The Cube with a Twist

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A one-handed solution

A Rubik’s cube can be twisted and twiddled in 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different ways, and 43,252,003,274,489,855,999 of them are wrong. Those truths – especially the second, maddeningly frustrating one – have been known since soon after the modish, Mondrianish plastic object was invented in 1974. The cube went on to become the must-have toy of 1980 and 1981.

Its popularity faded fast.

By 1982, the cube was so last year, doomed to Hula-Hoop faddishness. In 1986, The New York Times said the cube had been “retired to the attic, the garbage heap and, with a bow to its elegance and ingeniousness, to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.” Lately it has undergone a resurrection in a world in which engineers and computers can generate helpful algorithms that would-be cube solvers can share with each other. But some things have not changed. The typical Rubik’s cube still has nine squares on six sides, and the same eye-popping colors. And those unfathomable huge numbers in the first paragraph are still quintillions. “Four-point-three times ten to the nineteenth,” explained Paul Hoffman, the president and chief executive of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.

Rubik’s cubes have trailed Mr. Hoffman for his entire career. On his first job after college, as an editor at Scientific American, he shepherded a March 1981 cover story about Rubik’s “magic cubology” into print. It was written by Douglas R. Hofstadter, the professor known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller Gödel, Escher, Bach, who said it had taken him “fifty hours of work, distributed over several months,” to solve the “unscrambling problem.” He mentioned group theory, which has to do with algebraic structures, and something he called “cubitis magikia,” a “highly contagious” condition “accompanied by the itching of the fingertips that can be relieved only by prolonged contact” with a certain multicolored object.

Now Mr. Hoffman is capitalizing on the cube again, with a $5 million exhibition that opened to the public on 26 April 2014. It features an eighteen-karat gold Rubik’s cube said to be worth $2.5 million that pivots and swivels like an ordinary plastic one, and a cube-solving robot that is no match for speed cubers, as competitors who try to beat the clock are known. It took the machine a minute to unscramble a jumbled cube. In that time, Anthony Brooks, a speed cuber with several records to his name, did it three times, once using only one hand.

Speed cubers can memorize algorithms they have developed on their laptops and shared on websites or by email to unscramble a jumbled cube in less time than it takes to read a sentence like this one aloud. But Mr. Brooks said speed cubing also involved muscle memory and tricks, like breaking in a cube the way baseball players break in a glove with neatsfoot oil.“You can buy lubricants – cube lubes,” Mr. Brooks said. “Or regular silicon spray you can find in any hardware.”

In the forty years since it was invented, the cube has made some intriguing cameo appearances. Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has leaked intelligence secrets, told two journalists he had arranged to meet that they would recognize him outside a restaurant in Hong Kong because he would have a Rubik’s cube in his hand. Mr. Hoffman said that sounded like an homage to the 2009 film Duplicity, in which spies played by Julia Roberts and Clive Owen realize who they are because they are both carrying Rubik’s cube key chains.

That could not have happened to the cube’s inventor, Ernő Rubik, 69. He said he did not travel with a cube. “I don’t need to,” Mr. Rubik said as he previewed the exhibition this week.

For the record, he calls it “my cube.” “From my mouth, it sounds strange to call it ‘Rubik’s cube,’ ” Mr. Rubik said. “If I have a child, I call it ‘my child,’ not ‘Rubik’s boy’ or ‘Rubik’s girl.’ Naturally, after forty years, I have a strong relationship with my cube.”

He passed a display case containing his original pride and joy, a wooden cube. It sat in front of the Hungarian patent he was issued for his “magic cube” in 1975. He invented the cube as the solution to the kind of structural problem that could bedevil an architecture professor, which is what he was at the time. The structural problem was how to keep a mechanism with many moving parts from tumbling to the floor.

Do not expect him to face off against a speed cuber like Rowe Hessler, a bowling-alley manager from Riverhead, NY. Mr. Hessler, 23, is a former United States speed cubing champion, whose fastest time unscrambling a standard three-by-three-by-three cube was 6.94 seconds. At the science center, Mr. Hessler did it in a seemingly effortless 9.69 seconds of twisting and pivoting. The only noise was the cube, clicking like bad dentures in a cartoon.

