Happy Newtonmas, All

Sir Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727)

The great man is 369 years old today, December 25, 2011.

He is a non-mythical figure whose birthday is actually today!

Happy Isaac Newton's Birthday!

Maya Plisetskaya in Ravel's _Bolero_

 

Maya Plisetskaya (Russian, Born 1925)

In the news, in the world at large, around me--even within me--I see too much in human nature that fills me with dismay and horror. The evils of ideology, religion, superstition, greed, malice, hate, violence, pettiness, corruption, ignorance, wilful stupidity, egoism, egotism, and mental and physical laziness run amok wherever I look, and seem at times to increase precipitously as if in a feedback loop. It seems sometimes that hope and trust are groundless things, as sure as quicksand, as evanescent as mist in the morning sun. Faith in humanity, and in our  institutions, seems a bitter folly.

And then I encounter something new, something so worthwhile, so positive, so transcendently wonderful that my faith and hope are renewed and I see again the joy that can be found in that sometime spark that flares briefly a few times in every generation. A great artist, scientist, philosopher, or engineer can illumine his or her time and justify the human condition in its entirety for a while.

Just a few days ago, I saw for the first time the performance by the incomparable Maya Plisetskaya that I have embedded at the top of this page. When this performance was filmed, she was 50 years old.

Just to further blow your mind, here she is, performing the Dying Swan, at 61 years of age:

I have talked about Maurice Ravel's Bolero many times in class, devoting more than one class period to discussing the music and playing a recording of it, to illustrate structure in musical composition to enhance a discussion of the influence of musical structure on the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Those who were in my class at that time will hopefully remember it, and be able, without further comment by me here, to appreciate the wonder of the choreography by Maurice Bejart.

The idea behind the composition of Bolero is that Ravel challenges a traditional "rule" of composition: Don't present something in the same way more than three times. [To be strict, the rule should be stated "don't repeat anything exactly more than twice". (That comes out to three.)] It is a sort of showpiece of virtuoso composing--Ravel is demonstrating that he has the compositional skill to restrict his composition to repetition without development, and yet maintain and intensify the listener's interest through the piece.

Ravel introduces a four-measure rhythmic theme on the snare drum that repeats unchanging through the whole piece, over and over without pausing or altering pattern. As the drum repeats the rhythmic pattern for the first time, the melodic theme is introduced by a flute over the repeating drum. When it finishes, the drum continues on in another iteration of the rhythmic theme, and the melodic theme is now repeated, but by a different instrument; and again; and again; each time a different instrument or combination of instruments. The music progresses in a sort of stepped ascent, increasing in loudness with each iteration of the melody, with the final, 18th, repetition being played by all the instruments together. The final repetition with the entire orchestra finishes on a dissonant chord, as if an architectural structure has been constructed higher and higher until it collapses under its own weight.

Bolero is a constant crescendo to the end, and is wonderfully layered. It gathers in intensity progressively, and the music builds in passion and energy until the paroxysm at the end. The choreographer understood this very well, and the choreography begins almost robotically, with a single arm visible, going through a range of movement rather like the scoop of a backhoe. The dancer is emotionless, her movements symmetric and mechanical, almost pantographic. Gradually, in mirror of the orchestra's gradual unveiling of orchestral color and power, more and more of the dancer's body is introduced, her mobility increases, and she becomes increasingly animated. She progresses from robot to ecstasy, from machine to passionate abandon.

Plisetskaya's interpretation of the role is luminous. I consider it one of the greatest performances, in any medium, by any performer, that I have ever seen. She is her own instrument, and she plays with technique, genius, and beauty. She is strong, intelligent, controlled, beautiful, and in the end, wild, passionate, and the restraint that so restricted her at the beginning is violently thrown away. Plisetskay truly groks both the music and the dance and is unerringly graceful. But the beauty and elegance and intelligence of her movements never flags. Plisetskaya is mesmerising and sublime.

Glory

Here is glory. The beauty, excitement, and wonder of science.

Lawrence Krauss on "Cosmic Connections"

One of the best public speakers on science of our time is physicist Lawrence Krauss. This was a recent talk he gave in London entitled "Cosmic Connections".

Krauss is a brilliant, charismatic, and cultured man. I love his digressive and humorous mode of lecturing. He is energetic and passionate and his love of science and culture shine through. He is an exemplum of intellectual claritas.

[I am not entirely happy with the definition of claritas I linked to. It means transparency, a quality of crystalline purity through which light passes unchanged, clearness of thought, purity of spirit. To the Medieval mind, it was the purest beauty. Claritas was the medium through which light passed, which was the thought of God. Claritas was a word of importance to the High Modernists--Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce. To them it represented clarity of thought or intellection, purity of intention, perfection of form. Crystalline thought and structure in art, clarity of thought. Einstein and Maxwell represent the highest level of claritas, as do James Joyce, Bach, etc. Think of Debussy's Clair de Lune--clarity, purity, ineffable form, expressiveness, sublime intellection, clarity of emotional content; and think of the clarity of the night expressed in the music, and the perfect beauty of the moonlight. And note that the French word "clair" that Debussy used and the word "clarity" itself are both derived from the word "claritas". Medieval philosophers and theologians felt that the stars, the transparency of space, the ideal movement of the planets and stars--in toto, what they called the "music of the spheres"--represent the perfect thought of God made material, and in conjunction with Light and their concept of Soul...which was claritas. The English poet, John Milton, in his masterpiece, Samson Agonistes, uses the phrase "Light, the prime work of God" (line 70); prime here means "first" but also "best". He means claritas in the Medieval sense to which I refer, perfection of thought and form--both Light and Creation, through which light travels, and the clear perfection of God's being/thought, ideal and realized; and Word...God as poet and creator. Another example of claritas would be a Mozart concerto, sonata, or string quartet (or anything else Mozart composed). Bach's Art of Fugue (an agony of claritas), Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Maxwell's Equations.]

from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

This is me reading the last paragraph of the first chapter ("All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here") of Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

Language and Vision

Simplistic concepts of human nature, and allowing superstition to dominate thinking about human nature, leaves us with a black-and-white and impoverished view of ourselves and the universe. This video is profoundly exciting and fascinating:

Neurology Lecture on Seeing

The brilliant neurologist V.S. Ramachandran on the neurology of vision:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00gpxhb

Fascinating.

