Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

Brahms and Kindle

Bernard Holland's recent piece for the New York Times, on Kenneth Hamilton's "A Golden Age", fulfils the conditions of the perfect book review: an offbeat but evidently fascinating book; a lively discussion of its merits; and relevant additional material from the reviewer.

Hamilton proposes "a detailed reflection on concert behavior in the 19th and early 20th centuries"—applause, bravos, programming, performers' etiquette etc.

Among the new-to-me elements:

(1) Audience participation was taken for granted in the 1840s. The pianist
Alexander Dreyschock was criticized for playing “so loud that it made
it difficult for the ladies to talk,” Mr. Hamilton writes ...

(2) When Chopin played his E minor Piano Concerto in Warsaw in 1830, other
pieces were inserted between the first two movements. Perhaps the most
celebrated such interruption was at the 1806 premiere of Beethoven’s
Violin Concerto in Vienna, where the soloist thrilled listeners by
playing his violin upside down and on one string ...

(3) Liszt, Anton Rubinstein and virtuosos like them would have been offended had listeners not clapped between movements ...

The last of those points cheers me. When I dozily joined a scattered round of between-movements clapping at a concert by the Tokyo String Quartet a few years back, I received the sort of look from my neighbour usually reserved for a partner who bids badly at bridge.

Holland quotes (it is not clear whether from Hamilton) a wonderful comment from an unnamed critic on Brahms’s playing of his own B flat Piano Concerto. “Brahms did not play
the right notes,” the critic wrote, “but he played like a man who knew what the
right notes were.”

And that brings me, by this circuitous route, to my Kindle, which arrived yesterday. This fiddly little gadget does not strike all the right notes. But it has been designed by people who clearly do know what the right notes are, that need to be struck, if e-books are to take off.

On balance my confidence is reinforced. This is indeed the beginning of the end of the physical book. And I say that even though I have a long list of grumbles about the Kindle in its 1.0 version.

Among the teething troubles: it feels more plasticky than robust; its operating behaviour is downright neurotic (I've so far logged five resets in 36 hours, maddening when the reset button is buried beneath the back cover); the slip case is clumsy and badly-fitting; there is no backlight; the display is more black-on-grey than black-on-white; and there are too few books and very few newspapers available as yet from Amazon for downloading.

And yet, and yet, the basic elements of the strategy are right. We are all buying the thing, creating the big market which the Kindle needs. The display is good enough to read without fatigue. The "whispernet" wireless delivery system works implausibly well.

I can forgive much for the pleasure of downloading a literary novel for $9.99, and reading it easily for long stretches throughout the day; or for getting "Le Monde" in full text at the moment of publication—and on a 14-day free trial.

I have bought; I am sold. I know already that I will want the Kindle 2.0 and the Kindle 3.0. C'est plus fort que moi. And I trust that by Kindle 3.0 all the glitches will be fixed. I'm a convert: a physical book is something to buy when you can't get a download to your Kindle.