C’è un nesso insospettabile tra le due cose e la persona migliore per coglierlo è Tim Harford, il quale ci facilita l’impresa mettendoci a disposizione un libro notevole: “Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World”.
Si comincia con la storia di un pianoforte “insuonabile”.
E’ la storia di Vera Brandes, ma non della sua vita. Bensì di una sola serata, il 27 gennaio 1975.
Quella era la sua serata, la diciasettenne (!) impresaria aveva organizzato il primo concerto della sua vita riuscendo a portare Keith Jarrett all’Opera House di Colonia per le esibizioni di tarda sera, un colpaccio da tutto esaurito. E tra poco sarebbe cominciato l’afflusso del pubblico.
Tuttavia, quando quella sera incontrò Keith Jarrett e il produttore Manfred Eicher iniziarono i suoi guai. I due avevano dato un’occhiata alla scena e allo strumento, dall’esito del sopraluogo scaturì la terribile sentenza di Manfred:
… “If you don’t get another piano, Keith can’t play tonight.”…
E in effetti qualche ragione di lamentela c’era…
… ‘this tiny little Bösendorfer, that was completely out of tune, the black notes in the middle didn’t work, the pedals stuck. It was unplayable.’… he could do nothing about the muffled bass notes, the plinky high notes and the simple fact that the piano – ‘a small piano, like half a piano’ – just didn’t make a loud enough sound to reach the balconies of the vast auditorium…
Keith visibilmente irritato se ne andò nell’auto che stava parcheggiata fuori sotto un acquazzone torrenziale. La ragazza lo raggiunse bussando ai finestrini…
… Desperate, she caught up with Jarrett and, through the window of his car, begged him to play. The young pianist looked out at the bedraggled German teenager standing in the rain and took pity on her. ‘Never forget,’ Jarrett said. ‘Only for you.’…
L’esito della serata è noto:
… That night’s performance began with a simple chiming series of notes, then quickly gained complexity as it moved by turns between dynamism and a languid, soothing tone. It was beautiful and strange, and it is enormously popular: The Köln Concert album has sold 3.5 million copies…
Ecco, noi siamo portati ad interpretare male un evento del genere, tendiamo a vedere le difficoltà di quella sera come un ostacolo anziché un aiuto all’esito felice della performance…
… When we see skilled performers succeeding in difficult circumstances, we habitually describe them as having triumphed over adversity or despite the odds. But that’s not always the right perspective. Jarrett didn’t produce a good concert in trying times. He produced the performance of a lifetime, but the shortcomings of the piano actually helped him… The substandard instrument forced Jarrett away from the tinny high notes and into the middle register. His left hand produced rumbling, repetitive bass riffs as a way of covering up the piano’s lack of resonance. Both of these elements gave the performance an almost trance-like quality…
Le proporzioni dello strumento rispetto alla sala da concerto furono un vincolo senza il quale certe soluzioni improvvisate non si sarebbero mai prodotte: Jarrett riuscì ad “abbracciare” le difficoltà anziché respingerle cedendo alla sua mania di perfezione…
… Standing up, sitting down, moaning, writhing, Keith Jarrett didn’t hold back in any way as he pummelled the unplayable piano to produce something unique. It wasn’t the music that he ever imagined playing. But handed a mess, Keith Jarrett embraced it, and soared…
Esiste in noi un istinto sbagliato…
… Keith Jarrett’s instinct was not to play and it’s an instinct that most of us would share… But with hindsight, Jarrett’s instinct was wrong…
La tesi del libro: mettiamo un po’ più di casino nelle nostre vite, riusciremo meglio…
… The argument of this book is that we often succumb to the temptation of a tidy-minded approach when we would be better served by embracing a degree of mess…
L’elogio del disordine puo’ tessersi in molti campi…
… We succumb to the tidiness temptation in our daily lives when we spend time archiving our emails, filling in questionnaires on dating websites that promise to find our perfect match, or taking our kids to the local playground instead of letting them run loose in the neighbourhood wasteland… the careful commander is disoriented by a more impetuous opponent; the writer is serendipitously inspired by a random distraction; the quantified targets create perverse incentives; the workers in the tidy office feel helpless and demotivated; a disruptive outsider aggravates the team but brings a fresh new insight. The worker with the messy inbox ultimately gets more done; we find a soulmate when we ignore the website questionnaires; the kids running loose in the wasteland not only have more fun and learn more skills, but also – counterintuitively – have fewer accidents. And the pianist who says, ‘I’m sorry, Vera, that piano is simply unplayable’, and drives off into the rainy Cologne night leaving a seventeen-year-old girl sobbing on the kerbside, never imagines that he has passed up the opportunity to make what would have been his most-loved piece of work…
Quello di Keith Jarrett fu un incidente finito in gloria ma ci sono artisti che gli “incidenti” se li vanno a cercare, quasi intuiscano quanto bene possano fare alla loro creatività.
