My pianist Isaac Cohen and I recently performed the Prokofiev Flute Sonata at the First Unitarian Church of Chicago. The church has a generous, echoing acoustic. It is beautiful to listen to, though not always the easiest space in which to play—particularly for the flute. To project into the space you must give the instrument a great deal of breath. Prokofiev was famously dry, terse, allergic to sentimentality. He probably just wrote this sonata because the flute is an underrated instrument and he wanted to do something about that — thus a piece that is so technically demanding and classic Prokofiev — precussive piano lines, mysteriously beautiful chord progressions, and crazy scales up and down as if flutes don't need to breathe. I think I played reasonably well. Yet after the performance I felt terrible. In my memory the piece seemed full of mistakes—slips, cracks, moments where the line did not quite bloom the way I imagined it. ...

Today, Alex Tamkin from Anthropic comes over to Booth to talk about Anthropic’s Economic Index. The Booth lecture room is overflowed with enthusiastic audience: The accompany report covers a lot of insights. What I found interesting: Learing-by-doing: skill in collaborating with AI is itself a learnable competency. Users who have been on Claude for 6+ months have a ~4 percentage point higher success rate in their conversations, and this holds up even after controlling for the type of task, country, model choice, and language. Learning curve: early adopters with high-skill tasks are pulling ahead, while later, less technical adopters aren’t catching up as fast. This might be a channel for skill-biased technological change — the people who benefit most from AI are those who already had advantages. Combined with the finding that global usage inequality is actually increasing (the Gini across countries rose from 0.46 to 0.50), AI might widens existing economic gaps rather than closing them. And Anthropic opensourced the data in HuggingFace! Cheers.

Spring should be Mozart’s season! Or, as my friend put it [I’m sorry that] I hate mozart. Mozart is like vegetables… Fine, it’s like that for musicians. This is the 3rd movement of Mozart’s famous K299 — the flute & harp concerto. Its 2nd movement is arguably (fine, one of) the most iconic piece in ALL of classical repertoire. See Valeri’s (oscar winning) reaction — “an absolute beauty”: ...

Happy April 1st! The University of Breslau awarded Brahms an honorary PhD degree, in return, Brahms composed a ceremonial orchestra piece. Brahms himself has never been to college. But when he was 20, he joined his violinist friend Joseph Joachim for a few weeks to experience university life in Göttingen, in summer. As we’ll hear in the Academic Festival Overture that Brahms composed 27 years later, imagining and recaping his college life memory: it’s all fun student activities — reading, drinking alcohol and debting. He must have never had to complete any problem set: ...

March 31 Chaofan Shou @Fried_rice on twitter found a glitch that leaks Claude code’s source code (500k rows of code!). It’s now available on GitHub https://github.com/zackautocracy/claude-code.git: Chaofan Shou is a web engineer in california. he is a really impressive coder. See this article: the guy who found the Claude Code glitch… Turns out when Anthropic released its recent Claude Code version, the source map debug files are also packaged for release. The source map contains address of the Claude Code Source Code with which outsider can access and download Anthropic’s source code zip stored on their Cloud. ...

More or less competition? THE WASHINGTON POST: New York might experiment with city-run grocery stores. How do they work? July 16, Jaclyn Peiser “the city would run a pilot project to set up a network of stores, one in each of the five boroughs, with a subsidy of $60 million. These stores would also be strategically located in “food deserts” so that communities with few grocery options have more choice, especially for fresh and healthy food.” ...

See NY Times: The Sudden Death of a Man Who Told Chinese Kids How to Succeed The influencer Zhang Xuefeng was known for no-nonsense, some said cynical, advice about how to win in China’s educational rat race. He died at 41. NYTimes Link … Mr. Zhang was known for dispensing ruthlessly blunt advice about how to maximize a student’s chances at success. The liberal arts? Only good for service jobs, he declared. Finance? Don’t bother unless your family has connections. ...

Jazz and the symphony hall don’t always sit comfortably together — not everyone can be Gershwin, who moved between both worlds as though no wall existed between them. So here’s a Gershwin appreciation blog. He’s my favourite target when I retail therapy in record stores. A Good Pianist A lot of composers are good pianists themselves, and Gershwin was a compulsive performer. At parties, he’d plant himself at the piano and hold court, spinning out variations on his show-tunes deep into the night. Society celebrities and starry-eyed flappers drap around his piano in Manhattan apartments during Prohibition, cocktails in hand whether they were supposed to be or not. Just as easily, though, it could be Ravel and Prokofiev leaning in across a Parisian salon, or Alban Berg listening intently in Vienna. ...

Friday night at the CSO — sans Muti, plus bourbon Maestro Muti had taken the regulars off to Wheaton for the evening, leaving Symphony Center to do something rather brave, or rather reckless, depending on your temperament: host jazz on a Friday night. While sensible Chicagoans were settling into barstools and letting bebop wash over them with a proper Old Fashioned in hand, we — a friend visiting from New York and I — decided to experience the best Chicago has to offer. Jazz, yes. But jazz in that hall. ...

The Tchaikovsky The evening opens with Muti’s enthusiastic reading of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3, the Polish. Composed just two years before Swan Lake, this is Tchaikovsky when he was still happy — and you can tell, for better and for worse. The first movement trades in repetitive phrases that offer neither beauty nor direction, recalling Beethoven at his most obstinate. The second movement is light, pleasant enough, but slightly boring. By the third, though, the real Tchaikovsky emerges — the music swells suddenly into those lush, layered strings we know from the Nutcracker Pas de Deux, and you hear the toolkit of a composer finding his voice. The fourth movement is scherzo for scherzo’s sake: beats land off the beat with mischievous intent, and if this were written for ballet dancers, they might have better anticipated what Swan Lake had in store. A trombone solo arrives unannounced and entirely without pretense, somewhat too straightforward. ...