Mr. Rubik said he had not imagined when the ink on the patent was fresh that the cube would become so universal. “I had a feeling about the intellectual value of the cube” early on, he said, adding that items with intellectual value can be a hard sell in a material world. Mr. Rubik said he had thought that toy manufacturers would pigeonhole it as a puzzle. “Traditionally, the puzzle section in the toy business is very narrow,” he said, “and they don’t believe it’s possible to make a business. They’re not selling mass production.” He said the cube had changed that thinking.

Mr. Hoffman said one billion to 2.5 billion cubes had been manufactured, assuming there were five counterfeits for every legitimate one sold. “They’ve seized whole 747s full of illegal knockoffs,” he said.

Experts have calculated that a cube could be solved in as few as twenty moves, no matter how it is scrambled. But speed cubers do not have time to think about the elegance of economy implied by minimizing moves. Mr. Hessler said speed cubers averaged about fifty; his lowest was thirty-one. For his part, Mr. Rubik declined an invitation to go up against Mr. Hessler, but he said he understood the appeal of speed cubing, even if it was not the sport for him. “The main group who is buying the cube is teenagers,” Mr. Rubik said, “and they are competitive and they have the time. When you are working, you don’t have the time.”

James Barron – The New York Times

Viola for Sale

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Amadeus Quartet, Asturias, auction, David Aaron Carpenter, David Redden, Deutsche Grammophon, Hong Kong, Ingles & Hayday, Isaac Albéniz, Lady Blunt, Michael Cooper, New York, New York City Opera, Peter Schidlof, Philips, piano, San Diego Opera, Sotheby's, Stradivarius, Suite in C Major, The New York Times, Tim Ingles, viola, violin

It may well prove to be the most expensive musical instrument in the world – a Stradivari viola, whose asking price will start at $45 million when it is offered for sale this spring – but, just for a moment, it was held up with no hands.The viola was tucked firmly under the chin of the violist David Aaron Carpenter, who briefly needed both hands to adjust his bow, which had frayed a little during a virtuosic run-through of Albéniz’s Asturias at a demonstration of the instrument arranged by Sotheby’s. “I won’t go that crazy on this again,” Mr. Carpenter said with a smile after trying out the viola in an empty showroom at Sotheby’s. “It’s possibly the most expensive instrument in history, and I don’t want to break it.”

If the viola fetches anything near its asking price, it will dwarf previous sales records for musical instruments. The “Lady Blunt” Stradivari violin set an auction record when it was sold in 2011 for $15.9 million. While some instruments may have been sold privately for more, none are believed to have gone for anything near the $45 million being sought for this viola, which was owned and played by Peter Schidlof of the Amadeus Quartet until his death in 1987 in England.

It is a staggering sum for a fiddle: Its $45 million base price is more than enough to have saved both New York City Opera, which has folded, and the San Diego Opera, which is also closing because of money woes, or to buy several hundred top-of-the-line concert-quality grand pianos. And it underscores the way collectors have driven up the price of rare instruments in recent decades, with inflation far outpacing, say, musicians’ wages.

Violas are sometimes thought of as the unloved stepsisters of violins – rarely in the spotlight, played by fewer famous virtuosos, with less music composed specially for them. But it is precisely their status as second-class citizens that has made this viola so valuable: While there are roughly six hundred violins made by Antonio Stradivari, only around ten of his violas are known to have survived intact. That makes this instrument, the “Macdonald” viola, rare indeed.

The viola, owned by Mr. Schidlof’s family, will be sold in a sealed-bid process by Sotheby’s and by Ingles & Hayday, which specializes in the sale of valuable musical instruments. Buyers will be asked to submit bids of $45 million or more – not knowing how much their competitors have bid – and the viola will be sold to the highest bidder.

