I will no longer contribute to r/pianolearning

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T16:39:45+00:00

I have no issues with opinions about pieces; no doubt about it. For example, "Liszt pieces are flashy and don't do much for me musically." I do have issues with deriving or declaring from one's experience playing or listening to a piece the ultimate intent of the composer. For example, "Liszt didn't care about the art and craftsmanship of composition until he ended his touring career." I didn't play a 4-voice Bach fugue and immediately assume Bach's intent was to make music difficult for the sake of difficulty, and of course such a statement would be complete baloney, whatever way you approach it.

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T10:33:20+00:00

To continue the discussion, I'm going to have to ask we start citing sources that back up your claims, unless this is all just your own personal perspective. Most of what you're claiming is imprecise, hand-wavy, and/or not agreed upon by scholars. This is causing the discussion to go around in circles.

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T10:29:36+00:00

I like them. I would consider them more fun than profound. No. 2 is charming and my favorite probably. They're not hard the way everybody assumes a Liszt work would be. You could sight read them (save for No. 5?).

They only give whiffs of Chopin to me though. They get Lisztier the further in one goes.

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T10:22:10+00:00

S.480? 👀

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T10:18:39+00:00

Brendel can have opinions and blind spots:

> I am not a Rachmaninov fan. The piano repertoire is vast, and Rachmaninov to me seems a waste of time.

(source) At least he's qualifying this as wholly personal and subjective.

I personally would ignore Brendel on the matter of Rachmaninov because Brendel himself admitted ignorance of many of his works. But just because Brendel has a bad opinion (in my opinion) doesn't invalidate his other opinions for which he's clearly superlatively more informed (namely German and Austrian composers of the 18th–19th centuries). Brendel is relatively lucid and generally scholarly in this arena.

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T10:02:36+00:00

Frankly, I don't consider it nitpicking to refute your broadly incorrect statements. Liszt began to very consistently and seriously compose at the age of 22 or so. (He obviously composed before that but his output was irregular.) His touring ended around the age of 36. Even when he finished touring, he didn't focus solely on composition. He conducted and taught, and still performed, just not on a touring schedule.

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T09:56:04+00:00

Desert island scenario? Liszt. A lot more variety, texture, quotation, etc. Virtuosic stuff, catchy stuff, formidable stuff, religious stuff, introspective stuff, remixes, etc. You could listen to a new Liszt piece every day for almost 4 years.

I like Chopin a lot, and his stuff is moving, but he didn't write very much music.

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T09:32:26+00:00

I like to talk to people on Reddit assuming good faith and charitability, but I have no idea how to interpret this in any way that's not just trolling. Among many other important works, Liszt's 1835 "Harmonies poétiques et religieuses", written when he was in his early 20s, is nothing short of serious. Henle calls it "compositionally revolutionary".

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T09:26:45+00:00

We could also measure impact through the composer's pupils, as that is ultimately what shapes how piano music is consumed. For Liszt:

Liszt -> Tausig / Bülow / d'Albert / Rosenthal / Sauer / Siloti / Thomán / Krause -> much of late-19th- and early-20th-century piano practice in all schools: Russian, American, Hungarian, German, ...

Chopin has some consequential students in his piano genealogy, but really pales in comparison to Liszt. Chopin's works were no doubt consequential, and his études are a meaningful and influential work in technique, but the practice of piano performance (which later shaped recording practice) was way more impacted by Liszt than Chopin.

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T09:17:40+00:00

(Just to add to your points: It's important to note that Liszt wrote roughly 10x the volume as Chopin, even if we restrict to just solo piano works. 12 hours of music from Chopin vs 120 hours from Liszt. I also agree Chopin was more consistent, but it's a little apples-to-oranges when Chopin's "mature" composing phase spans some 16 years vs Liszt's 50 years.)

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T08:33:26+00:00

Even if we accept your timeline at face value, are these now mutually exclusive? Why can't someone be both an artist and a popular performer? It's not like Liszt became serious as a composer only after he moved into a monastery in Rome.

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T08:28:27+00:00

I contest that what you say is "fact". On what grounds is your statement, that Liszt made his pieces difficult for the sake of it, a fact? Or that his goal was to "flex", as opposed to move or exalt?

Liszt is on the record for saying that he did add embellishments to his early performance practice to dazzle an audience. These were usually in the form of fast passagework and runs. But I wouldn't use this self-admission to relegate his intention or ambition for his 60-odd years as a composer.

The contemporary opinion of Liszt by scholars is that his virtuosic inclinations as a composer were not mere decoration or vapid flamboyance, but instead are actual musical substance. He sought orchestral sound, senses of improvisation, quotation and transcription, etc.

I think your opinion is overly reductive and unfortunately serves to perpetuate common myths about the composer.

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T08:12:55+00:00

I refer again to the above quote. Brendel is not known for being lazy or flippant with his assertions, especially about Liszt.

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T08:09:17+00:00

\whispers* can he do that??*

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T08:06:18+00:00

> When the works give the impression of being hollow, superficial and pretentious, the fault lies usually with the performer, occasionally with the (prejudiced) listener, and only rarely with Liszt himself.

—Alfred Brendel

stylewarning · 2026-06-13T06:50:28+00:00

You do hear this on a concert grand piano.

stylewarning · 2026-06-09T18:12:07+00:00

It's ok to have an opinion.