Going Bananas: Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon, is a masterpiece of 20th-Century writing, one of the greatest American novels. It is Joycean (the highest complement, to me) in its complexity and richness.

I recorded myself reading one of my favourite passages, the Banana Breakfast scene very early in the book. I love the voices, the truth to detail, the richness of language, the complexity of reference and allusion. I find it very beautiful writing. I also love the way it takes me back to the London I remember so well, a London long gone, the London of the War, when anonymous random destruction rained down on the teashops, gardens, parks, brick walls--and on neighbours and friends, strangers, and faces glimpsed but once or twice in a lifetime from the top deck of a red bus or across the crowd on a train-car in the Tube. We were young then, and life burnt brightly...and all too briefly for so many.

Because of the 15-minute limit to YouTube videos, I have had to break the selection up into two parts.

Part 1:

Part 2:

"Locksley Hall", by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

"Locksley Hall" is a poem by the Victorian poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Tennyson was the most famous poet writing in English in his day. No poet writing in English since has been so revered in his own lifetime. His work was adored throughout the Empire, and in the United States, Ireland, and by English-speaking colonials across the globe, as well. To modern ears he might seem a bit stilted now, particularly since the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman changed poetry in English forever and the High Modernists, led by Ezra Pound, threw off the tyranny of the rhymed pentameter ("that was the first heave") and other traditional forms for a less mannered and more natural music. Tennyson uses an unusual line in this poem, a trochaic octameter with the last foot having a missing syllable [catalectic octameter]. It might sound ponderous to a modern ear, but was much admired in his day. [He used an unusually long line to give the feeling of time moving on, as a train along tracks; he broke the final rhythm with a catalexis so that the eight-foot line wouldn't sound like two tetrametric lines--he wanted the line-rhythm to feel prolonged, as opposed to the lilting brevity of tetrameter.]

This poem is relevant to the blog here, because the title of Colum McCann's masterpiece of a novel, Let the Great World Spin, is gleaned from "Locksley Hall". You will find it in a fragment of a line toward the end of the poem.

There are also many famous lines in the poem, often misquoted. You might recognize some that you have heard before.

This poem describes a young man's disillusion and heartbreak, and his resolution to set out into the world nursing a deep inner wound; it describes both an excursion from and return to childhood and young heartbreak; in a meditative moment he has a vision of the future in which science and technology bring wonders and unity to Mankind, an expression of the Victorian ideal of Progress and its vision of hope and an Earthly salvation. Home, hearth, and heath are the starting point, but he steps out into the void of an unknown future, a sort of Victorian version of the Byronic hero.

I had to break the reading up into two parts because of YouTube's 15-minute limit. Here is Part 1:

Part 2:

Decades later, the older Tennyson composed a response, "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After", in which he looks ironically at his young man's bitter Romanticism, and described a settled, phlegmatic personal history greatly in contrast to the young man's dramatic angst, and a larger history in which the young man's glowing vision of Mankind's future, rooted in new technology and science, has gone awry. But Tennyson recapitulated the rhythmic structure of the original, looking back at youthful passion and folly, and yet in continuing the form also valuing his young idealism, however misplaced, in late-life retrospect.

Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann

One of the great writers of our time, Irish-born New York City author Colum McCann, wrote a masterpiece, Let the Great World Spin, a book that has been mentioned in my class many times.

Here is my reading of the introductory section that precedes the first chapter of Let the Great World Spin:

Here is the first part of the first chapter, "All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here" (YouTube has a 15-minute limit on the length of YouTube videos, so I have to break chapters up into parts):

Here, then, is the second part of the first chapter:

I will add other chapters/sections over time....

Just Imagine Our Civilization Reduced to Three Books...

Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Richard Feynman was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th Century. He was a physicist whose prankish sense of humor and ability to see into things--and express them in his own unique ways--have made him the hero of millions of "geeks", scientists, intellectuals, and people who enjoy intelligent humor.

Here is a Youtube excerpt from a lecture he gave in which he was sidetracked by his outrage at the destruction of the Mayan civilization. "They had hundreds of thousands of books. And there's three left....Just imagine our civilization reduced to three books. The particular ones left by accident...."

Richard Feynman was an endlessly fascinating character. A number of popular books have been written about him, and you will find that the more you learn, the more he appeals, as an intellect, a prankster, and as a human being. A great place to start is the anecdotal biography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, which is delightful. There is a BBC biography that is quite good, too, entitled Richard Feynman--No Ordinary Genius.

A wonderful biography of Feynman was done for Nova, called "The Quest for Tannu Tuva". The biography gives a feel for the delight that Feynman instills as we learn about him or watch videos of him. One of his preoccupations late in his life before his death from cancer was the wish to visit the Cental Asian republic of Tuva. It had become for him the embodiment of the unknown and exotic, an exciting place to explore and experience. Among the most exotic aspects of Tuvan culture is their extraordinary music, known as "Tuvan throat singing". Tuvan throat singing can be heard in some YouTube videos. This is one. And here is another. The technique known as "throat singing" is also referred to more accurately as "overtone singing", and is also practised by other Central Asian cultures (Mongolian, Tibetan) and in avant garde Western performance. (When I was in college, I had a music professor who was a wonderful composer. He used to arrange festivals of experimental music that at times showcased techniques such as overtone singing and circular breathing. This was thirty years ago, before Richard Feynman's interest in Tuvan culture became known and thereby greatly increased the notoriety of Tuvan throat singing, which I still find surprising and beautiful.)

