Musing's musings

You've got to see this play!

If you're within shouting distance of Chicago (or will be) and have a chance sometime in the coming week, you should definitely make the time to catch Vitalist Theatre's production of Anung's First Christmas at the Theatre Building on Belmont. The show runs through January 4 (schedule and tickets are available at the above link).

Truth in advertising: I know the playwright/adapter of the story, the director, and the scene designer. The author of the original novella on which the play is based, everyone I just named, and several more people in the cast or crew for the play are all affiliated with or alumni/students of my alma mater. But that's not why I'm encouraging you to see this show.

The first reason to see it is because it's a great story and apropos for the season. The second is because it's a wonderful production, inventive, eclectic in the best sense, and it has a wonderful cast. I won't go into any more specifics than that, because to do so would reveal too much that you'll want to experience for yourself.

The last reason to see this show is because it's an independent production. This is theater at its very best--no super-commercial hackery, no standard, one-size-fits-everybody plot lines. Just a wonderful story beautifully adapted for the stage, innovatively staged, mounted, and costumed, and an ending that underscores a very important point in these trying times. But to keep that kind of theater going, it needs our support. So if you can possibly manage it, please do consider taking in this show. You won't regret it.

Another titan bids farewell

Reuters is reporting that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died at his home near Moscow. He was 89.

Solzhenitsyn had the satisfaction of outliving the Soviet regime he criticized so often and so bitterly that, after the publication of one of his major works (The Gulag Archipelago) it stripped him of his citizenship and sent him into exile. But I never did manage to delve into his longer works--or at least I haven't yet. I do have a copy of August 1914 that I picked up a couple of years ago. But, as with so many other books on my shelves, I just haven't had the time to get around to reading it, what with the pressures of coursework and research (and family, and a full-time job...)

What captivated me in Solzhenitsyn's writing was the one book he managed to get published in the Soviet Union--with the explicit permission of Nikita Khrushchev, during the early phases of the latter's de-Stalinization campaign--One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I first read that book (or at least excerpts from it), if memory serves, when I was in the sixth grade. My middle school was offering a not-for-credit elective in Russian at the time, and the teacher had us read it. I've since come back to it many, many times.

Methinks I'll go re-read it again.

Who says science and the humanities don't mix?

One of the nicer perks of my job is our departmental subscription to Science, which comes to me first each week. I even occasionally get time to read it before somebody else bugs me for the last issue. Since I had a little downtime yesterday afternoon, I was perusing the March 28 issue when I stumbled across this little item (subscription and/or membership required).

It seems that there may have been a reason why composers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance composed the way they did. And that reason may have had something to do with the size and shape and construction of the buildings in which their works were performed--which may in turn have had something to do with the way that cathedrals and chapels were designed. An architectural historian took the choir of St. John's College, Cambridge (along with a bunch of acoustics people and some musicologists) on a very special choir tour to Venice, where they sang a variety of works in 11 different churches and chapels around the city.

Polyphonic works (for example, a Byrd Mass--though in some cases that might be a special case--or a Tallis motet) get mushy in great big spaces like the Basilica di San Marco. There's too much room for the sound to bounce around, and it makes it very difficult for the audience to make out the words. Simpler melodies, like plainchant (or Gregorian chant, or simple polyphonic works like Byrd's Masses) work better in the big spaces. The best spot to sing a really complex polyphonic work is in a smaller space, like a side chapel off of the bigger cathedral. The historian speculates that composers may well have tailored their works for the building in which they would be performed (which, really, any good composer should have done). She even speculated that it might have been possible, with a big enough choir, to achieve something like "surround sound"--which may explain some of the really gigantic works in the early polyphonic repertoire, like Tallis's Spem in alium, composed ca. 1570 for 40 voices. That's 40 voice parts (eight choirs of five voices apiece), not just 40 people singing the same three or four parts, by the by.

Having spent some time singing in spaces big and small, and having attended services in some pretty doggone big churches, the group's findings, which were reported, according to Science, at the Cambridge Science Festival last month, don't surprise me much. I distinctly remember a small chapel on the campus of a choir college or a seminary (I don't remember which it was) in Nashville, where we stopped on choir tour my junior year in college. Obviously, since at least one of the functions of the place was to train singers and musicians and directors for choral work, the chapel at the school was designed with singing in mind: all stone and glass and wood, hard surfaces that keep even a small space vibrant.

