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As you probably know, I’m a huge fan of electronic music, musique concrète, and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. So I was quite surprised on March 27th to discover this on the Wikipedia page under “Recorded Legacy”:
“Shostakovich’s fascination with the work of electrical engineer Nikola Tesla and his own hobby of electrical experimentation was to result in perhaps his most experimental musical recording: ‘глупо муравей’, named after his father’s playful nickname for the Cossacks, surfaced in the early 1990s. The work is notably experimental; indeed, Shostakovich is said to have created the piece with his own amateur electromagnetic devices, using magnetic tape to create its unique sounds. Arthur Rubinstein is said to have been heard saying it was ‘the most profound piece of music man has of yet created.’ [Citation needed]“
I immediately did a search using all the major search engines, and discovered that the Wikipedia entry was essentially the only reference to this piece, other than a tweet on February 28th
and another tweet on March 18th
@NateHamilton: Still trying to find Shostakovich´s глупо муравей. If anyone finds it, holla at me.
I posted a tweet about it myself on March 27th:
and heard back from @NateHamilton on the 28th:
On April 2, I picked up the trail again. I re-subscribed to the Usenet news group alt.fan.shostakovich and the DSCH-L Shostakovich mailing list. And I posted a query here and here. I never did hear anything back from alt.fan.shostakovich, but I received a not-entirely-unexpected response on the DSCH-L list:
>> "the most profound piece of music man has of yet created."[citation needed]" > Citation: Journal of Profound Wikipedia Pranks, April 1st 2010 > > 'глупо муравей' translates something like, "the foolish ant", apparently referring > to those who would believe such a tale. > > This April Fool's prank is on a par with the apocryphal story that due to shrapnel > lodged in Shostakovich's brain, he was able to tilt his head to one side to hear > original music "pouring out" from his mind's ear. Those who fell for this ridiculous > story include Donal Henahan of the New York Times, and Oliver Sacks in "Musicophilia". > > Am I being to much of a curmudgeon in spoiling someone's happy mischief? > Louis
The rest, as they say, is history. The Wikipedia page has been updated several times, and it now appears that ‘глупо муравей’ was a figment of someone’s imagination, perhaps someone at the Keele University Department of Music and Music Technology. Two of my great musical loves, Shostakovich and musique concrète, apparently never met in the real world, and will have to be satisfied with a fanciful meeting along the lines of When Harry Met Iannis.
Lessons learned:
- All pranks and hoaxes on the Internet do not happen on the first of April. Every second of every day, someone is posting bullshit for every imaginable reason one would post bullshit.
- If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
- The Internet makes it possible for almost anyone to say almost anything for almost no cost.
The Wikipedia curation / peer review process may have its flaws, but within a day or so of the original posting, @NateHamilton discovered the posting and sent out a tweet looking for the composition. I found the posting on March 27, inquired on DSCH-L on April 2, and by April 4, the Wikipedia page was corrected. The discussion may be read here.
The point is that the Wikipedia curation process worked, and worked fairly rapidly once I accessed the collective wisdom on DSCH-L. The key technology is the complete audit trail provided by the Wikipedia software. I suspect that for topics of wider interest than Shostakovich and musique concrète, the process works much faster. We are now seeing history and journalism merging on the Internet in real time, and Twitter and Wikipedia are at the forefront. It’s a great time to be alive, and we are all curators!
