It's not hard to see somebody play Rimsky-Korsakov's 'Flight of the Bumblebee'
at full speed and think,
"Wow!"
"That's difficult."
But... what do we mean... by... difficult?
Let's find out.
(CUE INTRO)
We humans are fascinated by the idea of
virtuosity:  the ability to perform difficult pieces of music.
'Virtuosity' and 'virtue' come from the same Latin root:
Virtus, meaning merit or valor.
We ascribe a high aesthetic value,
and also, kind of a moral value
to the ability to do something difficult
In his book, "Aesthetics and Music"
Andy Hamilton explains how the
"...devilry, risk, excitement and relief..." of virtuosity
is a thing that we experience in music, aside from music itself.
It's the same sort of feeling that you might get when you're watching somebody attempt
a ridiculous stunt live on national television.
That possibility of failure is... almost...
...tantalizing.
This is why we would feel somehow cheated
if somebody recorded something at a slow tempo
and then sped it up.
It doesn't evoke the same feeling in us,
to know that somebody didn't actually perform it at the tempo that we think they did.
Put it simply, we like to hear the sweat in somebody's performance.
"Ugh, boring. This video is over a minute long already
and you still haven't said which music is the most difficult.
Get to the good stuff already."
Well, it's hard to even know what is meant by the phrase "most difficult piece of music",
because there's really two different kinds of virtuosity.
Physical virtuosity...
...and conceptual virtuosity.
Physical virtuosity comes from the level of technical finesse
necessary in order to execute a certain piece of music.
Now even still, it's difficult to say what the most physically difficult piece is becasue
the human species is a kaleidoscope.
What might be possible for some people might by utterly impossible for others.
A trained classical soprano, with some preparation,
will be able to execute the stratospheric arpeggios of Mozart's "Queen of the Night" aria.
But that would be utterly impossible for say,
a male Tuvan throat singer.
Of course, that same classical singer wouldn't be able to engage her false vocal chords
and sing in an extreme bass register,
isolating overtones the same way that that Tuvan throat singer would be able to do.
The great pianist, Rachmaninov, had very large hands
and only wrote music playable by people with similar large wing spans
(NOT YOU, TRUMP)
So the physical difficulty of a piece of music is entirely
dependent on the circumstance of who is playing it.
"That's a boring non-answer!
Like, what about something really difficult like, say, 'Black-MIDI'?
Would that count as the most difficult music ever?"
Well, yeah, you could say that.
Black MIDI is the practice of inputting so many notes into a musical notation
software that the sheet music turns black. So, yeah,
I guess black MIDI would be the most difficult music ever because technically
nobody could ever play it, but, to me, that's also kind
of a non-answer because there's none of the same, 'devilry,
risk, excitement and relief,'  that comes when human virtuosoes
play music. So, since no human could ever begin to attempt it,
it's not really a satisfying answer to the question
'what is the most difficult music'
Although, technically, there might be some of that
devilry, risk, excitement, and relief when the black MIDI becomes so
ridiculous that the computer overloads. In that way, maybe
the broken computer performance is a form of
virtuosity, but I'm more interested, right now, in what humans can do.
"Okay so if the humans species is a kaleidoscope or whatever,
and not black MIDI, what can we actually do to figure out what piece of
music is the most difficult?
Alright, so what we want is
conceptual virtuosity: something that performers have a
difficult time conceptualizing but still is technically
physically possible. A long-standing metric of both conceptual and
physical virtuosity for violinists are the twenty-four
caprices of Niccolò Paganini— a nineteenth century
virtuoso with staggering technical abilities. He wrote
them as a cutting-edge showcase of every advanced violin
technique he could think of like fast double-stops,
octaves,
and left hand pizzacato
For a while, he was the only violinist alive
who could actually play the twenty-four caprices, but as the years progressed
and technical abilities among musicians grew,
more and more people were able to play them. As difficult
music and difficult techniques become more and more
familiar to the musical community, they become less
and less difficult to conceptualize. Eddie Van Halen's, 'Eruption,'
is a modern-day version of this. It blew
everybody's minds when it first came out—dazzling audiences
with pyrotechnic guitar techniques the same way that Paganini did with
audiences more than one hundred years earlier. But now, because of
its ubiquity and its influence on the genre of shred guitar,
'Eruption,'  presents less of a challenge. Humans didn't evolve
to play guitar faster in the years since, ' Eruption,' came out ; it's just
we have a better framework of understanding how to play it.