The world has so much more to delight and enrich and teach us than the old superstitions and other forms of hate-filled prejudice allow. Those superstitions destroyed the Mayan civilization and nowadays are frothing to destroy the science and human advancement that people like Richard Feynman have given us in our time. Feynman found wonder and delight in the lost culture of the Maya, the little-known hidden culture and geography of Tuva, and in the workings of the Universe itself. So should we all. Tuva or bust!

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, French Artist

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891 - 1915), Self-Portrait

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a French painter and sculptor. He was killed in action in the First World War at the age of 24.

The U.S. poet, Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972) a genius himself, and a man who surrounded himself with geniuses, considered Gaudier-Brzeska the most authentic genius he had ever known. (A brief list of some of the artists Pound knew personally: Stravinsky, George Antheil, Henry James, Ford Maddox Ford, Yeats, Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Brancusi, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, Wyndam Lewis, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, Noguchi, etc.)

In a very brief time, killed as young as he was, Gaudier-Brzeska created some of the most remarkable sculpture from the early 20th Century, and his drawings have a spareness and vitality that are extraordinary even among exceptional artists. He was a cubist sculptor and in his drawing very influenced by Chinese and Japanese art.

Most of Gaudier-Brzeska's sculptures are small, they can be held in the hand, because he could not afford blocks of marble. Even so, his few works show astounding talent, and it grieves one to think of what Gaudier-Brzeska might have accomplished. A vast, unprecedented wealth of talent disappeared into the mud and agony of the Great War, and Gaudier-Brzeska is one of the stand-outs of the geniuses lost.

Red Stone Dancer c. 1913

Here is a picture of one of Gaudier-Brzeska's sculptures, Red Stone Dancer from 1913.

Here is a reproduction of his most famous drawing, the magnificent portrait of the young Ezra Pound.

Ezra Pound wrote a memoir of his friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska that was published in 1916, during the war. The title of Pound's book is  Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir by Ezra Pound. Please click on the link; it will take you to Amazon's page for the New Directions edition of the book. If you click on the image of the book, you can turn virtual pages and you'll see more reproductions of Gaudier-Brzeska's work.

The Tate has a little video of one of Gaudier-Brzeska's notebooks. Beautiful.

Charles Tomlinson, English Poet (b. 1927)

I was just reading some of the poetry of Charles Tomlinson, and the second section of his poem "A Garland for Thomas Eakins" struck me as particularly fine:

II

Anatomy, perspective
and reflection: a boat
in three inclinations:
to the wind, to the waves
and to the picture-frame.
Those are the problems. What
does a body propose
that a boat does not?

Bloomsday 2011

James Joyce (1882 - 1941)

At 11:30 AM, the day's activities start at Ulysses Folk House on Stone Street in lower Manhattan, near South Ferry:

Then, starting at noon, the day's greatest event, the 30th Annual Bloomsday on Broadway:

30th Annual Bloomsday on Broadway: "Thu, Jun 16 at 12 pm — On Thursday, June 16th, 2011, we celebrate the 30th annual BLOOMSDAY ON BROADWAY James Joyce ULYSSES marathon, staged by Isaiah Sheffer. It will involve over 100 actors, including some leading stars of stage and screen, and will last over twelve hours, from noon until Molly Bloom's final 'Yes!' sometime after midnight. Since the events of June 16, 1904, described in the 18 episodes of ULYSSES also happen on a Thursday, this anniversary will sample ALL 18 EPISODES, giving beginning readers of ULYSSES a sampling of the diverse styles employed by James Joyce, and giving experienced Joyceans a very satisfying literary feast."

Molly Bloom (photos: Louie Correia)

Radio Bloomsday 2011 on WBAI:
This year's Radio Bloomsday will be broadcast live from 7 pm to 2 am on Thursday, June 16, 2011 on the Pacifica Radio Network, wbai 99.5 FM in New York City, KPFK 90.7 in Los Angeles and online at www.wbai.org anywhere in the world. Artists interpret James Joyce's Ulysses.

This year's broadcast includes artist from New York, Los Angeles, Dublin, and London. Performers for this year's Radio Bloomsday include Anne Enright, Wallace Shawn, Roma Downey, Jerry Stiller, Alec Baldwin, Paul Muldoon, Conn Horgan, Marie-Louise Bowe, Charles Busch, Paul Dooley, Marc Maron, Bob Odenkirk, Marc Singer, John O'Callaghan, Jaason Simmons, Brian O'Doherty, Aaron Beall, Con Horgan, Amy Stiller, T. Ryder Smith, Kate Valk, Jim Fletcher, Janet Coleman, David Dozer, and many more.

Radio Bloomsday is written and directed by Caraid O'Brien, who also performs the complete Molly Bloom monologue. The Artistic Director is Janet Coleman. Larry Josephson and The Radio Foundation is the producer. Mark Torres of The Pacifica Archives recorded actors in Los Angeles for this broadcast.

Email us at radiobloomsday@gmail.com
Follow molly on Twitter @mollyinbed
or Radio Bloomsday on Facebook

[You can listen to some of last year's readings on Radio Bloomsday on WBAI HERE.] 



And, last of all, on Saturday, June 18, 2011, the final Bloomsday event of 2011:

Bloomsday in Brooklyn! 

The second annual Bloomsday in Brooklyn event will be in Park Slope, and will start at 2:00 PM at an Irish pub called the Black Sheep Pub, at 428 Bergen Street in Brooklyn. Their phone number is (718) 638-1109. The nearest train is the Bergen Street Station of the 2, 3, 4 trains.

