Concert Concat 2025

Published by peter on 2024-12-30 in Concats, Concert Concats, Concerts, Jazz and Music. Closed

This post is one in a sequence which lists (mostly) live music I have heard, as best as memory allows. I write to have a record of my musical experiences and so these entries are intended as postcards from me to my future self. All opinions are personal.

Other posts in this collection can be found here. The most recent prior post in this sequence is here.

  • The Piccadilly Sinfonietta and Christina Lawrie on piano in an early evening concert at St Mary-le-Strand Church, Strand, London on Friday 19 September 2025. The programme comprised Holst’s St Paul’s Suite in C major (Op. 29, No. 2) and Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. The Sinfonietta had 7 musicians (two first and two second violins, a viola, a cello and a double bass), six of whom stood. There were about 50 people in the audience. The playing from all eight performers was excellent. I do love the final movement of the Beethoven.
  • Claudia Jablonski in a lunchtime cello recital with Rustam Khanmurzin on piano at St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, London on Friday 19 September 2025. About 35 people were present. The programme comprised the Cello Sonatas of Debussy and Prokofiev, neither of which I had heard before.

    This was a superb recital. The Prokofiev Sonata began with low rumblings on the cello, and then the piano entered with a lyrical and pleasing melodic phrase. I relaxed into a reverie, only to be jolted out by the very next phrase from the piano. The theme went stumbling spikily into some strange key! I thought, Hello Prokofiev, my old friend!

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AI Hallucinations

Published by peter on 2025-09-03 in AI and Computer Science. Closed

Anyone trying to integrate Generative AI using Large Language Models into some commercial or professional business process should understand the dangers of so-called hallucinations. Because LLMs are generating the next text, given a corpus of training text and prompt data, all activity by these models is the same – prediction of the most highly likely completion text. Some outputs may appear to be hallucinatory only to those of us tethered to a real world. Anyone untethered – and this includes the LLMs themselves – will not be able to distinguish so-called real from so-called hallucinations, just as a sleeper cannot tell if his or her dreams are plausible or not.

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Doing and thinking

Published by peter on 2025-06-06 in Computer Science. Closed

Someone once said that computer programming is 10% syntax and 90% thinking. Here is Andrej Karpathy with a similar thought, writing on Twitter:

You could see it as there being two modes in creation. Borrowing GAN terminology:
1) generation and
2) discrimination.
e.g. painting – you make a brush stroke (1) and then you look for a while to see if you improved the painting (2). these two stages are interspersed in pretty much all creative work.

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Palindrome week

Published by peter on 2025-05-23 in Uncategorized. Closed

Using the common American date format (month-day-year) this week contains ten successive palindromic dates:
5/20/25
5/21/25
5/22/25
5/23/25
5/24/25
5/25/25
5/26/25
5/27/25
5/28/25
5/29/25

Note that, although widespread in North America, this format is not compliant with the ISO Standard for formats of dates, ISO 8601.

To liberate our talents & uplift our horizons

Published by peter on 2025-05-01 in Culture, Politics and Rhetoric. Closed

The inspiring vision of the Australian Labor Party in their successful campaign for the Australian Federal election of 2 December 1972 (from the campaign speech of Gough Whitlam, leader of the ALP):

Our program has three great aims. They are:
– to promote equality
– to involve the people of Australia in the decision-making processes of our land
– and to liberate the talents and uplift the horizons of the Australian people.

We want to give a new life and a new meaning in this new nation to the touchstone of modern democracy – to liberty, equality, fraternity.”

Delivered at Blacktown Civic Centre, Western Sydney, 13 November 1972. Source: Museum of Australian Democracy (Old Parliament House).

Musical performance

Published by peter on 2025-03-17 in Music and Uncategorized. Closed

Nat King Cole:

I’m an interpreter of stories. When I perform, it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.”

Two nations under God

Published by peter on 2025-02-23 in Religion. Closed

To people familiar with the organized, formal factions of the Australian Labor Party, the divisions within the Roman Catholic Church may look quite unprofessional. To an outside observer, there appear to be two main factions in the modern Church, although neither is organized or formal (as far as I know). Their names are my own invention.

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Thinking aloud

Published by peter on 2025-02-14 in Music and Rhetoric. Closed

For some years, I have been arguing that music is a form of thinking. (See prior posts here, published in 2011, and here, 2010.) I realize that this statement would likely be obvious to most musicians, but I still receive push-back to it from those people (especially many philosophers) who believe that thinking requires words. In this belief, they are mistaken. Even with other forms of thinking (geometric, visual, musical, kinetic, etc), though, we may still need words to explain our thinking to others.

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Celebrity page turners

Published by peter on 2025-02-01 in Concerts and Music. Closed

Pianist Roger Woodward in his memoir, Beyond Black and White, (2014, Kindle Edition, location 5265):

Violin virtuoso George Enescu and acclaimed pianist Arthur Rubinstein were once lunching together at Enescu’s Paris apartment when there was a knock on his door. It was one of Enescu’s violin students, who was beside himself. Enescu tried to calm him down as the student explained that his piano accompanist had telephoned half an hour earlier to say he had fallen ill and was not able to replace him for his debut that evening. Since Enescu was as fine a pianist as violinist, he reassured his student he would accompany him. Rubinstein volunteered to turn pages. Next day, one of the Paris critics described the concert in the following way: “Except for the fact that the pianist should have played the violin, the page-turner the piano, and violinist the pages, the concert was memorable.” “

Woodward tells this story when recounting a rehearsal of Iannis Xenakis’ Eonta in UCLA in March 1972 under Zubin Mehta at which Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod turned up unexpectedly, having braved rioters and police on the UCLA campus to get there. Eventually Messiaen turned Woodward’s pages for him. However, Messiaen, who had been Xenakis’ composition teacher and knew his music (and who was always supportive of his student), first helped the brass players (from the LASO) deal with the many challenges and mis-prints in their parts for Eonta.