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| Apr-04-11 | | goldenbear: <kardopov> I think a 10-game match between Yifan and Judit would end somewhere in the 7-3 or 8-2 range. I don't think it would be at all exciting. Judit is a freak of nature, a chess genius, and a great fighter. She wouldn't be afraid to, or feel bad about, winning every game. |
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| Apr-04-11 | | goldenbear: <kardopov> To continue the thought, I think a fischerrandom match between them might end as a 10-0 white-wash. That's how different I feel they are in class. |
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| Apr-04-11 | | twinlark: <goldenbear> <Judit is a freak of nature> This is exactly what her parents set out to prove was <not> the case when they hot-housed and home-schooled their daughters to be chess geniuses (as well as intelligent and balanced multi-lingual talents). Their thesis: that genius is made, not born. And considering that Judit and Zsuzsa concede that Zsofia was the most talented of the three, they make a pretty good case. |
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Apr-04-11
 | | HeMateMe: tens of thousands of kids are home schooled in the USA. Many are pushed into one discipline by parent(s), for better or worse. Become a doctor. Become a scientist. Be a great ballet dancer. Very few become No. 1 in the world in their chosen area of concentration. I would think that the three Polgar sisters got an amazing genetic gift which had to be pushed to come to fruition. They probably would not have become as successful as they became in chess, without the constant chess honing as children. But, as I mentioned above, other parents/guardians have tried the Lazlo Polgar method, most have failed. I'd say the genetic side of this is the most important factor. Perhaps a good laboratory to study this is the old USSR and eastern europe sports teams. Representatives of the state would tour schools and make phone calls, looking for kids with a certain physical body type, and a high degree of hand/eye coordination. They found Katarina Witt, two time olympic skating champion, East Germany. They found Nadia Comenechi in Romania. They found Olga Korbut, and so on. Then they put these kids in a sort of college level sports academy, while they are still pre-teen. The training they get is very important, similar to what Lazlo Polgar did. A mimimum of six hours a day training for one particular sport. But, without taking the right genetic material to begin with, you will not have a success. Families with a line of genes like the Polgars are rare, but they do exist. The DiMaggio family had three boys make the pros in baseball, Joe being the most famous. The great composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has a brother who is an accomplished cellist. |
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| Apr-04-11 | | twinlark: <HeHateMe> <Families with a line of genes like the Polgars are rare, but they do exist> Do you actually <know for a fact> anything about the Polgars' genes or are you inferring this from their chess outcomes? If the latter, then you're engaging in circular reasoning. |
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| Apr-05-11 | | andrewjsacks: HeMateMe speaks with reason. The Polgar Experiment will not work without impressive raw talent to develop. One cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. That is a cliche for a reason. |
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| Apr-05-11 | | rilkefan: <The great composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has a brother who is an accomplished cellist.> Does he have another brother named Andrew Lloyd Schlockmeister Webber? |
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Apr-05-11
| | HeMateMe: <rilkefan:> Oh, my....are you implying that the rock operas/musicals created by Webber aren't 'serious' music? Many of us think that creating something as interesting and listenable as "Jesus Christ Superstar" is every bit as good as something by Mozart or Beethoven. If I'm reading your comment correctly, then one could infer that Lennon and McCartney were just jingles writers, because they didn't write for an orchestra? I think it is more difficult to write a four minute song, that people love, which may even have a serious message, than it is to write something fifty minutes long. A whole lot of people in the classical world wish they could write musicals like Andrew Lloyd Webber, or do things like Cole Porter and Gershwin. Thats why you often see full orchestra's performing the works of these peoples. |
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| Apr-11-11 | | Lambda: <HeMateMe> The test would be whether people are still lauding "Jesus Christ Superstar" in a couple of centuries time. |