People to Know About: Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace

 Among the most remarkable prescient geniuses of history were the English mathematician, engineer, and inventor, Charles Babbage (1791 - 1871) and his friend, mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1852).

Charles Babbage

In 1812, Charles Babbage was perusing a book of logarithmic tables, which he knew to contain errors, when he had the idea that the calculation of these numbers could be broken down into simple stages, and then processed by mechanical addition and subtraction. But in 1812, there was no such thing as electronics. Babbage conceived of a mechanically operated machine that would be able to compute by the working of complex and precisely manufactured machinery. (The word "computer" now means to process mathematical problems by electronic machines. But even into the 1950s, a computer was someone who added and subtracted columns of numbers. For example, people who worked in banks, insurance companies, or engineering firms needed to calculate sums and tables "by hand"; these processes were tedious, complex, and subject to human error. But those who did the "number crunching" were called "computers". What we now call "computers" were initially called "electronic computers".)

Charles Babbage is now known as the "father of the computer". Using mechanical machinery only, he designed two mathematical computers equipped with printers, called "Difference Engines", and an even more advanced contraption he called "the Analytical Engine" that would be capable of calculations not done until modern electronic computers after the Second World War. The Difference Engines were not constructed in his lifetime, and the Analytical Engine has never been built.

Please take a look at this site at the Computer History Museum providing fascinating details about Babbage's mechanical computer, the Difference Engine 2. I think you will be intrigued and amazed. Also, please watch the video on the first page of the site. It shows Difference Engine 2 in operation. It is shocking. Shocking and breathtakingly beautiful. And remember, as you watch the video, that it was designed by a single person in the 1840s. I am awed by Babbage's genius.

Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the famous poet. She is generally referred to as Ada Lovelace. Her mother was preoccupied with mathematics, her father was a genius; Ada inherited both qualities. In 1842, Babbage asked Lovelace to translate an article in French on a lecture on the Analytical Engine that he had given. She did, and provided notes to the article that were longer than the article itself. Lovelace had looked farther into the possibilities of the Analytical machine than just crunching numbers, and in one of her notes, she presented an algorithm by which Bernoulli numbers could be calculated by use of the Analytical Engine. This algorithm is considered to be the first computer program ever written.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, the inventor of computer programming, died of uterine cancer after being subjected to the stupid and barbaric practice of bloodletting. She was 36 years old.

Books to Know: A Mathematician's Apology by G.H. Hardy

If you haven't read this book yet, it should be on your short list: A Mathematician's Apology, by G.H. Hardy.

G.H. Hardy was a mathematician at the University of Cambridge in England. He is best known for his recognition and fostering of the extraordinary talent of the Indian mathematical prodigy, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Ramanujan was one of the most gifted mathematicians in history, and of the English mathematicians Ramanujan tried to contact, only Hardy recognized his genius. Hardy called Ramanujan's work to the attention of other mathematicians, and the rest is history--history best introduced in A Mathematician's Apology!

The word "apology" originally meant a formal, rationally presented argument in favor or justification of a theory or doctrine. It is from the Latin word "apologia", which in turn is from Greek, "apologia" [apo + logos], and does not have the modern primary sense of to say "I'm sorry" or "mea culpa". For instance, Plato's Apologia was his account of Socrates' defense of his teachings and actions as a teacher in court.

A Mathematician's Apology is a small (the PDF file linked to below is only 56 pages), autobiographical book. It is a delightful expression of what it is to be a creative mathematician, and Hardy's insights and opinions on mathematics--and from there, the human condition--are fascinating and moving. Hardy was an eccentric in many ways, but he was a good man, consumed with a love of mathematics and cricket. The book is involving and touching, and endlessly fascinating. His account of his interactions with Littlewood, Ramanujan, and others are a window into the world of giants of mathematical and scientific legend.

A Mathematician's Apology is available online as a PDF file HERE, if one is in Canada; it is still under copyright here in the United States. It is in print and can easily be found in bookstores and in the local libraries. It is available on Amazon, and for the Kindle. I'd recommend the little old copies you can find in libraries with the introduction by C.P. Snow. Those old books are lovely, and Snow's commentary enhances the book. (To our Northern neighbors: In casually skimming the PDF file, I saw some typographic errors; it looks like they scanned the book, used scanning-to-text software, and saved it as a PDF file without serious proofreading; I'd say look for the book, because a PDF file is not as nice to read as the old book, and I find those kind of errors distracting.)

All too often, people in the humanities disdain mathematics and the sciences. We are usually ignorant and unappreciative of the math-based magisteria. This apologia is one of the great bridging documents. It is itself a work of narrative art that shows the working of the mind of a pure creative artist of the first calibre.

In math, rich brevity is elegance; in this foray into literary activity, Hardy exemplified the aesthetic of a world-class mathematician, while creating a classic of autobiographical writing.


P.S.: I found a nice article on this book HERE. It summarizes the book and the people presented in it elegantly.

Aetheric Reflections: Ezra Pound's "Drafts and Fragments"

Nocturne: Reflections sur Ezra Pound

or,

Late Liszt, Late Pound, and the Action of Old Ice?--Sublime

The word "sublime" is most commonly used to describe something of transcendent beauty or excellence.

But the word is also used in chemistry to mean the process by which a solid evaporates without passing through the intermediate step of existing in a liquid form (i.e., "liquefaction"). We usually think of evaporation as proceeding from a liquid, as water evaporating in the sunlight. But consider ice in a household freezer--in time it diminishes and disappears. A chemist would say that ice "sublimes". I find that a lovely usage....The ice fades from a cold, hard, sharply defined solid to an ethereal and intangible state. Who says that chemists are not poets?

This word occurred to me in the context of the "Drafts and Fragments" section of Ezra Pound's Cantos, but by an indirect metaphor: The musical compositions of Franz Liszt.

