From time to time it’s recommended that I get to learn a particular piece by watching a video of it in performance on YouTube. I’ve tried this but it doesn’t really work for me, for various reasons. One is that I tend to get distracted by the visuals and pay less attention to what I hear than if it were sound only. The sound also tends to be of poor quality.
But the real problem I have is that inevitably I see the comments, and these are all too often inane denials of the beauty and value of the piece of music in the video. It’s saddening to read such dismissive comments on a particularly fine composition, given without any reasoning. And this happened most recently to me with Berlioz! I haven’t dared try looking to see what the commenters have to say about some of my favourite bits of the 20th-century repertoire …
In my experience online reviewers of books (on Amazon, say, or the Visual Bookshelf application in Facebook) at least say what it is they dislike about the work in question and have apparently engaged the brain before typing. Why is YouTube different? I suppose it is because the book reviewer has at least put in the effort to read the book, or a significant part of it. The YouTube reviewer has just looked at a few minutes of video.
Looking at YouTube again, there seems to be a way of displaying only very positive comments which is perhaps what I need, the drawback being that I lose comments which are less than very positive, but intelligently so.