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| Apr-11-11 | | Octavia: <other parents/guardians have tried the Lazlo Polgar method, most have failed. > how many have tried & failed? I only know one who tried & the son is one of the top players. The book is only available in Hungarian, because Lazlo wanted too much money fro a translation to my knowledge. Anyone who believes in genes or talent is a lazy teacher - those teachers invented 'talent' to hide their inability to teach. |
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| Apr-12-11 | | Bdellovibrio: <because they didn't write for an orchestra?> It has nothing to do with the musical medium, but everything to do with the level of complexity, internal diversity, and patterned interplay of the harmonic and rhythmic structures within music that causes some people, like (possibly) <rilkefan>, to prefer so called "intellectual music," usually produced by highly entrenched and educated composers, and so called "popular song," which represents the expressive use of musical substance by the usually self-taught specialist. This dichotomy, while constantly being challenged and blurred, corresponds both to demonstrable and systematic differences in the structure of the product itself and empirically verified differences in perception and cognition on the part of the listener. "Intellectual music" more greatly utilizes the human ability to process music like spoken language and mathematics, but unlike language, the musical capacity requires an environment that is rare in order to develop. The Beatles, by the way, seem to have blurred the dichotomy outlined above to an extent well above the vast majority of popular musicians, due probably to their sheer knack for complex and sometimes ambiguous harmony that permeates their corpus. As a matter of fact, I think that their music is usually more complex internally than that of Lloyd Weber, despite the misleading suggestions of the latter's preferred instrumentation. |
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| Apr-12-11 | | Bdellovibrio: <I think it is more difficult to write a four minute song, that people love, which may even have a serious message, than it is to write something fifty minutes long.> First of all, anything even marginally resembling a "serious message" is by definition non-musical, especially if it is delivered via lyrics in the case of a pop song or a libretto for opera. Crafting those messages is purely a poetic issue, and draws upon the writer's linguistic competence. Stravinsky: "Music, by its nature, can't express anything," (my paraphrasing). Secondly, popularity in music speaks is not a metric of quality or effort. Music becomes popular when people are easily able to relate to it, and that judgement also is more of a poetic and psychological consideration and is therefore extrinsic to musical production when one adopts any limited definition of the latter. The compositional process of Beethoven and the songwriting process of John Lennon both demand a great deal of effort, but Lennon's effort is distributed over social, political, and musical considerations, whereas Beethoven's energy is more restrictively devoted to music (excepting his selection of texts for use in Fidelio et. al.) But that restricted investment allows for a greater deal of abstraction and complexity within the music itself, as can be demonstrated by the fact that his work is a complete product without politico-poetic dimensions, whereas Lennon's corpus would seem absurd with those dimensions removed. |
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| Apr-12-11 | | Bdellovibrio: I'm not attempting to make any quantitative value assessments in my analysis, by the way. My main point is that the interaction between objective ("quasi-linguistic, "logical") and subjective ("emotional," "emblematic") elements within the audio-instrumental communicative mode has produced a broad spectrum of qualitatively different paradigms, all labeled in the lexicon as "music," but which may or may not utilize activity in non-musical interface levels to underscore their impressions. Thus, partisanship within this unstable (and possibly non-real) dichotomy is merely a incommensurable value statement that cannot assume any persuasive form, given the deeply ingrained nature of each individual's unique musical interpretive system. |
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| Apr-12-11 | | Bdellovibrio: Polgar liverating: 2699.4: http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail... |
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| Apr-12-11 | | Travis Bickle: Here is a recent post at Chess.com by Natalia Pogonina which features a Judit Polgar game, (scroll to bottom of page). http://www.chess.com/article/view/e... |
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| Apr-12-11 | | Marmot PFL: <Oh, my....are you implying that the rock operas/musicals created by Webber aren't 'serious' music? Many of us think that creating something as interesting and listenable as "Jesus Christ Superstar" is every bit as good as something by Mozart or Beethoven.> Maybe at the time JCS came out that was true - today I doubt it. In 100 years I am fairly certain they will still listen to Mozart and Beethoven (in one format or another) but I doubt that will be true for 98% of today's pop music. Some artists will probably be listened to but I wouldn't try to guess which. |
