A visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tonight I asked my daughter if she would like to fall asleep at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Luckily, she did! It made for an interesting and really great date (which we are now both writing about). I find dating my pregnant wife with our almost four year old to much more fun and romantic than any of the teen romance flicks I saw suggested such a thing would be.

The exhibit featured beautifully crafted guitars and other stringed instruments, mostly from luthiers from Italy or Little Italy. It is no exaggeration to say that most of the pieces were as exquisite as the Crown Jewels, or any of the finest masterpieces adorning the galleries above. One could stare at any given component, a fretboard, a headstock, tuning pegs, any of the bodies, and get nearly swallowed by deeper and deeper layers of fine detail. It was such expertly artistic work.

The were pictures on the walls of some of the recording artists who played the guitars, and almost any guitar's description mentioned the more famous artists who favored them, or their maker's work. This shift of focus from the work of the luthier to the work of the musician made me think about how there was a time where I would have looked at this exhibit more from the eyes of an artist, rather than those of an engineer. At first it made me want to shift a lot of my current energy into playing and singing and creating more. But then, after some more thought, I realized that without the luthier (or some other type engineer), Jimi Hendrix or Beethoven or Shigeru Miyamoto or Steven Spielberg can do nothing. Then, I was fine again.

One last note: there was a large picture of a professional recording studio at the exhibit. The audio commentary rentals were implemented via iPod touches. It struck me that after thousands of years of musical history, hundreds of years of study, math and engineering thrown at the development of instruments and musical theory, and all of the passion of humanity that gets fused into songwriting, we listen to it via a digital recording at a 16-bit/48khz sampling rate, in a 128kbs .mp3 on $50 digital audio player equipped with factory ear buds. \sigh Let's all do ourselves, and musical history a favor: support musical appreciation, and high-end (or at least not crappy-low-end) audio equipment!