Un caso da manuale fu la fuga a Berlino ovest, allora un posto squallidino, di David Bowie nel 1976. La sua carriera stagnava, stava divorziando e si faceva di eroina a più non posso…
… It was a dangerous period for me,’ Bowie reflected over twenty years later. ‘I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity…
Gli era venuto in testa di registrare un disco agli Hansa Studio. Il produttore Tony Visconti ogni volta che si avvicinava a quell’edificio era come se sentisse delle “voci”…
… the place screamed ‘you shouldn’t be making a record here’…
Poi c’era con loro Brian Eno un tipo pericoloso, il tastierista folle dei Roxy Music impelagata in strane musiche (stava inventando il genere “ambient”).
L’inserzione che misero sul giornale per cercare un produttore fa capire l’atmosfera stralunata:
… Visconti himself had been recruited by Bowie with this sales pitch: ‘We don’t have any actual songs yet … this is strictly experimental and nothing might come of it in the end.’…
In sala di registrazione erano apatici finché Eno non propose di agire secondo la cosiddetta “strategia obliqua”…
… Eno took to showing up at the studio with a selection of cards he called ‘Oblique Strategies’. Each had a different instruction, often a gnomic one. Whenever the studio sessions were running aground, Eno would draw a card at random and relay its strange orders…
Si estraevano delle carte eseguendo e istruzioni indicate. Non sempre le istruzioni erano intellegibili. Un esempio:
… Be the first not to do what has never not been done before Emphasise the flaws Only a part, not the whole Change instrument roles Look at the order in which you do things Twist the spine…
Il fatto è che le istruzioni non apparivano sempre congrue, tipo quando chiedevano di spostare il miglior musicista in formazione ad uno strumento a lui alieno…
… For example, during the recording of the Lodger album, Carlos Alomar, one of the world’s greatest guitarists, was told to play the drums instead. This was just one of the challenges that Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards imposed, apparently unnecessarily…
Un altro musicista di vaglia disorientato da Eno fu il povero Adrian Belew…
… Adrian Belew, another fine guitarist, who was drafted into the David Bowie recording session where Carlos Alomar was ordered to play the drums. Belew didn’t really know what was happening and had barely plugged in his Stratocaster when Eno, Visconti and Bowie told him to start playing in response to a previously unheard track. Before he could ask why Carlos was on the drums, Belew was told that Alomar ‘would go one, two, three, then you come in’. ‘What key is it?’ asked Belew. ‘Don’t worry about the key. Just play!’ ‘It was like a freight train coming through my mind,’ said Belew later. ‘I just had to cling on… Eno admits that his experiments with Belew, Alomar and the other musicians in Berlin weren’t much fun for them. Used to finding a comfortable groove, they had their routines ‘entirely subverted’… The eventual result of the freight train coming through Belew’s mind, sliced and spliced by Eno and producer Tony Visconti, became a guitar solo that is the spine of Bowie’s single ‘Boys Keep Swinging’. The solo is now regarded as a classic…. when we listen to a Bowie album, we don’t see the mess and frustration of the recording session; we can just enjoy the beauty that it produced…
Altro esempio:
… During another session, Eno stood beside a blackboard with a list of chords on it, and the musicians had to follow along as he pointed at random to chord after chord…
E’ chiaro che con gente tipo Eno e le sue strategie oblique capita che i professionisti perdano le staffe…
… Carlos did have a problem, simply because he’s very gifted and professional … he can’t bring himself to play stuff that sounds like crap.’…
Eppure, il parto del caos a volte è notevole…
… Yet the strange chaotic working process produced two of the decade’s most critically acclaimed albums, Low and ‘Heroes’, along with Iggy Pop’s most respected work, The Idiot and Lust for Life, which Bowie co-wrote and which benefited from the same messy approach… It’s hard to argue with such results, and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies now have a cult following in creative circles…
Possiamo trarre una lezione dall’avventura di Jarrett a Colonia e di Bowie a Berlino?
