26 August

George Bernard Shaw, before he was a famous playwright, was one of the world’s leading music critics. (One of my favourites was him suggesting a steamroller be used on the chests of people coughing at the opera.) One thing Shaw said that always stuck with me was that he was sick of virtuosos on instruments. Shaw believed that instruments should be as easy to play as possible, so that people weren’t subjected to boring demonstrations of technical proficiency. Rock music is appalling for that, who can play the fastest is an idiot obsession, we have generations of musicians with awesome ‘chops’ and no musicality. But I wouldn’t make it a binary thing either, which some do, saying it’s all about feeling and not about skill. Skill will let you express more feeling, they’re not opposite. You see a lot of memes criticising ‘laptop’ music. But if you play with a lot of the modern digital music apps and their software instruments, you see a world Shaw dreamed of. A world where a lot of the pointless technical exercises aren’t needed, where you don’t need to know scales, they’re built into the app for you, where you can throw together an entire orchestra of music in an hour or so. The focus is on the music. Stevie Wonder was doing this stuff decades ago already.