“The value is a combination of factors,” said Tim Ingles, a director of Ingles & Hayday. “It is a Strad, which is the first thing, made in the very best period of Stradivari’s work, which is between 1700 and 1720. It’s incredibly well preserved – one of the best-preserved Strads in existence. It’s one of only ten violas in existence. Then you add to that the fact that one of the most famous violists of the twentieth century played it for over twenty-five years.”

Still, setting a price for such a rare item is not easy.

Mr. Ingles said that the “Macdonald” viola – named for one of its early-nineteenth-century owners – sold in 1964 for $81,000 to Philips, the Dutch electronics company, which owned the Deutsche Grammophon record label and bought the instrument for Mr. Schidlof to play with the Amadeus Quartet, which recorded on the label. (The ownership of the viola eventually passed to Mr. Schidlof “by a process we don’t fully understand,” Mr. Ingles said.) But the valuation is not as simple as adjusting the 1964 price for inflation – $81,000 in 1964 would be around $613,000 today – because the value of rare instruments has far outpaced inflation in recent decades.

Mr. Ingles said that the sellers determined the viola’s asking price partly by examining how its value compared with other instruments over time. The $81,000 it cost in 1964, he noted, was more than three times the auction record for a Stradivari violin then. The $45 million base price now is a bit less than three times what the “Lady Blunt” sold for.

It is unclear who might offer such a sum for the viola, which will be first on view in New York. It then goes on display in Hong Kong and Europe. Collectors, foundations and patrons have often purchased rare and valuable instruments, which they then sometimes let musicians use. But David Redden, a vice chairman at Sotheby’s, said that the instrument might appeal to another kind of buyer: the type who will pay $7.6 million for a coin or a fortune for a rare stamp. “We see them at Sotheby’s quite frequently – the sort of person who is absolutely fascinated by, sort of, the greatest object of its kind, in every category, and is able to participate at that level,” Mr. Redden said.

Of course, no one would try to spend a $7.6 million coin, or mail a letter with one of those postage stamps made famous by a printer’s error. The viola is still meant to make music. “Musical instruments and string instruments are quite different from selling some of the other things,” Mr. Redden said. “Because they need to be played.”

David Aaron Carpenter plays Bach’s Suite in C Major (BWV 1009) on the “Macdonald” viola.

Michael Cooper – The New York Times

As Cultures Intersect

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Shi Shuai

Shi Shuai is the face of classical music’s most promising new frontier: a young and gifted violinist, born in Shanghai and trained by some of the West’s most prominent musicians who is eager to return to China to perform and teach in a burgeoning symphony scene. And Fuling, the pretty outpost of 1.2-million at the nexus of the Yangtze and Wu Rivers, has the trappings of a new home for Mozart and Bach. Like dozens of smaller Chinese cities, it boasts a gleaming grand theater that just opened this year and has, in its initial season, brought Canada’s National Arts Centre (NAC) orchestra to perform.

The future of classical music, many have grown fond of saying, is in China – and Ms. Shi’s arrival in Fuling with the NAC seems emblematic of the new sound echoing here. Classical music was banned during Mao’s time. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that it was allowed back in, and it has exploded in recent years, winning converts and attracting students. But the real test lies in smaller centers, such as Fuling, and Ms. Shi is keen to put her talent and passion on display.

“I don’t have a good voice to sing,” she says. “Violin is like my voice, to sing out what I’m feeling.”

But if Fuling is the future, it’s one where the quiet concluding bars to the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 5 in E minor must compete with the loud chirping of a bird ringtone. As numerous others, as Google and Home Depot, have discovered, exporting Western commerce and culture to China is often not as easy as it seems. The potential of a middle class burgeoning among 1.3-billion new customers continues to thrill, but the work of attracting interest is filled with pitfalls.

The orchestra was recently in China as part of a broader Canadian campaign that included visits from Governor-General David Johnston and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. While the NAC works to build a potentially lucrative long-term music relationship with China, Ottawa is hoping cultural diplomacy can help smooth relations still frayed from years of neglect and, more recently, the tension over Chinese buying up Canada’s oil sands.