… Given both Jarrett’s and Bowie’s experience, it seems that arbitrary shocks to a project can have a wonderful, almost magical effect…
La cosa interessante è che la soluzione del caos è utilizzata anche in altri ambiti apparentemente più ligi alle regole. Penso alla costruzione dei microchip…
… Take the question of how to lay out a circuit on a silicon chip… there are trillions upon trillions of conceivable ways to lay out the wiring and the digital logic gates that make up the circuit – and some are much more efficient… This is an example of what mathematicians call an NP-hard problem. NP-hard problems are a bit like enormous combination locks… With a lock, only one solution will work. With a chip, manufacturers don’t need to find the ultimate circuit layout… A good algorithm will get you a decent solution… But what makes for a good algorithm?… Another is to start with a random layout and look for incremental improvements… Unfortunately, this method is likely to send you down a dead end… The better method is to emulate Brian Eno and introduce a judicious dose of randomness… There’s no guarantee of finding the very best circuit layout, but this kind of approach will usually find a good one…
Oppure in campo biomolecolare…
… how to evaluate a complex new molecule for possible medical use by comparing its structure with that of many other complex molecules with known medical properties…
Facciamo adesso il giochino delle montagne: se doveste individuare il punto più alto della terra senza poter vedere una mappa che strategia adottereste? Ce ne sono diverse: 1) metodica 2) random 3) step by step 4) step by step + schock arbitrari… Ebbene, l’ultima è la migliore
… Here’s an analogy: imagine participating in a strange competition to find the highest point on the planet, without being allowed to look at a map. You can name any set of coordinates you like and you’ll be told its altitude: say, ‘50.945980, 6.973465’, and you’re told: ‘That’s 65 metres above sea level.’ Then you can name another point… What strategy will you use?… you could try a methodical search: start with ‘0.000001, 0.000001’ and work your way up… Or you could try a strategy of purely random leaps… An alternative extreme strategy is pure hill-climbing, analogous to the step-by-step search for improvements in silicon chip design. Start at a random point and then look at all the nearby coordinates – say, a metre away in each direction. Pick the highest of those and repeat the process over and over… Hill-climbing strategies get stuck if they meet small hills… The most likely winning approaches will be a blend of randomness with hill-climbing…
C’è qualcosa che unisce l’improvvisazione di Jarrett, la costruzione del microchip e la ricerca di punti topici al buio…
… Improvising at the piano seems a world away from laying out an efficient array of electronic components on a silicon wafer, but the analogy of random leaps and hill-climbing helps to make sense of what happened in Cologne. Keith Jarrett was already a highly accomplished pianist: we might imagine his performances as habitually scaling peaks in the Alps. When faced with the unplayable piano, with its harsh treble and anaemic bass, it was as if a random disruption had plucked him from an Alpine peak and deposited him in an unfamiliar valley… But when he started to climb, it turned out that valley was in the Himalayas…
Il nostro istinto è quello di migliorarci sistematicamente ma è una strategia che spesso finisce in un vicolo cieco. Gli improvvisatori lo sanno…
… It’s human nature to want to improve and this means that we tend to be instinctive hill-climbers. Whether we’re trying to master a hobby, learn a language, write an essay or build a business, it’s natural to want every change to be a change for the better. But like the problem-solving algorithms, it’s easy to get stuck if we insist on never going downhill…
A volte ricorrere a saltuari schock arbitrari è ostacolato da autorità regolatrici che sono terrorizzate dai cambiamenti repentini. Un caso classico preso dal ciclismo sportivo…
… In the 1990s, Graeme Obree, a maverick cyclist nicknamed the ‘Flying Scotsman’, made some random leaps – he experimented with radical changes, building his own bike from odd components (including parts of a washing machine) and adopting unusual riding positions; one of these involved tucking his hands into his breastbone with no handlebars to speak of, and in another he held his arms straight out like Superman. Obree’s experimentations enabled him to break the world hour record twice, until cycling’s world governing body, the UCI, simply banned his tucked riding position. He switched to the unconventional Superman position and won the World Championship; the UCI banned that position too. Given the UCI’s attitude, we should not be surprised that the best cyclists and cycling teams now focus largely on marginal gains…
