Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Browsing Category

Music

Intermezzo

Do you know those days when you wake up feeling like this?

And your immediate reaction to what greets you at the breakfast table is, “why does no one else share that sentiment?”

 

And  during your walk your inner chaos is echoed in nature?

 

And even the car in front of you mocks you?

Then all day you listen to Mahler/Rückert about turning your back to the world?

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen….

trans. by Emily Ezust

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world’s tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song.

 

Well, it’s time to

a) read about stoicism

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2017/01/stoicism-for-dark-days.html

 

and b) to ignore everything you just read, put on your read shoes, grit your teeth, blog and find your way back to your usual self.

 

 

 

3 Comments

First (Class) Act

I have a few people who recommend books to me that invariably hit the spot. Those people are from different backgrounds and of different ages, and I agree with them 90 or so % of the time. I am grateful to them because they alert me to authors that I might otherwise never have encountered.

That does not hold for Naomie Klein – I have met her in several of the journalistic sources I read, among them the Guardian, the NYT and lately the Intercept. The book recommended by my handlers and still on my library reserve list is This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate (2014), but I am sharing here her acceptance speech at the Sydney Peace Prize.

https://www.thenation.com/article/intersectionality-is-the-only-path-forward-for-the-climate-movement/

I like Klein’s naming Trump “the grabber-in-chief,”but, more importantly, I am impressed with how she summarizes the looming climate disaster and its political antecedents.

Matching her theme of resistance to capitalistic ruthlessness that could, quite literally, kill us all, with operatic music was hard because of too many choices; Beethoven advanced revolutionary ideas in Fidelio.  Kurt Weill wrote  Die Bürgschaft — about a mythical land under a totalitarian, money-driven dictatorship. When it was criticized, he used words that could come from a contemporary composer. “I believe that the task of opera today is to move beyond the fate of private individuals toward universality,” he wrote. “Die Bürgschaft undertakes an attempt to adopt a position on matters that concern us all. Such an attempt must elicit discussions as a matter of course. That is part of its job.”

And then there is CO2, an opera by Giorgio Battista, commissioned by the Milan Scala and premiered there in 2015. Taking its focus from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, it is a small modern masterpiece implicating us all in the destruction of the earth and suggesting potential remedies we could adopt.

Klein herself cites Leonard Cohen, so I’ll add her chosen song as well – all this music should motivate us!

1 Comments

From Prelude to Swan-Song

 

Maybe we should look this week at some favorite pieces of music paired with some writings that have the shared attribute of making us think. We’ll cover preludes, swan songs and a number of things in-between; all choices are related to ways one might make sense of what is going on around us and put it in some historical context.

I want to start with Carl Sandberg’s poem in the link below, published in 1920, shortly after WW I had ended. Four preludes on playthings of the wind is a cautionary and repetitive tale about the fleeting nature of past, present and future, faith in nations; it is also a dire warning against nationalistic pride that comes before the fall.

The last stanza claims:

And the wind shifts
and the dust on a doorsill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/four-preludes-on-playthings-of-the-wind/

(PS For your laugh of the day: the poem hunter site that displays the poem has it categorized as: about girls.)

The matching musical prelude can be found here, from Glass’ opera about the pharaoh Akhenaten: a pharaoh who was one of the first founders of a monotheistic religion, oblivious to the country falling apart around him. It did not end well. Blind nationalism and blind religion never does.

 

1 Comments

Music from Wintry Lands

Housebound by the ice last week I photographed my yard in winter. Figured it could accompany some cool music from counties with a decidedly cold climate.

Finland – Sibelius Two songs of winter   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P44CfhGQBss

Poland – Chopin Winterwind  (Etude#11) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnWo8PxrOR4

Russia – Tchaikoswsky Symphony #1 – Winter Dreams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoBc1GsZM0s

Czechoslovakia  – Leos Janacek In the mists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lFekGwREs4

Germany – Schubert Der Leiermann from Winterreise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIIS-UgixGE

France – Debussy The Snow is dancing” from Children’s Corner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWAyFw98RLM

0 Comments
© 2024