Reminiscent of the music of Liszt, Ezra Pound's poetry is considered difficult, and is approached with trepidation or avoided--or dismissed with contempt by those who don't want to make the struggle to rise to, and thereby transcend, their difficulties. The Cantos in particular are rarely studied, rarely read, and have not lent themselves to the academic cottage industries, so to speak, that rose up around the work of T.S. Eliot or James Joyce. And within the context of the Cantos, the "Drafts and Fragments" are problematic. Unlike the compositions of Eliot and Joyce, the Cantos are open-ended and unfinished. The Wasteland annotates itself quite neatly, and each of the Four Quartets is visibly structured, has its beginning and its end, and comfortably closes on the tonic. Ulysses also resolves, and while one might claim that Finnegans Wake has no beginning or end, Joyce completed it, and we feel, if we don't see how, that it gyres hermetic. That is comforting. But the structure of the Cantos overall is obscure to many, and sometimes even Pound specialists fail to see the relevance of the "Drafts and Fragments" to the rest of the poem.

Hence, a metaphor.

Liszt's music is often considered to be bombastic and it is thought by some to be primarily a vehicle to showpiece his incomparable virtuosity rather than a product of profound artistry. Many consider it showy and artistically superficial, particularly his early compositions; when he was young he was the musical showman of his day, and was regarded as technically without peer. His preoccupation with virtuosity appears in his writing at a shockingly early age (the first version of the Transcendental Etudes was written when he was fifteen). He retired from the concert stage at age 35, and he still haunts the minds of piano students and concert performers to this day. He is yet the benchmark, ideal, and looming presence of pianism. He was and remains, in a nutshell, il miglior fabbro.

[...I am getting to Ezra Pound! Patience, s'il vous plait, mesdames et messieurs....]

Please listen to this recording of a composition by Liszt, that old warhorse of the Romantic virtuoso, the Second Hungarian Rhapsody. O, hear! Velocity! Velocitous octaves! Rich chords and harmonies! Arpeggios and scales like Olympic sprinters run amok! Glissandi!! Accelerated repeated notes! Lots and lots of notes! Rhythm, syncopation, rubato, crescendo, diminuendo, themes, variations, playfulness, whimsy, heavy minors and capricious majors! And always that solid bedrock of tonality. The heavy anchor, buttress, and foundation of tonality. The emphatic return to and emphatic expression of the familiar key that tells us at the end where we are. A young man might know that. A brilliant young man in the bloom of virtuosity and vitality who has created, and in so doing limned and mapped, new worlds will be quite confident of where he is at the end of a mighty stride.

Now please listen to this recording of one of Liszt's late works, composed the year before he died, En Reve. It sublimes.

The Cantos began as a confident young virtuoso stepped out to create the epic of his time. A brilliant young man in the bloom of virtuosity and vitality who intends to create, limn, and map new worlds will also be quite confident of where he is at the inception of a mighty stride. Pound set off confident in the power of his facility and genius to circumnavigate new worlds while dragging the old along with him. A young man's objective. But his conception was that the unifying element that would bring these worlds together harmoniously was himself: The unifying element, the point of intersection, the harmonic axis of universes is the personal; after all, we need to stand at a point of reference. And the Cantos was to be the work, not of a beginning date and an end date, but of a lifetime. So what distinguishes the ambition of the Cantos from the ambition of Four Quartets is that it does not follow the ascents and descents of the sonata form as codified in the classic string quartet, a structure defined by long-departed craftsmen of 18th-Century music, but the arc of a life.

The Cantos begin with a bang, confidently rooted in a harmonic conception, a major triad in Greek-major: Homer--Dante--Confucius; and progression pivoted on the third: Inferno--Purgatorio--Paradiso. But, as life does, the Cantos went their own way. Certitude faded, vigor faltered, the solid evanesced. The "Drafts and Fragments" sublime.

Roberto Matta, Chilean Artist, 20th Century Master

One of my favorite 20th-Century painters is the Chilean artist Roberto Matta, (1911-2002).

The first painting that I saw by him arrested me on the spot, and made a strong, favorable impression. The painting is entitled "The Vertigo of Eros", and is in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (It is not currently on display; I think the museum errs sometimes in its appreciation of its own collection, and fails therefore on occasion to promote worthy art over less interesting.)

"The Vertigo of Eros", 1944

Here is a Web site dedicated to the art of Matta, with many images of his paintings. These images on the computer don't give the whole effect. I recommend a visit to the museum(s) to see his work in person.

Matta is an artist who will engage and delight, and whose oeuvre is worth looking into.

There is a page for this painting on the MOMA Web site. Their brief blurb discussing the painting is inadequate, but it is a starting-point for consideration of this painting.

Basil Bunting: Ode 2 from "Second Book of Odes"

Basil Bunting (1900-1985)

Basil Bunting was an English poet from Northumberland, the northernmost county of England, at the east border with Scotland. He is one of my favorite poets. I will present a short poem by him, then a brief gloss.

This selection is from the "Second Book of Odes". It is the second ode, indicated with the numeral "2".

Aster amellus, a.k.a. the European Michaelmas Daisy

                    Three Michaelmas daisies
                    on an ashtray;
                    one abets love;
                    one droops and woos;
          

                    one stiffens her petals
                    remembering
                    the root, the sap
                    and the bees' play.

1965

This is a lovely erotic miniature. So evocative, and so condensed.