Ma il fenomeno non si produce solo dove si compete al limite bensì anche nella vita di tutti i giorni. I pendolari lo sanno bene: quando uno sciopero (schock arbitrario) ostacola il loro viaggio spesso scoprono vie alternative che si dimostrano talmente efficaci da trasformarsi in regolari…
… In 2014, some of the workers on London’s Underground system went on strike for two days. The strike closed 171 of the Tube’s 270 stations, leaving commuters scrambling to find alternative routes using buses, overground trains or the stations that remained open. Many London commuters use electronic fare cards that are valid on all forms of public transport, and after the strike, three economists examined data generated by those cards. The researchers were able to see that most people used a different route to get to work on the strike days, no doubt with some annoyance. But what was surprising is that when the strike was over, not everybody returned to their habitual route. One in twenty of the commuters who had switched then stayed with the route that they had used during the strike…
Rimescolare le carte serve per combattere quello che Brian Eno chiama “il blocco dei cliché”…
… As long as you’re exploring the same old approaches, Brian Eno explains, ‘you get more and more competent at dealing with that place, and your clichés become increasingly clichéd’. But when we are forced to start from somewhere new, the clichés can be replaced with moments of magic…
A proposito di Eno, chi lo intervista sa bene come lui pretenda di conversare nel suo studio di registrazione insonorizzato. Perché? Perché qualsiasi cosa lo distrae, è una dannazione. Specie per chi crede che la concentrazione sia l’elemento decisivo per avere successo…
… Brian Eno is easily distracted. We’re often told that good work comes from the ability to focus, to shut out distractions. To choose from a plethora of self-help tips along these lines… Some people turn to methylphenidate (better known as Ritalin) to help them concentrate… science writer Caroline Williams even visited the Boston Attention and Learning Lab – an affiliate of Harvard and Boston Universities – to have her left prefrontal lobe zapped with magnetic pulses, all in an attempt to resolve what one of the lab’s neuroscientists called her ‘issues with attention and distractibility’…. Yet here is a creative icon, one of the most influential people in modern music, who seems unable to hold a conversation outside a soundproof box…
Ora chiediamoci come mai uno come Eno sia tanto facilmente distraibile. Il suo genio creativo non si discute…
… Look around a record shop and Eno is everywhere: as a glam rocker with Roxy Music; composing ambient work such as Music for Airports; creating My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a collaboration with David Byrne in which two white geeks anticipated hip-hop; and making Another Green World, the record that Prince once named as his biggest inspiration. (It’s the one featuring Phil Collins and the beer cans.) But the albums with Eno’s name on the front are just the start. Look in the small print and he is everywhere, a zephyr of cerebral chaos blowing back and forth across the frontal lobes of pop. Famous for his contributions to David Bowie’s albums, Eno has also worked with Talking Heads, U2, Paul Simon and Coldplay. Along the way he collaborated with punks, performance artists, experimental composers and even the film director David Lynch.* When the music magazine Pitchfork listed its top 100 albums of the 1970s, Brian Eno had a hand in more than a quarter of them…
Il fatto accertato è che esiste un legame tra tendenza a distrarsi e creatività artistica. La distrazione costituisce l’elemento di disordine che coordina lo sforzo creativo…
… Distractible brains can also be seen as brains that have an innate tendency to make those useful random leaps. Perhaps, like Keith Jarrett’s unplayable piano, distractibility is a disadvantage that isn’t a disadvantage at all…
Shelley Carson lo sa bene…
… A few years ago a team of researchers including Shelley Carson of Harvard tested a group of Harvard students to measure the strength of their ability to filter out unwanted stimulus. (For example, if you’re having a conversation in a busy restaurant and you can easily filter out the other conversations going on around you and focus only on the conversation at hand, you have strong attentional filters.) Some of the students they studied had very weak filters – their thoughts were constantly being interrupted by the sounds and sights of the world around them. You might think this was a disadvantage. Yet these students were actually more creative on all sorts of measures… There were 25 of these super-creatives in the study; 22 of them had weak or porous attention filters. Like Brian Eno, they simply couldn’t filter out irrelevant details…
Anche Holly White e Priti Shah studiano da anni le persone con deficit di attenzione…
