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EvanAnderson a day ago

Bartók... >shudder< You have a point.

ssttoo 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As a counterpoint, Bartok’s Mikrokosmos [1] was the “textbook” for a piano sight reading class at my community college. He does have a lot of accessible, even pedagogical, pieces.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikrokosmos_(Bart%C3%B3k)

Hunpeter a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, Bartók is really not that random: polytonality, pentatonic and octatonic stuff, whole-tone scales etc. are all things you can practice and put into work in his music. (You can argue that Schönberg is even less random, cause serialism, but that probably doesn't help too much when playing the piano).

EvanAnderson a day ago | parent [-]

As a wildly amateur and unschooled musician Bartók simply looks wildly intimidating. Listen to him (again, as a wildly amateur and unschooled musician) doesn't make him make much more sense.

I wish I'd taken music more seriously when I was a kid (and had better neuroplasticity). I know I could still make decent progress with it, even at nearly 50, but I missed my opportunity to really cozy up to it deeply. (Instead I've got 6502 and 16-bit x86 assembler... Arguably not an even trade.)