• The "Michaelmas daisy" is a variety from the "aster" family of flowers. "Michaelmas" is a traditional Christian holiday celebrated on September 29 in honor of the highest of the archangels, Michael. Michaelmas occurs just after the autumn equinox and is associated with the beginning of autumn. Daisies are members of a very large and varied family of plants known as the Asteraceae, a family that includes the asters, too. [The French name for the daisy is "marguerite", a common girls' name. The English equivalent is Margaret--which is commonly abbreviated by the nickname "Peggy". Bunting's masterwork, Briggflatts, also from 1965, bears the dedication "For Peggy". One of the cores of Briggflatts is young love and desire remembered. Intensity lived and re-lived is the thread woven throughout Briggflatts.]
• To "abet" is to aid or assist in an action or plan. Traditionally, the prognostic game of pulling petals off a flower to prove love is done with a daisy: "He loves me"; "He loves me not"; "He loves me"; "He loves me not"....So, a daisy that abets love is a daisy that has lost a petal (or some odd number of petals). Note that he anthropomorphizes the flowers and gives them motive action.
• To "droop" is to hang limply or to bend limply from a stiff or upright position. To "woo" is to try to win the heart of someone or to seek marriage with someone. So, in this case, to droop and woo is to turn the face away coyly in order to attract. A coquettish turn of the head.
• Petals--and the flower herself--are a metaphor for female genitalia. Note Bunting's very specific use of the feminine pronoun "her". He anthropomorphizes the flower, and gives it gender; some flowers are "male" only, some are "female" only, some are both, as botanists had long understood when he wrote this poem.
• "Root" is the word for the part of a plant that branches out into the ground to provide a base and collect nutrients and water from the soil. It is also a colloquial term for a penis.
• "Sap" is the word for the liquid in plants that is analogous with blood. In context, we might think of semen and female lubrication. Flowers lure bees and other fertilizing insects and birds, etc., by producing nectar, a clear, sweet, viscous liquid. (The word "nectar" originally meant the drink of the gods, and it was not until the 17th Century that it was first used in English to mean the clear, sweet liquid provided by flowers.)
• Bees flit upon the flower, tickling, stimulating, entering, sipping with their proboscises, fertilizing.

The first two flowers are fading and losing life. The first flower is already losing petals. The second is drooping. This is what happens to picked wildflowers. But those characteristics are more than descriptive.

The fortune-telling flower--a silly presenter of falsehood and fairy-tale love--and the teasing flower get short attention. There follows a line break that divides the poem into two quatrains, and then fully half the poem is given to the third flower alone, the flower that surrenders to and embraces erotic love. She is living, swelling with life, love, and passion. The third flower is abloom with vitality, desire, and love. 

The poet's approbation is given to a genuine, earthy, life-affirming love.

__________
There will be future posts on Bunting's work, and specifically on Briggflatts, which I consider one of the most beautiful long poems in English.

Desert Island Music: Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924)

One of the greatest pianist-composers was the Faustian giant, Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924). Busoni was one of the greatest pianists of all time. He was a musical philosopher, and his essays are fascinating reading. He was a piano teacher, a musical scholar, a composer, a conductor, a supporter of young performers, and a champion of forgotten and new composers. He was an original thinker, and a genius at scholarship; a profound creative and a profound re-creative artist. He was also a man of deep culture and wide learning, and a polyglot.

Busoni's best-known compositions are his transcriptions for piano of works originally for other instruments. His most famous work is the Bach-Busoni Chaconne in D Minor from the Partita number two for solo violin. It has been recorded by many pianists over the years, including a piano-roll recording by Busoni himself (here's the second part of Busoni's piano roll recording). Next is an old friend, a performance I listened to many times in my college days: Here is a link to the first part (and here is the second part) of a performance of the Bach-Busoni Chaconne by Busoni's student, friend, and musical champion, Egon Petri. A more recent recording of the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, and much loved by many people, was by the Italian pianist, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli [Part 1...Part 2]. Here are links to Marc-Andre Hamelin's performance, Part 1 and Part 2. Many others have performed and recorded the Chaconne, such as Alicia de Larrocha [1/2], Artur Rubenstein [1/2], Yevgeny Kissin, etc.

. . .

And, to reiterate Vladimir de Pachmann's comment on Busoni: "der grosser Bach spieler": Busoni playing Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude and Fugue [Number One] in C Major. This is one of my all-time favorite recordings.

The Song of the Madwoman Singing by the Edge of the Sea

There are a number of composers of genius whose compositions are little-known, because of the technical difficulties of performance, or a failure to engage supporters in their own time, or an extremely avant-garde or eccentric aesthetic or compositional philosophy.

One such "forgotten genius" was the 19th-Century French composer, Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888). Alkan was regarded by Liszt as a performer and composer of the highest level, rivaling himself as a virtuoso. Unfortunately, Alkan became misanthropic and reclusive and his impact on performers, scholars, and composers diminished and he was almost completely forgotten.

One of the most haunting pieces of music that I know is Alkan's La Chanson de la Folle au Bord de la Mer (The Song of the Madwoman By the Side of the Sea) played by the English pianist Ronald Smith, whose dedication to reviving lost treasures of the piano repertory I have much admired for many years.

The Song of the Madwoman by the Edge of the Sea is haunting, evocative, and beautiful. I hope that this might introduce some people to music, and a composer, that they will enjoy. Alkan is worth listening into.

______
Additional:
Alkan: Nocturne No. 1 in B Major, Op. 22 played by Ronald Smith.
The same piece, Nocturne No. 1 in B Major, Op. 22 played by French-Canadian pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin. This Nocturne is a lovely piece, and wonderfully polyphonic and delightfully structured. Perhaps there was something in the water in Paris then...Alkan was Chopin's next-door neighbor....

Alkan: Marche Funebre played by Ronald Smith. You will hear drum-rolls, bells, and the slow, regular steps of the funeral procession. The "B" section enters with celebratory bells pealing through the city. The return to the "A" section brings back the funebral drumrolls and the minor key. (Here is another recording of the Marche Funebre, by Mark Viner, a young English pianist.) The contrasting piece by Alkan is the Marche Triomphale, played in this recording by Ronald Smith. The Marche Funebre and Marche Triomphale are Opus 26a and Opus 26b, respectively.

