Friday, May 13, 2016

Flight of the Bumblebee: How Fast a Performer Are You?

There are some music pieces that for one reason or another are picked as the field to set music records or break them. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of The Bumblebee from the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan is definitely one of them. First of all, for its musical structure and the 'record-suitable' rhythmic pattern.


In 2012, a young man called Daniel Himebauch decided to play the piece at the highest speed he was capable of on his guitar. Thus, instead of the original 170 beats per minute that the bumblebee was supposed to ‘fly’, the piece was performed at 1300 BPM! You can imagine what kind of sound is that, right? A piece hardly recognizable. But Daniel thought he could do better, and this year, in 2016, he beat his own record playing the same piece at 2000 BPM. You can see the process (all controlled and properly monitored) on the video below.

My question is – what’s your attitude to music records like that? I mean I can understand perfectly a desire of a human to be “The” in something: the highest, the strongest, the fastest. The curiosity to test one’s capabilities and to prove one can stand out. But somehow I feel sorry for the classical masterpieces. In a way, they lose their aesthetic value becoming some experimental material that’s attractive only because of its historic name and recognizability. What do you think?