… the ADHD sufferers were more creative in the laboratory than non-sufferers and were more likely to have major creative accomplishments outside the lab…
Un titolo sardonico sull’Onion: “Il Ritalin ci sta privando del prossimo Picasso” non era poi così assurdo…
Altri due ricercatori che hanno lavorato sul tema sono Charlan Nemeth e Julianne Kwan. Ecco il loro esperimento…
… they showed pairs of people blueish and greenish slides, asking them to shout out whether they were blue or green. The experimenters had a trick to play, however: one member of each pair was actually a confederate of the researchers, who would sometimes call out baffling responses – ‘green’ when the slide was clearly blue. Having been thoroughly confused, the experimental subjects were then asked to free-associate words connected with ‘green’ and ‘blue’ – sky, sea, eyes. Those who had been subjected to a confusing mess of signals produced more original word associations: jazz, flame, pornography, sad, Picasso…
Vale la pena di citare anche gli esperimenti con le parole di Ellen Langer e Paul Howard-Jones…
… Researchers showed their experimental subjects a set of three words and then asked them to tell a brief story involving the three words. Sometimes the words had obvious connections, such as ‘teeth, brush, dentist’ or ‘car, driver, road’. Sometimes the words were unconnected, such as ‘cow, zip, star’ or ‘melon, book, thunder’. The more random, obscure, challenging combinations spurred the subjects into spinning far more creative tales…
Eno su amici e nemici della creatività…
… The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually,’ he says. ‘And the friend is alertness. Now I think what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to stay on top of it… That alertness is Keith Jarrett on stage in Cologne. It’s Adrian Belew desperately trying to make sense of ‘Boys Keep Swinging’…
E sul ruolo delle carte nella strategia obliqua…
… They force us into a random leap to an unfamiliar location, and we need to be alert to figure out where we are and where to go from here. Says Eno, ‘The thrill of them is that they put us in a messier situation.’…
Alcuni psicologi non saranno sorpresi da un simile fenomeno, specialmente Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer e Erikka Vaughan, in fondo il loro esperimento con le classi di una scuola giunse a conclusioni simili…
… Half their classes, chosen at random, got the original materials. The other half got the same documents reformatted into one of three challenging fonts: the dense Haettenschweiler, the florid Monotype Corsiva or the zesty Comic Sans Italicised. These are, on the face of it, absurd and distracting fonts. But the fonts didn’t derail the students. They prompted them to pay attention… Students who had been taught using the ugly fonts ended up scoring higher on their end-of-semester exams…
Nella scienza ci sono tanti “Brian Eno”, uno potrebbe essere Erez Lieberman Aiden…
… He has been a physicist, an engineer, a mathematician, a molecular biologist, historian and a linguist, and he’s won some big scientific prizes for his work. All before he turned forty…
Il suo metodo di risolvere i problemi potrebbe essere definito come “nomade”…
… Ed Yong describes Aiden’s working method as ‘nomadic. He moves about, searching for ideas that will pique his curiosity, extend his horizons, and hopefully make a big impact. “I don’t view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method,” he tells me. “I’m constantly looking at what’s the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on…
Molti dei suoi successi sono “fallimenti riconvertiti”. Ecco un caso famoso…
… Aiden tried to sequence the human immune system. Human antibodies are built from a Lego-kit of different genes, snapping together quickly to meet the challenges of constant invasions from viruses, bacteria and other nasties. Aiden wanted to catalogue all the Lego bricks in the set – all the different genes that could be deployed to fight germs. After months of hard work, the project crashed… But then Aiden went to an immunology conference, wandered into the wrong talk and ended up solving a ferociously difficult problem – the three-dimensional structure of the human genome – by combining everything he had learned in failing to sequence antibodies with an obscure idea he’d stumbled upon from mathematical physics… This wasn’t a fluke. It was a strategy. Aiden seeks the hardest, most interesting problems he can find, and bounces between them. A failure in one area gives fresh insights and new tools that may work elsewhere…
Aiden usa i suoi fallimenti per rimbalzarci sopra…
La psicologa Bernice Eiduson ha notat come i grandi scienziati cambino spesso i loro interessi…
… A question of particular interest was: what determines whether a scientist keeps publishing important work throughout his or her life? A few highly productive scientists produced breakthrough paper after breakthrough paper. How? A striking pattern emerged. The top scientists switched topics frequently. Over the course of their first hundred published papers, the long-lived high-impact researchers switched topics an average of 43 times…