Among Alkan's HUGE works for piano are his Concerto for Solo Piano and his Symphonie for solo piano. Here are recordings of the Symphonie: played by Ronald Smith; played by Marc-Andre Hamelin; and played by Mark Viner. (The Symphonie is too long to be a single Youtube entry, so these links are to the first parts of each pianist's performance; if you are intrigued, please follow the links through to hear the entire composition.) For those of you who might be fans of historical pianism, here is a recording of Egon Petri, student and friend of Ferruccio Busoni, who was himself a champion of Alkan's music, playing an excerpt from the Symphonie.

And, for a different note: Alkan's composition for chorus, three oboes, and bassoon, Marcia Funebre, Sulla Morte d'un Papagallo (Funeral March on the Death of a Parrot) is brilliant, witty, and hilarious. {The text of the chorus is "As-tu dejuner, Jaco?"--"Have you eaten, Jacko?" which is the French equivalent of "Polly want a cracker?" in English. The only other text is "Et de quoi? Ah" which would translate as "And what [did you have]? Oh".} Alkan is thought of as an eccentric composer of huge, serious, difficult music--difficult for the performer, technically and musically, and difficult for the audience--but this music is delightful. It is droll, ironic, sardonic, sympathetic, lovely...and funny.

Alkan: Baracolle, Opus 65, Number 6, played by Mark Viner; and played by Marc-Andre Hamelin.

There is a lot more to be found on Youtube, and there are now a good number of records of Alkan's music available. I hope that some of you will be moved enough to explore further!

New Blog, Just for My Classes at the International Center

I have started a dedicated blog for my classes at the International Center.

This will hopefully allow better focus. This is all a new experiment!

My new blog is entitled By Any Other Name, and is at:
http://rosebudsmay.blogspot.com/

Wanda Landowska (1879 - 1959)

Wanda Landowska in 1907

The other day in class, no-one was familiar with Wanda Landowska. Oh, how quickly you young people forget!

She was a great pianist and the most reknowned harpsichordist of her time. Among others, Poulenc composed harpsichord music for her.

She was eccentric, but an extraordinary musician. You will enjoy getting to know her!

Landowska Playing the Piano:

Mozart piano concerto No. 22, Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.

Mozart: Sonata No. 17 in D, Part 1; Part 2; and Part 3. (Lovely touch on the keys.)

Mozart: Rondo in A Minor, K511


Wanda Landowska Playing the Harpsichord:

Johann Sebastian Back: Prelude & Fuge # 1 in C Major

Johann Sebastian Bach: Goldberg Variations, Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; and Part 5

Johann Sebastian Bach, Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor BWV 903

Wanda Landowska plays Francois Couperin. Wow!

Francis Poulenc: Concert Champetre for harpsichord and orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski; Poulenc dedicated the work to her.
Part 1; Part 2

L. van Beethoven <==> T.S. Eliot: Quartets

There is disagreement as to how much, or even whether or not, Eliot was influenced when writing the Four Quartets by a particular Beethoven string quartet. The quartet in question is the Beethoven String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Opus 132, linked to in Youtube below.

I am convinced. But listen for yourself, and see what you think. And, even if you don't see it or don't care, the music is beautiful. Many people feel that the late quartets were Beethoven's greatest work.

From Youtube:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

Or if you prefer, an older recording:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Establishing "Home": Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #2, Played by Moiseiwitsch

I mention this concerto, the Rachmaninoff Second, in class frequently. As a supplement and in lieu of having to take up class time with bringing a recording in and playing a CD to illustrate my point, I'm posting this here.

Please listen to the recording linked below. If you are familiar with this concerto, my point will be more easily understood. This concerto is--to me--one of the most beautiful and poignant pieces in all of music, but more relevantly to the class, this concerto is an exemplar of compositional technique. Note the use of the piano to establish the key, and the way the melody introduced thereon by the strings hovers at the tonic, teasing...leaving...returning...leaving...returning. It is almost coquettish in how it plays on the edge of withdrawal and return; it evokes a feeling of home, of loss and return (or loss and the longing to return), of nostalgia, of lost childhood or faded dreams.

Here is the first part of a recording of Benno Moiseiwitsch playing the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto on Youtube. This concerto is too long for the entirety to fit in one Youtube video, and so it is broken up into four parts. If you wish to listen to the whole thing, here are the remaining parts: part two (this is the second movement); part three (the beginning of the third movement); and the last part (the completion of the third movement).


CAVEAT: THIS IS NOT BACKGROUND MUSIC. Please give this particular attention and listen to it. Too many people confuse listening to music with being able to hear it; they are not the same thing. I am posting this for a reason, not for mild background amusement. There is incomparable genius to be found in this recording. This is one of the great achievements of our species. I present this as a key; through listening to this to find an insight into the poetry, literature, and ideas that we discuss in class...and much, much more.

....

Benno Moiseiwitsch is my all-time favorite musician. I have loved him since I was 18. About 10 years ago, I saw this video on Channel 13; I had never seen Moiseiwitsch, and had not even known that there was video of him, I had not known that it were possible to see him with my own eyes in this flawed world of entropy, distance, and loss. I had so vividly seen in my mind's eye how he sat at the piano and how he touched the keys, and it was exactly as I had imagined. It was like seeing someone loved deeply, but who was long long gone forever, forever gone, long, long, alas; I wept.

If your ears wish your eyes to see what vision they hear, here is another video of Benno Moiseiwitsch, in which Moiseiwitsch plays the Wagner-Liszt transcription "Overture to Tannheuser".

