer) there are plenty of marginal works that rarely get performed. Considering his long and respected career as a music critic and author, I'm kind of surprised to see Terry Teachout's byline on this.

<comment><USER8> I mean amongst the list of composers publishing in the 19th Century are Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel to name a few(!)

It's a bit hard to take a critic seriously when they're capable of forgetting facts like this...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> His most replayed work. I'm sure you've heard it, but many don't know it's Chopin. If you realize that now, it may be a chance for some rewarding Spotify exploration...

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=9E6b3swbnWg](https://youtube.com/watch?v=9E6b3swbnWg)

<comment><USER11> Possibly qualifying double for these same statements: [https://youtu.be/dw4aGcmircA?t=2120](https://youtu.be/dw4aGcmircA?t=2120)

<comment><USER12> I've always wished John Williams would just include this piece straight up in a Star Wars movie. Both to acknowledge the inspiration and just because it would be perfect sad, brooding music as the camera panned across across a smashed rebel base or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ashkenazi complete recordings box set owner: he might have been a bit antisemitic and a bloody mess at the end, but I love my chopin.

</comment><comment><USER14> The headline is not apt, the piece is not really making a strong case "against" Chopin. There is a slight attempt to build up some illusion that Chopin was once not held in high esteem. Well, that is a very weak argument indeed, as he was a child prodigy touring Europe in his teenage years, and then subsequently was very well known to the other famous romantic composers, most of whom thought he was a true genius of melody, finesse, and a master of chromaticism and narrative piano writing. Look no farther than Liszt's storied relationship with Chopin, they played together at salons and gatherings, they played each others works. Similarly, the Schumanns loved Chopin's work. He achieved a very high fee for teaching as well, there were numerous very wealthy Parisians eager to have training with him. Furthermore, there was and is a very, VERY strong tradition of classical pianists playing his works. Consider Debussy's performance of the fourth ballade at his conservatory, when it was stated he performed it as if "without hammers". So, no, there is no case against Chopin's mastery, this headline is click-bait.

The linked article is really a pseudo-book review of the recent biography "Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times" by Alan Walker.

<comment><USER15> As a pianist, the suggestion that Chopin or his études are not held in high esteem for both technical and musical merits is simply ludicrous.

His technique paved the way for Liszt and Debussy études, and Godowsky expanded their utility. Most technique after him is influenced by him in some way.

<comment><USER10> To my thinking the parent comments too easily blur the notions of "is not" held in high esteem", and "was not".

In his day it's acknowledged his work was appreciated, the article mentions his patronage. However, imagine present day people in your field who are respected as luminaries. They take time to publicly disparage your work.

Despite his supporters, it could have easily been traumatic to him personally and professionally. Could he have been more successful or inspiring to young composers otherwise?

In general it's quite a sad theme. I hate to see this same story so recurrent throughout history. In the 21st century we've finally simplified the concept to one word: "haters".

Criticism is just as important as praise, but not when it's unbalanced or done unproductively. Why as human beings must we treat each other this way and close our minds to things that are don't fit a mold?

The damage to individuals is never fully visible and the cultural price is never fully known.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Content marketing piece for a book.

<comment><USER17> There's nothing wrong with book reviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Of the well-known composers of the 19th century, Fryderyk Chopin (as his > name is spelled in Polish, his native tongue) is the only one whose complete > works continue to be played regularly—indeed, without cease.

We must be excluding lesser works and juvenilia since those works by Chopin exist and aren't regularly played today.

Ok, let's start hashing...

Error: collision detected: Schumann

Error: collision detected: Brahms

Error: collision detected: Schubert

Stopped parsing at line 1.

<comment><USER19> _complete works_

<comment><USER20> Which is an arbitrary metric that could easily confuse a reader. How much a composer is played matters more than the amount of pieces played. Furthermore, Chopin composed a relatively small amount of music compared to others composers, and most of it is composed for solo piano so of course a lot of it is still going to be played.</comment></comment></comment>


Ideas I would like to build / see built - <AUTHOR> http://arandomurl.com/2010/04/10/ideadump.html

<comment><USER2> > Canvas/WebGL/JavaScript Game

I made a bunch of small JS games/puzzles using Processing.js (which uses Canvas/VML). The exact rules are slightly cryptic by design. I definitely loved making them and intend to make a bunch more this year:

<http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?nored>

<http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?gold>

<http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?piggy>

<http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?vanish>

I hope you enjoy them.

<comment><AUTHOR> those are brilliant, exactly what I was talking about, thanks for sharing

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On a related note, there's a new sub-reddit called SomebodyMakeThis. (a sub- reddit being a user created subsection of the link aggregator Reddit)

<http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Not to hate, but these are vague ideas overall. Those are the kind that are a dime a dozen. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> They are pretty vague so far, I just wanted to jot down general ideas that I keep having and forgetting over time, thought itd be handy if they were online for others to try as well. It will be updated and refined pretty regularly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to see also: a web browser, an OS, a "spreadsheet" (term I've coined, I'll explain in a follow-up post), also some sort of FPS, also some sort of markup format that's like HTML but not presentation-specific...also, I'd like a language like C but with classes. And, a pony. Thank you.

