Larfen Writes Longer Posts

I was once one of the best in the world at something. Toribash is a free-to-play ragdoll physics fighting game that I played just about every day for 5 years starting in 2009, when I was 14. I am currently one of 67 players who have been honored as a “legend” of the game, with a golden forum username to match. If you narrow it down to my field, I’m one of 23. Unfortunately, very few people have even heard of Toribash , so I quickly learned that telling people of my accomplishments led to a very short conversation. Would it have been better if I had dedicated myself to a more well-known endeavor? Would I have been capable of being a “legend” in anything else? I was an above-average fish in a smallish pond. I’ve recently been reading Benjamin Labatut’s novels, which largely focus on the scientists who made the breakthrough discoveries of the early 20th century. These are the people who first laid out things like quantum mechanics, computer architecture, and artificial intelligence. Isaa...

This piece was prompted by a great article I read in the latest Harper’s about the rise of fake/ghost artists on Spotify . I recommend reading it if you’re not familiar with the phenomenon. I have a lot of thoughts about the state of art in general today, and we’ll see if I can work myself up to that. For now, I want to focus on the history of music as an artform in western culture, and where I think it may be going.  To begin the discussion, I want to lay out a framework that I’ve been brainstorming lately. My thesis is that music is actually three separate forms of art, though the third is a recent development. First, there is the composition of music, where an artist arranges and communicates notes such that a piece can be replicated. Up until the invention of the player piano*, this replication was exclusively the domain of the second art of music, performance . This is what people usually imagine when they think of the word “musician”. The performer replicates a composed pie...