"Finnegans Wake"...the Song at the Dark, Lost, Nightful Heart of English

While there is more to it than what I am about to say, the old Irish drinking song called "Finnegans Wake" is a clue to the structure of the book by James Joyce. I have often said that to "open" a newly encountered work of art we have to have a key, or many keys; James Joyce sprinkled clues here and there to enable the reader to open Ulysses, and he did the same with Finnegans Wake; in the case of Finnegans Wake, the title of the book leads us to the old Irish ballad just as the title Ulysses leads us to Homer--and then, in each case, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, back to the book...but now armed with a key that will begin the process of revealment.

So, here's the song--and in the first link, Tom Clancy performs a wonderful introduction that delights entirely:
* Finnegans Wake performed by the Clancy Brothers and Robbie O'Connell
* Here is another performance of Finnegans Wake by the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem--also rollicking good fun.
* Here is another rendition of the song "Finnegans Wake" that I enjoy: Finnegans Wake performed by The Kilkennys.

Reading Arc for International Center Members

As an outgrowth of my literature class at the International Center in New York, my students, professor Carlisle Yearwood, and I have embarked on a reading project. We will read, and then meet to discuss, the books presented below. The authors are all from "colonized" nations or peoples and write in English, the colonizer's language. The sequence of the authors describes an arc swooping from England to Ireland, down to West Africa, across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and finally up into the Southwest United States. The authors in question are Irish, Nigerian, Jamaican, Saint Lucian, and Kiowan.

These are the books that compose the "reading arc":

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian author of Igbo descent.

Chinua Achebe (born 1930)

The title of Achebe's book, Things Fall Apart, is a quote from the third line of "The Second Coming", a poem by Irish writer William Butler Yeats. Here is the text of the poem:

THE SECOND COMING

          Turning and turning in the widening gyre
          The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
          Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
          Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
          The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
          The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
          The best lack all conviction, while the worst
          Are full of passionate intensity.

          Surely some revelation is at hand;
          Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
          The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
          When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
          Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
          A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
          A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
          Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
          Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
          The darkness drops again; but now I know
          That twenty centuries of stony sleep
          Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
          And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
          Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[first published 1920]

William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939)

2. The second book in the reading arc will be West Indian Folk Tales, by Sir Philip Sherlock, a Jamaican scholar, teacher, and writer. [This book seems to be out of print; the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library appear to have one copy each, but the Queens Borough Public Library has eight copies. There are used copies at the Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Borders Web sites. I might have to make copies of one or two of the tales that seem representative for us to proceed. I will inform those interested if I find a bookstore with copies in stock.]

Sir Philip Sherlock (1902 - 2000)

3. The third book in the arc will be Omeros by West Indian poet, playwright, painter, and teacher Derek Walcott. Derek Walcott is from the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia.

Derek Walcott (born 1930)

4. The last book in the arc will be The Way to Rainy Mountain by the Native American (Kiowan) novelist, poet, painter, and teacher, N. Scott Momaday.

N. Scott Momaday (born 1934)

Badinage: The Great Godowsky (1870 - 1938)

Leopold Godowsky was incomparable. To me, he was the greatest of the great; at five-foot three, the giant of the giants. But I introduce him here, in this post, because I was thinking of one of my favorite words, and want to introduce that word, badinage--and the richness of the associations that I have with it--to my students. The great masters of compositional badinage of the Modernist era (I'm not claiming that there were not other masters of that era whose badinage delights) were Leopold Godowsky and James Joyce. In this post I wish to introduce "badinage" and Godowsky. (An in-depth biographic introduction to Godowsky is here; read it in awe....)

The word badinage is flaccidly defined in Webster's as "playful repartee : BANTER".

OK, lets track that down a bit: following Webster's lead, what are the definitions of "repartee" and "banter"?

Ah, now we are getting somewhere:

repartee : ... 1a : a quick and witty reply b : a succession or interchange of clever retorts : amusing and usually light sparring with words 2 : adroitness and cleverness in reply : skill in repartee syn see WIT

banter ... (verb) ... 1 : to speak to or address in a witty or teasing manner ....
(intransitive verb) : to speak or act playfully or wittily

banter (noun) : good-natured and usually witty and animated joking

So, overall, we get a feeling of "badinage" as being a quick, clever, light-hearted interplay of dialogue. A sort of fencing jokingly with words; a witty sequence of back-and-forth, a conversational thrust-and-parry, a quick volleying of ideas and plays on words. But to me, there is more to it; it is rooted in responsorial or antiphonal play. The word badinage, at its best, connotes a fast, light counterpoint of thought and wordplay.

The words I just used and highlighted, responsorial and antiphonal are terms from musicology [the scholarly study of music]. The word "responsorial" refers to a leader in singing a line of a psalm and a chorus or the church/congregation singing the next line in response. (A phrase sometimes used to describe this in chant or song, particularly in a church/temple setting is "call and response".) The word "antiphonal" refers to an interactive alteration between choruses; think of the singing of crickets on a summer night in the country. However, language carries meaning with words and memes, and so the witty interplay of dialogue will incorporate a counterpoint of ideas, too. And this is my conception of "badinage": A playful countrapuntal dialogue in quick, witty interplay--the key distinction being contrapuntal play with words and thoughts.

An exemplification of this conception, carried to the highest level, is in Leopold Godowsky's piano composition entitled Badinage. The linked recording is by David Saperton, one of the forgotten treasures of pianism; Saperton was Godowsky's son-in-law, and was highly respected by Godowsky, Hoffman, and the others. As Godowsky's son-in-law, he was in a unique position to have a deep comprehension of the Godowsky paraphrases. In addition to Saperton's recording, here is a performance of Badinage by Marc-Andre Hamelin, a contemporary Canadian pianist who specializes in piano works of the greatest technical difficulty. Other recordings: Francesco Libetta; Boris Berezovsky (this last shows the original Chopin etude followed by Godowsky's Badinage.

[I will no doubt be fleshing this out more. Please return. There is much more to say about the great pianist-composer Leopold Godowsky, and there are some wonderful recordings to link to....]