Violin Makers Museum

Instrument makers can be seen as the unsung heroes of music-making. Without them, there would be no instruments to make sing. The history of violin-making is a fascinating one. What violinists and music-enthusiasts take for granted today was not so obvious for quite a long time; the violin took many forms before it became the violin we recognize as such today. Even today, violins have different shapes and sounds. Each violin is unique. Today, it is easy to forget the tremendous experimentation and ingenuity it took to design an instrument that could truly make beautiful sounds. What inspired these instrument makers? Why does the violin look the way it does? Sound the way it does? How is it that every instrument has a unique sound? Why is the violin important and what does it add to musical expression? What exactly goes into making a violin? All of these questions will be answered at the Violin Makers Museum.

Visit to the Getty Villa

This Spring Break, I visited the Getty Villa in Malibu. I had a fabulous time there; the museum was absolutely gorgeous. I found the Villa particularly interesting in that, aside from the galleries inside, the building itself and the gardens were integral parts of the museum experience. The building is modeled after an ancient Roman villa in Herculaneum called Villa of the Papyri, and it is built to be like it once was thousands of years ago. The building is new looking, and not antiqued to look like the ruins that were excavated in the early 1700s. This makes the experience of entering the villa a unique one that could not even be experienced at the original Villa of the Papyri. Museum-goers experience the villa as if they had traveled back in time. The gardens contain the real growing herbs that once were used by inhabitants of the villa, and the fountains and courtyards that were found in ruins at the original villa have been brought back to life for the public to encounter. The museum immerses you into another world because the atmosphere is so compelling.

One exhibit that I found particularly interesting was the tactile exhibit, which was intended to teach through touch. In this exhibit, visitors are allowed to touch sculptures that are so rarely allowed to be touched. Visitors learn about the craft and brilliance of the sculptors when they can feel the small grooves that were made by the sculptor’s chisel and the smooth polished rock that was sanded to perfection. Feeling sculptures leads the visitor to understand why some surfaces were left rough and why some were polished and how that brings the sculpture to life.

The museum tells many stories including the history of Greek mythology, the history of Greek sculpture, the history of Etruscan Jewelry and it’s cultural significance, the history of Roman Imperial symbolism, as well as the history of J. Paul Getty and the creation of the Getty Villa. The museum engages visitors on many levels, by use of artifacts to look at, plaques that explain them in words, videos describing the building, smells from the garden and the sea that evoke the Mediterranean, and so on. The layout allows for the visitor to explore the building for him or herself as if he or she had come to a real ancient Greek home. The Getty Villa is a beautifully designed museum and very worth visiting.

"The Fallacy of One True Path"

In "A German Lesson: the Fallacy of One True Path" by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Los Angeles Times 2005), Goldhagen draws a controversial parallel between Pope Benedict XVI and Pre-WWII Germany. According to Goldhagen, although Pope Benedict XVI expresses great sensitivity to Jewish history and the Holocaust, he maintains that the only true religion is Catholicism and that followers of other religions are gravely misled. Just like Hitler believed the Aryan race was the only true race and that all others were somehow inferior, Pope Benedict XVI believes that one religion is true and that all others are inferior. The parallel does not hold up entirely however, because Pope Benedict does not feel that non-Catholics are inferior humans, the way Hitler felt that Jews, for example, were inferior humans, but simply have inferior beliefs and must be brought to Catholicism. The fallacy is that neither Hitler nor Pope Benedict XVI ever explain why their "chosen path" is any better than another by saying more than that it is better because it is truer or something of that nature. The only backbone for the claim of a true path is circular logic, which is in itself fallacious.

Critical Thinking in Music

A performer of music employs critical thinking in order to communicate through the piece he/she is performing. Creating beauty and expressing emotion through a piece of music requires much more than an ability to play notes. Intonation and rhythmic accuracy are extremely important, and achieving those things requires the performer to free him/herself from self-deception and evaluate his/her own technical abilities honestly (a form of critical thinking itself), but more than that, a performer must understand what the composer intended for his music to express. Understanding this requires the performer to analyze the texture, the dynamics, the chord progression, etc. and divine meaning from what was written. The performer interprets this data and brings it to life how he sees most fit, employing techniques he has studied for years. The ability to interpret data and use tools to create something personal from that data is the very essence of critical thinking.