<comment><USER6> _I'd like a language like C but with classes_

C already has classes. They're called structs. And methods are called function pointers.

<comment><USER5> Disagree C has classes. No "class" and no inheritance or polymorphism. C++ and Objective-C have these things. But I understand what you're saying. There is the very well-known structs+functions technique which gives a partial stand-in for full OO.

My post was meant to be funny yet true. I read the OA and thought all of the ideas he listed already exist, and was surprised it made the front page on Hacker News. Then I thought to myself, "Oh, it must be because it's a joke, the OA was trying to be funny." Perhaps I was mistaken.

<comment><USER6> _Disagree C has classes. No "class" and no inheritance or polymorphism_

C has perfectly good inheritance:

        struct child {
            struct parent p;
            // new variables go here
        }
        struct child foo;
        struct parent * bar = &foo;  // perfectly valid C

<comment><USER5> Looks like composition and a struct alias, not inheritance to me.

Is my C that rusty?

For example, say that the "struct parent" type (which in your example has no members) had a member named z. In your example, I expect to be allowed to do something like this:

        (*bar).p.z

which is composition. But not:

        (*bar).z

which would be member inheritance. Because bar/foo/child all lack a z member. Only "parent" has a z member. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER6> It's valid C to cast a structure to the type of its first element. So in the example of

      struct child {
        struct parent {
          int z;
        } p;
      } foo;

you can access foo.p.z but not foo.z -- but you _can_ access (struct parent *)(&foo)->z, so you can pass foo to anything which expects a struct parent.

<comment><USER5> I'll assume you're right. Thanks for pointing that out. Your C sounds fresher than mine. I used it heavily from 90-95 or so but later moved on to higher languages like Java and Python. If what you point out about the syntax is accurate, I find that to be a counter-intuitive design decision.

<comment><USER7> It works because C structs are just contiguous bits of memory, interpreted as various fields. A pointer to a struct points to the start of that contiguous bit of memory.

      Child Struct:
      +</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----+
      | parent struct | child fields    |
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment>---+</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----+
      ^
      \--- pointers to the struct point at the start

You can cast this child struct to a parent struct, which is like saying 'interpret memory starting here as a 'parent' struct'.

This works: The memory from location to location+sizeof(parent) IS a parent struct. The child fields following the parent struct are simply ignored.

<comment><USER6> _It works because C structs are just contiguous bits of memory, interpreted as various fields_

Well... almost. C structs can have internal padding -- but the C standard doesn't allow padding _before the first element_ , so that first element is guaranteed to begin at the beginning of the struct.

<comment><USER7> Thanks! You learn something every day :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the idea of a game which limits the time you can spend playing it. You might have something big with that one.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised no one has mentioned Google Talk. For a while I suffered through the tangled mess that was using jabber transports to connect to other protocols because it was so minimalistic and slick. I'd love to see Pidgin or Psi reimagine Google Talk's UI while keeping the extensibility of the backend.

Also, you might be interested in a free game by the name of Skyrates (<http://www.skyrates.net>). It's not really an MMO, but it was made for people with not much free-time in mind so it doesn't favor people sinking a lot of time into it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Re: Calender Web Service. How about Tungle? <http://www.tungle.com> Allows other to schedule with you with no signups. It also works with many calendar apps.

</comment><comment><USER11> My latest addiction isn't an MMO, but otherwise fits your description pretty well: <http://np.ironhelmet.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> For the first idea, have you checked out tinychat? <http://tinychat.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> tinychat seems to let you host your own chatroom, whereas I was looking for a chat client that can connect to irc / xmpp (and possibly msn / facebook), somewhat more like meebo

<comment> mike-cardwell You could take <http://cgiirc.org/> and point it at a <http://bitlbee.org/> server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> WYSIWYG HTML Editor == Dreamweaver

<comment><USER5> Or the old fashioned alternative: browser & editor side-by-side on your screen.

Browser rendering the same HTML file that is loaded in your editor.

Edit.

Save.

Hit refresh in browser.

Optionally: add a simple, development-class web server (like web.py).

Bingo, done.

I guess I feel like the "editor" and "render" parts of the problem are already solved. I'm not sure that we gain more than we lose by trying to smash them together into one gob. For debugging/tweaking an existing web app, sure (then use something like Firebug), but for general development from scratch there are a lot of benefits to using a real browser and real editor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Most or all of these already exist in some form. E.g., Campfire, ikiwiki, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> calender => calendar

Attention to detail, buddy.

<comment><AUTHOR> heh cheers, I had even ran it through after the deadline but still managed to miss it, fixed

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What about a social network especially for people who haven't owned Apple (stock, hw and sw) and never will?</comment>


Ask HN: Best proxy provider for web scraping? - <AUTHOR> Hi there, i'm looking for a proxy provider to do some web scraping.
There is a ton of providers, i was wondering if you have any favorite service ? <comment><USER2> If your scraping on regular websites, any proxy service will do the job.

But, if you want to scrape large platforms like Amazon, eBay, etc then you should consider dedicated proxies for these websites (with IPs never used on them before).

Here are some services that you might find helpful: [https://www.bestproxyproviders.com/category/seo- proxies/](https://www.bestproxyproviders.com/category/seo-proxies/)</comment>