Partway into Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 3 in G Major, music director Pinchas Zukerman turns to face the noisy burbling of the crowd and vigorously points his finger to his lips; later, Ms. Shi stands up to ask for quiet in Chinese. Nearly all of the theater’s 1,038 seats have been filled, thanks in part to local authorities that bought up numerous tickets and handed them out for free, but not all the patrons are captivated.

In a place where many are hearing this music for the first time, orchestral music occupies no sacred space, no tradition of reverent listening. Classical music has arrived in a cultural market furiously trying out new things. The NAC orchestra sits on the Fuling Grand Theatre schedule somewhere between Mamma Mia! and a Michael Jackson tribute show. The symphony opens not to its own music but to the thundering bass track of a video ad for the theater’s coming shows, with bare chests and thrusting pelvises flashing on the bright screens.

This, then, is orchestra in one tiny part of China outside the major centers, in a place where it must compete for the ears of 19-year-old Ni Sha – Lisa, she calls herself – an English student whose tastes run to blues, country and her current favorite, Taylor Swift.

“I don’t think everybody here can understand this concert, including me,” she says, as a swelling crowd and she gather outside the theater high on the banks of the Yangtze. “But I really want to know.”

When Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler, author of River Town, came to Fuling in 1996, it had been a half-century since an American had lived in an isolated place still reached primarily by boat. Today, it’s a quick drive down a four-lane highway. The end to isolation has brought visible change, in shiny new apartment towers and roadside advertisements for a residential complex called, in English, “Hot Springs City.” Less visible is the curiosity it has sparked about a broader world people are now more able to explore.

“Before this theater opened its doors we had almost no contact with Western music,” says Yang Xiao Lin, 43, a realtor who has come to hear the orchestra. High-speed Internet and Youku, a Chinese equivalent to YouTube, have given people a chance to sample orchestral music ahead of its arrival, and Ms. Yang likes what she has heard. Not only is the NAC concert a chance to taste what she calls “high-rank joy” – status music, in other words – but she finds something spiritual in it. “The cello is so deep,” she says.

That appeal – status and sound – has won classical music growing numbers of converts in China, where it had already gained a small foothold pre-Mao, with the Shanghai Symphony opening its doors in 1879. Nine conservatories are now pumping out graduates. Many of their teachers are foreigners or foreign-trained Chinese. Beijing now has at least ten professional symphony orchestras.

The numbers of young Chinese people studying piano and violin far exceed the population of Canada. Some of the top luthiers on Earth draw out rich tones from Chinese woods; earlier this month, Shenyang, China-born pianist Lang Lang was named International Artist of the Year. Even The Julliard School is planning a new location not far from Beijing amid hopes that Chinese ears will prove more hungry for symphonic sound than those in North America, which have left orchestras facing bankruptcy and salary cuts.

But it’s far from clear whether symphonies will truly find a home in China. Even in Beijing, “the National Centre for the Performing Arts after five years is doing roughly half as many international well-known orchestras as they were at the beginning,” says Wray Armstrong, a well-connected, Beijing-based impresario.

Classical music is, in some ways, an expression of a culture foreign to China. “I don’t know if China can save Bruckner or Wagner,” says Jindong Cai, the director of orchestra studies at Stanford University and author of Rhapsody in Red – How Western Classical Music Became Chinese.

There may, however, be a future for symphony with an Asian lilt. The Chinese pipa has found its way into symphony performances in major North American and Australian concert halls, while Chinese composers are experimenting with new orchestral sounds. There’s even an argument that it is no more difficult to lure Chinese audiences to Mozart than to Michael Jackson as both are unfamiliar.

That doesn’t make it easy. The raucous concert in Fuling is “proof that we’re a long way from bringing Western culture to the hinterlands” of China, Mr. Zukerman said. “And the hinterlands are what makes a country. It’s not Shanghai, and it’s not Hong Kong.”

Still, even in Fuling some see an innate appeal in symphony. Ms. Yang, the realtor, emerged from the concert bearing a broad smile. It was, she said, “really, shockingly good. Sometimes it sounds like a young girl is telling a love story gently, and sometimes it feels like you’re in a deep forest.” Her husband, however, thought it could use a slight tweak. “It would be better,” he said, “if they could add a few more Chinese characteristics.”