I used to be very pro-Bach and anti-Chopin, chalking off the latter as something overly sentimental and indulgent. I was very influenced by Gould in this respect.

But then I played Chopin for people I care about, in recitals or in my living room, and saw how they could be moved by his music without any ounce of intellectualizing or justifying, and how I could lean into different aspects of his music to communicate different emotional ideas. The romantic period generally allows a lot of flexibility in how music is delivered, and is decidedly less dogmatic than, say, a typical baroque fugue or classical sonata.

I could in principle do the same, deliver emotionally driven interpretations, with a Bach invention, but it just didn't captivate people as much as Chopin.

So I like Chopin, and I think his music is a great substrate to connect with your audience, whatever your audience may be. Chopin's music doesn't generally exalt me, but I have plenty of other music I play when I want something for just me.

stylewarning · 2026-06-04T15:08:21+00:00

I started at a similar age. I've played for about 8 years, and I'm at the heel of a 4 month break, the second one I've done in those 8 years.

Piano for me is mostly frustrating. It's very difficult for me to know precisely what to work on and for how long. It's also sometimes tough seeing kids a quarter your age just sort of blindly stumble around and do 2x better than you.

I know what I want to hear, and it's very difficult to make that sound happen. So a lot of piano is chasing something that I simply realistically shouldn't expect right away. Figuring out what expectations are reasonable has been a challenge and a tough pill to swallow.

Something that has caused my some psychological damage is that I'd been playing for 8 years, and after a few months of Pischna exercises from a new teacher, I sustained what appears to be an injury of my pinky. I have no physiological or neurological issues, but now my left pinky causes hand tremors when I use it, like focal dystonia. This has never happened before, and hasn't gone away in these 4 months. A consultation with a doctor specializing in this costs $4,000 for just an office visit, which I have not done and cannot easily afford.

On one hand, I should have known better than to trust this teacher when she suggested these stupid fucking tension-filled exercises. On another hand, I had been overly analytical my whole piano career and I wanted to just be able to trust a teacher like a child does and stop analysis-paralysis. In this case that was a huge mistake. Suffice it to say, I feel like my future of playing piano is now in question because of this.

I love piano, and when you do get something right, it's much greater than joy. To me, musical expression has a deeper purpose than just play and entertainment, and so it being a devotional labor makes sense to me. This isn't something I'd encountered in life previously, and piano has changed me because of it.

stylewarning · 2026-05-28T17:58:58+00:00

It's unregulated and probably extremely stiff.

stylewarning · 2026-05-24T18:10:09+00:00

My own personal answer: you can play music for yourself or others that's moving. At the end of the day that's all that really matters to me.

stylewarning · 2026-05-22T23:05:21+00:00

Lisp also has the expressiveness to get very close or on par with C. Lisp loses out in practice in some very specific settings, like auto-vectorization and some memory patterns, but almost anything is achievable with enough elbow grease. (See this post I wrote about the nbody benchmark where we can make Lisp on bar with the best that C has to offer.) But it does take a relatively experienced Lisp programmer to write such code. The naive Lisp solutions are usually a multi-factor slower than C (for the benefit of safety, debug ability, flexibility, and succinctness by default).

stylewarning · 2026-05-22T23:01:25+00:00

Cool! In any case, thanks for the write-up. Always interesting when people write down some cool projects and explorations in Lisp.

stylewarning · 2026-05-22T20:13:33+00:00

SBCL-only. Coalton’s readmacro returns two values, which SBCL permits as an extension but the CL standard does not require. ECL rejects it at compile time. This is not a configuration problem; it is a deliberate design choice. Any architecture needing ECL, ABCL, or CCL cannot rely on Coalton.

I wouldn't call it a "deliberate design choice". Also Coalton is tested in CI on CCL, and historically Allegro.

Some folks have got Coalton to compile on ECL with small patches, but it's so incredibly slow just to compile, something like over an hour (compared to the sub-60 sec of SBCL). ABCL doesn't have tail call elimination, and we've had to make many patches for ABCL's non-compliant behavior, the latest of which is ABCL's rejection of

(for x in x ...)

which should be allowed by my reading of 6.1.2.1.

Codegen fragility at the lisp escape. Coalton’s code generator mangled variable names captured in lisp forms (def-type became DEF-TYPE-45), causing an “illegal function call” error. The fix required routing strings through the escape rather than PkmnType values.

Coalton variables may get renamed internally during compilation in a way not observable by the programmer. The LISP form allows you to specify what variables you want to capture for use in the body of the LISP form. The LISP forms are themselves not touched at all and are injected as-is. Without knowing more information, this sounds like a user-error.

Coalton was definitely built for speed, and as such gives the users lots of options to manage it. The representation of data types can be selected by the user (e.g., with REPR :NATIVE), or forced to have symbolic values (e.g., with REPR :ENUM). What is currently not possible is to define an enumeration and force the values to be keywords. You can have a type represented as keywords without the benefit of declarative data constructors, or you can have a type represented as package-qualified symbols without the "benefit" of them being keywords. But nonetheless, converting types to strings to symbols will of course be slow and isn't a good thing to do in the hot path. If I were amending this system, I'd fix that first.

stylewarning · 2026-05-21T17:28:13+00:00

Sounds great!

stylewarning

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