La strategia del “project switching” è tipica anche di Bowie…
… This sort of project-switching seems to work in the arts as well as the sciences. David Bowie himself is a great example. In the few years before he went to Berlin, Bowie had been collaborating with John Lennon, had lived in Geneva, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and had acted in a feature film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, as well as working abortively on its soundtrack. He had been drafting an autobiography. In Berlin, he produced and co-wrote Iggy Pop’s albums in between working on his own…
Howard Gruber e Sara Davis hanno notato come i maggiori talenti siano soliti portare aventi più progetti contemporaneamente…
…Two leading creativity researchers, Howard Gruber and Sara Davis, have argued that the tendency to work on multiple projects is so common among the most creative people that it should be regarded as standard practice. Gruber had a particular interest in Charles Darwin, who throughout his life alternated between research in geology, zoology, psychology and botany, always with some projects in the foreground and others in the background competing for his attention. He undertook his celebrated voyage on the Beagle with ‘an ample and unprofessional vagueness in his goals’…
La cosa ha almeno 4 vantaggi: 1) i progetti si auto-fertilizzano tra loro, 2) contesti nuovi sono più eccitanti, 3) mentre lavori ad un progetto l’inconscio lavora all’altro (se ce l’hai, se non ce l’hai la cosa costituisce uno spreco) 4) i progetti alternativi sono vie di fuga nel caso il progetto su cui lavori si blocchi.
Fin qui la teoria. Ma la pratica? In pratica avere tanti lavori in sospeso puo’ produrre ansia. La coreografa Twyla Tharp ha una sua soluzione, ma lo stesso Eno ha delle proposte…
… Tharp uses the no-nonsense approach of assigning a box to every project. Into the box she tosses notes, videos, theatre programmes, books, magazine cuttings, physical objects and anything else that has been a source of inspiration. If she runs out of space, she gets a second box. And if she gets stuck, the answer is simple: begin an archaeological dig into one of her boxes… Eno’s friend, the artist Peter Schmidt, had a flip-book filled with similar provocations. The two men teamed up to produce the Oblique Strategies deck – a guaranteed method of pushing artists out of their comfort zones…
Il poeta Simon Armitage utilizza le carte della strategia obliqua e ha trovato una bella immagine per definire quello che il creatore fa con loro…
“you’re asking the blood in your brain to flow in another direction”
Quando stai soffrendo perché senti esaurita la tua vena creativa a volte la cosa migliore è soffrire ancora un po’ gettando te stesso in una situazione poco amichevole…
… It’s like when you’re feeling a pain in your foot and someone slaps you in the face, you’re not feeling the pain in your foot any more…
E il povero Carlos Alomar?, il chitarrista super-professionale che Eno aveva tanto sconcertato con le sue mattane a Berlino? Niente paura, si è riconvertito ed oggi è uno dei maggiori sponsor della “strategia obliqua”…
… Alomar now teaches music at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey and he regularly resorts to the Oblique Strategies. His students will sometimes experience creative block and, says Alomar, ‘I need for them to see what I saw, and feel what I felt, and the dilemma that I had when I had to come up with something out of nothing.’…
COMMENTO PERSONALE
E’ consolatorio leggere queste pagine, uno dei pochi elogi argomentati della distrazione in un tempo in cui la distrazione è il demonio da scampare a tutti i costi. Ho l’impressione che se la strategia degli schock arbitrari funzioni per i creatori d’arte così come per i fruitori: i libri letti contemporaneamente si fecondano l’un l’altro, così come quelli abbandonati e poi ripresi con nuova verve laddove prima stagnavano. Ormai non sarei più in grado di fare altrimenti. Anche il salto tra generi diversi nell’ascolto delle musiche è una modalità molto eccitante, tornare indietro sarebbe per me impossibile ma soprattutto controproducente. In fondo oggi il profano lo scovi per la sua ottusa metodicità d’altri tempi (per esempio inizia un libro e vuole finirlo prima di dedicarsi ad altro, oppure disdegna a priori taluni generi musicali perchè li ritiene totalmente privi d’interesse). In realtà nell’era dell’accesso universale la nostra cultura è una playlist e abbiamo ricevuto una lezione chiave: il bello si annida ovunque - anche in un Bösendorfer con i tasti fessi e le proporzioni improponibili - ma soprattutto è altamente contagioso, non lasciamocelo sfuggire cedendo ad uno sguardo appannato dall’ abitudine e dai preconcetti.