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Apr-12-11
| | HeMateMe: < The test would be whether people are still lauding "Jesus Christ Superstar" in a couple of centuries time.> No, it would not be. One can't say that "if it isn't as long lasting as Mozart, it is 'Shlock'". I think contemporary music can be of as high a quality as that of Mozart, without it lasting 300 years. Music by Gershwin, Cole Porter, Louis Armstrong and the Beatles may not be played with the same frequency in one hundred years as that of Mozart, but that does not prove the quality is any lesser than that of Mozart's music. BTW, a lot of old, 4 minute long songs ARE played 300 years later. The Led Zeppelin hit song "Gallows Pole" is a reworking of a song several hundred years old. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUOx...; wiki:
"<The Maid Freed from the Gallows>" is one of many titles of a centuries-old folk song about a condemned maiden pleading for someone to buy her freedom from the executioner. In the collection of ballads compiled by Francis James Child, it is indexed as Child Ballad number 95; eleven variants, some fragmentary, are indexed as 95A to 95K.[1] The ballad existed in a number of folkloric variants from many different countries, and has been remade in a variety of formats. It was recorded in 1939 as "The Gallis Pole" by folk singer Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, but the most famous version was the 1970 arrangement of the Fred Gerlach version by English rock band Led Zeppelin, which was entitled "Gallows Pole" on the album Led Zeppelin III." How do you know that popularity is not the most important criteria? 300 people might go to a "mostly Mozart" night. 30,000 will go to see Paul McCartney. This is really a matter of personal taste. I like a lot of classical music, but some of it I find very dry and dull. It matters not how 'complex' the music is, how big an orchestra is needed to play it. The proof is in how well it is appreciated. |
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| Apr-12-11 | | Bdellovibrio: <I think contemporary music can be of as high a quality as that of Mozart, without it lasting 300 years. Music by Gershwin, Cole Porter, Louis Armstrong and the Beatles may not be played with the same frequency in one hundred years as that of Mozart, but that does not prove the quality is any lesser than that of Mozart's music.> High quality indeed. Different (incommensurable) quality even more so. BTW the artists you mention are many, many, notches above the "average pop artist" that Marmot was likely referring to. Gershwin hardly fits into the false "classical/pop" dichotomy at all, the chameleon that he is. He wrote a beautiful piano concerto in addition to jazz the ballads that made him famous. |
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| Apr-12-11 | | Jim Bartle: As a child I played Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and others on the piano, and thought he was simply a "classical" composer. I learned he also wrote popular songs much later. |
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| Apr-12-11 | | polarmis: I translated a Russian interview with Judit Polgar after the European Championship. She's also asked what it was like to beat Karpov and Kasparov and if she'll start playing in women's events: http://www.chessintranslation.com/2... |
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| Apr-12-11 | | TheFocus: A lovely interview with a lovely lady.
I still have a crush on Judit. |
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| Apr-12-11 | | Marmot PFL: Another who won't disappear anytime soon is J.S. Bach (1685-1750). I can type the dates without looking them up as that was the first thing my piano teacher made me learn. Bach was like God to him and I never forgot those dates even if I have forgotten how to play every single piece I ever practiced. |
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Apr-12-11
| | HeMateMe: I remember "Switched on Bach" from the early 70s, the beginning of the Moog synthesizer. Is that the same Bach you are referring to? |
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| Apr-24-11 | | Antonina: I'm not as talented as her, but I'm hardworking and I hope one day I'll be as good as she is. She's great! |
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Jul-03-11
| | HeMateMe: FIDE published some new ratings. As always Judit is top of the women's list. I think she is 35. So, she has led the women's ratings list for about 20 years. Amazing. Q: Who was the highest rated female player before Judit? Q: How long has one male had an uninterupted stay at the top? I'm guessing its Kasparov. Ten years? |
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