Another example of this is 'Giant Steps' by John Coltrane.
When Coltrane first recorded this piece
it presented an incredible intellectual challenge for jazz improvisers
who were required to change keys every second.
Now this challenge has been fairly normalized,
and all advanced jazz improvisers at one point in their careers
tackle Giant Steps.
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is another example
of this phenomenon. Its rapidly changing time signatures
and polyrhythmic and polytonal passages
at one point considered unplayable.
But now it's place in the repertoire so common, that even
high school orchestras are playing it.
American iconoclast Frank Zappa wrote his piece, "The Black Page"
to be an impossible gauntlet of odd subdivisions and nested tuplets
But now, it's standard faire among young virtuoso percussionists.
Okay, so what you're saying is we need some pieces which haven't been
ingrained in the musical consciousness yet of musicians, right?
So, what would those pieces be?
Well, there are plenty of people coming up of really crazy ideas for performance pieces.
One of my favorites is "Failing" by Tom Johnson, a piece for solo double bass.
The performer is supposed to read from a text,
talking about the piece of music...
...as they're playing the piece of music.
They're supposed to maintain a conversational tone with their speech patterns.
But it gets harder and harder as the piece goes on and becomes more technically challenging.
At some point, it's just inevitable that the performer will not be able to maintain that conversational tone.
You can definitely hear the sweat--
and maybe even see the sweat of people trying to play the piece "Failing"
and, to me, this is what virtuosity is.
Then there's also the absolute insanity,
that is, the music of composers like Brian Fernyhough.
Fernyhough is a composer that writes music that makes Frank Zappa's black page look like...
...Mary had a Little Lamb.
Nested tuplets...
...INSIDE of nested tuplets.
Quarter tones...
and unspeakably difficult rhythmic schemes and subdivisions.
It's hard to even get your head around what the sheet music is telling the performers to do,
never mind ACTUALLY  performing it.
It's so complicated that the sound of the music almost sounds
Like it wasn't even...
written down.
Youtube comment sections are little bit less tactful in their appraisal of his music.
Garbage.
This is nothing but trash...
Sounds like they're moving furniture.
Even this insanity...
...PALES in comparison to the Grand Daddy of them all,
what most people consider, the most difficult piece of music ever attempted.
It's what composer Kyle Gann calls the quote:
"The Burj Khalifa of sonic conceptualization..."
Ben Johnston's Seventh String Quartet.
The difficulty of Ben Johnston's music comes down to one thing:
Intonation.
We normally divide an octave into 12 equal parts.
But Ben Johnston's music requires the performers to divide the octave into
literally hunderds of specific discrete pitches.
These pitches are based upon calculati ons and divisions of the overtone series.
The difference between these pitches is at the cusp of what humans can actually hear.
Depending on the person, we can hear an average of about a five cent difference between pitches
or a twentieth of a half step.
Consider the difference between this:
(Equal temperament tuned A)
and this:
(Equal temperament tuned A plus 5 cents)
You might not be able to even hear that difference.
Imagine not only being able to hear it,
but also accurately recreate it on your instrument.
String musicians have no frets on their instruments,
so they have to rely entirely upon their ear to create these relationships.
What's crazy about this is that there actually have been humans who have recorded it.
The Kepler Quartet: a group of musicians that have been rehearsing
for over a DECADE in order to actually accomplish this.
What's even MORE amazing is that
when you're listening to this music it actually sounds...
...well...
...pretty cool.
The intensely complex math that goes into it doesn't result in a cacophony,
but rather, a strange, resonant soundscape
that is quite unlike anything else that you will hear.
The Seventh String Quartet's difficulty does not lie
in physical virtuosity, or how fast you need to play in order to play it.
Rather, the difficulties lie with conceptual virtuosity
or how precise the musicians need to be with their intonation
in order to achieve Ben Johnston's meticulously constructed soundscape.
Steven Downs writes:
"Virtuosity is a product of performance that communicates something extraordinary between artist and audience."
This is why I think that asking the question "What music is the most difficult?"
is not a pointless exercise, but rather a search for something extraordinary to be expressed.
What music do YOU find the most difficult?
And what does that communicate to you?
BASS
