Saturday, January 22, 2011

Six Degrees of Musical Separation

Here's a new "six degrees" game I invented that can work horizontally or it can reach back in time. The one rule is that you need to have played with or studied with the person who is one degree from you, and the rest of the people need to have played with or studied with the person to either side of their names on the list.

Here's a sample:

Me
My father (Burton Fine)
Rudolf Serkin
Pablo Casals
Richard Strauss
Hans von Bülow
Johannes Brahms
Clara Schumann

Nu?

6 comments:

peregrine said...

[reposted with corrected type!]

Me
Richard Coffey (organist and choral director)
Marie-Claire Alain (organist and teacher)
Maurice Durufle (organist and composer)

My "four degrees" doesn't stretch as far back as your examples, but it gives me a thrill nonetheless. I wrote about it a while ago:

http://quodlibet-sarah.blogspot.com/2009/07/durufles-connecticut-connections.html

Thomas Deneuville said...

Me
Franco Corelli (voice teacher)
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
Samuel Barber
Arturo Toscanini
Giacomo Puccini

:)

TimR-J said...

Nice game!

Mine is a bit of cheat, because Messiaen taught everyone, so it's not hard to be a couple of degrees separated from him, but still ...

Me
Nicholas Sackman
Alexander Goehr
Olivier Messiaen
Marcel Dupré
Charles-Marie Widor
Jaak Nikolaas Lemmens
Adolf Friedrich Hesse
J.C.H. Rinck
J.C. Kittel
J.S. Bach

Elaine Fine said...

Wow to all the above. It is uncanny to see that there are only six degrees of student teacher separation between Widor and Bach!

ellie said...

Me
Carol Sindell (violin teacher who I've studied chamber music with)
Jascha Heifetz (violin teacher)
Leopold Auer (violin teacher)
Joseph Joachim (violin teacher)
Johannes Brahms (collaborator with above)
Eduard Marxsen (piano teacher)
Ignaz von Seyfried (piano teacher)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (piano teacher

Also...

Me
Brian Quincey (viola teacher)
Donald McInnes (viola teacher)
William Primrose (teacher)
Eugéne Ysaÿe (teacher)
Henryk Wieniawski (teacher)
Anton Rubenstein (collaborator with above)
Felix Mendelssohn (collaborator with above)
Sarah Levy (aunt of Felix Mendelssohn, teacher of for a short time)
Wilhelm Friedmann Bach (teacher)
Johann Sebastian Bach (father of, teacher)

I could go on with a lot more.

ellie said...
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