Classical music

Here's the thing about classical music. You have Amy Chua, the abusive Chinese-American Yale law professor mother who gloats about having forced her daughters to practice for three hours a day. She forced them to play the violin and the piano. I don't know why Chua picked those two instruments. But I think I understand why she insisted on classical music.

It's because classical music requires zero creativity. You're playing the same music that has, in some cases, been played for centuries, and you're trying to play it the same way everyone else played it. If you're in an orchestra, you try to sound exactly like everyone around you.

And since there is a glut of thousands of other classical musicians all playing the same thing, and since it's all available on records and CD and has been for years, you're contributing absolutely nothing.

Maureen Corrigan reviewed Amy Chua's book on National Public Radio. The poor woman's been hanging around NPR too long. She concluded her review by noting that you couldn't argue with the results of Chua's sick abuse. Her daughters both played classical music! What a boon to mankind!

Some other fellows on NPR

There was the time the elderly MIT boys on Car Talk discussed school. The older one preferred math. He explained that you could get 100% on a math test and rest assured that you couldn't possibly have done any better. But even if you get the highest possible grade on an essay test in history or English, you could still have done better. No matter how good an essay is, it could always be improved somehow.

That's the appeal of classical music. It's music for people devoid of any creative impulse. You judge a performance according to how much it's sounds like everybody else. There's an objective measure. You don't say, "Well, it could always be better," you say, "It sounds exactly like the CD you can buy for eight dollars!"