Nathan Vanderklippe – The Globe and Mail

Chinese Culture in Brazil

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Concerto de Bach

In September, Brazil organized cultural events in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Now the favor is being repaid with China Cultural Month touring Brazil’s main cities.

Over one hundred fifty artists from China are presenting Brazilian audiences with a series of cultural events including ballet, acrobatics and art exhibitions. During the course of a night of Chinese dance, the ballet Concerto de Bach and the traditional folk dance Jasmine Flower were performed by Chinese artists at the sold-out Theatro São Pedro in the country’s largest city, São Paulo.

“China and Brazil have a new highlight now in cultural exchange, whereas before the economic and technological fields ruled. Brazilian people are very interested in Chinese culture,” said Zhu Qingqiao of the Chinese embassy in Brazil.

– Central Chinese Television

Iskandar Widjaja, Indonesian Sensation

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“Issi”

Award-winning violinist Iskandar Widjaja speaks of music as being on the cusp of science and art, describing Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions as having “the most complex mathematical structure.” Yet, he concedes, the interpretation of a classical music piece hinges on the artist’s ability to become emotionally permeable – before hundreds of spectators. “[Classical music] is so difficult to play and it doesn’t scream as loud as pop for attention. It is a finer language that you need to focus on to appreciate it. . . . It certainly takes time to get used to a new language, but this journey is worth it,” he says.

With his schedule booked solid until June next year, the young sparkplug – who will be awarded the LOTTO Förderprize of €15,000 by the committee of the Rheingau Music Festival, Germany’s largest music festival, during his 23 July concert – looks set to light many of the world’s most eminent stages for years to come – or at least those he hasn’t already graced.

The Konzerthaus Berlin and Tel Aviv Opera already have a checkmark; likewise, Spain, Brazil, Croatia and Indonesia have played host to his evocative performances.

This year will see Iskandar crack Hong Kong, where he will make his debut with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta in October, and release his second album, Clear as Bach, a homage to the composer that he declares as “the one, the greatest of all!” who is indeed the founding father of the sonatas and partitas that have formed templates for the study of the solo violin until today. He believes such passion and enthusiasm toward classical music can develop in Indonesia with the help of key figures with young minds. “In Jakarta, we already have wonderful venues like Aula Simfonia Jakarta and orchestras like Twilite under Addie MS – these certainly help,” he says.

Unlike what one might assume of a classical musician, “Issi,” as the violinist is better known, is not contemptuous of mainstream pop music, conferring praise where it is due on artists who perform with the rawness and verve to which he aspires every time he picks up his seventeenth-century F. Geissenhof.  The musician cited American R&B star Beyoncé Knowles and pop singer Lady Gaga as two such artists who command his respect.

“I recently went to Beyoncé’s live concert in Berlin and was blown away by her utmost perfection. She was the definition of a superhuman, and to imagine all the money that went into that production was just staggering,” he says. “Yet, Lady Gaga’s concert had a somewhat more personal touch and displayed more of her inner self. Doesn’t an audience want to see ‘soul striptease?'”

In July, the musician, who readily replied with “The Chaconne” [from Partita in D minor (BWV 1004)] when asked what soundtrack he would like to be played at his funeral, will be working with equally illustrious violinist Midori, whose legendary Tanglewood performance during which she broke two E strings resulted in the headline “Girl, 14, Conquers Tanglewood with Three Violins” on the front page of a major US newspaper the next day.

On 19 September, Issi will grace Indonesia’s stages at The Dharmawangsa, playing alongside Addie MS’ Twilite Orchestra.

Although he spends forty percent of his time in Berlin and the rest traveling and touring, he concedes that his favorite pastime when coming home to Indonesia is eating. “I love rendang [beef stew], kue dadar [pancake], kenari nuts and also to dress up and go to events, partying in Bali.”

Kindra Cooper – The Jakarta Post