One of the pieces we were singing that year was C. P. E. Bach's 1749 Magnificat which, while it's a middle-period piece by chronology and should therefore be more in the classical style, is written in a style much closer to the Baroque or Rococo style favored by C. P. E.'s more famous father. (What that means to non-music buffs is that it's a little more florid and has a lot more weaving of the various lines than you would expect in a classical-period piece.) And I do remember that our director had the darnedest time reining in the soloists (including me), because that little space did such wonderful things for a voice that we were all hanging on to notes longer than we should have, just to enjoy the sound a little more.

By contrast, it's really been an experience going to Mass in places like the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Church of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor in the Galilee, or Notre Dame in Paris. All of those spaces are simply huge--and at Notre Dame, just as would have been done in medieval times--while Mass is going on in the central nave, the tourists and the pilgrims continue to go in and out, oohing and aahing as they gawk at the spectacle, in the side aisles. Even with modern microphones and loudspeakers, it can sometimes be difficult to follow what's going on in a space as big as that--particularly if the speaker or the singer(s) isn't careful about enunciating and allowing for the reverb time.

It's nice to know there may be a scientific basis for those empirical observations.

ψυχή δ' Ἄϊδόσδε κατῆλθεν

To paraphrase his translation of the tagline from Homer that I've paraphrased for this post's title, "the soul of Robert Fagles has drifted down to the House of Death." (It's Iliad VII.330 if you want to check it; I've just changed the number of the noun from plural to singular, and changed the verb accordingly.)

Sadly, it is a little out of the ordinary that a classicist's passing gets mentioned in the national media. It's not like there are classics groupies or anything like that. Heck, most people aren't really clear on what it is classicists do in the first place.

But Fagles was different. As the Paper of Record noted, he is one of the few people to have attempted tackling the three biggest epic poems of classical antiquity: the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. Not only did he tackle all three, but he produced bestsellers with his translations. And that is a singular accomplishment in this diminished age when reading itself is on the decline, and when the classics are no longer exactly flying off the shelves.

I'm not surprised at the success of his works, however. I haven't yet made the acquaintance of his Aeneid (but I'm putting it on my wishlist for birthday and/or Christmas gifts), but I've had the immense pleasure of devouring both his Iliad and his Odyssey. I've taught Homer in the original Greek, and I can attest from bitter personal experience that making sense out of his text is not always an easy thing. Making not only good poetry, but good poetry that is both readable and captures something of the flavors of the original, takes a translator with more on the ball than I've got. In addition to the originals, I have four (I think it's four) translations of each of Homer's epics on the shelf behind me in the office: the Classics Club's edition of Samuel Butler's translation, Robert Fitzgerald's poetic rendering, Richmond Lattimore's more-or-less word-for-word translation, and Fagles's.

The last two are the two I'm most likely to pull off the shelf, though for different reasons. The Butler is the one I cut my teeth on as a wee sprout in junior high. It's stilted, archaic, and prosy. (But even with all those faults, it was good enough to keep me turning the pages; I think I'd read both the Iliad and the Odyssey two or three times apiece before I hit high school.) The Fitzgerald I forget how I came by. It may have been a required text for one of my high school classes, or it may have been a Christmas or birthday gift from my folks. I know plenty of people who swear by Fitzgerald's translation, but it's always left me cold. He uses a very odd transliteration scheme for the common names, and while he keeps to a poetic form, I never felt it singing to me. The Lattimore was a college text, and it's the one I reach for if I want a fairly precise rendering in English. Lattimore was no slouch as a translator, but given his decision to stick closely to the original, it can be a little dense in places.

But Fagles's translation, on the other hand, not only sticks to at least a mostly six-beat line (echoing the epic hexameters of Homer's original) and fairly closely to the original text, but manages to make it sing. His is the translation I pull down when I want a reasonably accurate rendering with some oomph behind it.

Of course, that skill makes his passing at a reasonably young age (he was 74) all the more tragic. If we're ever going to get more people reading the good stuff from antiquity, we need people who can turn them into bestsellers. And thus I will lament his death with words from another classical author (the Bard this time) and paraphrase the beginning of a famous soliloquy pronounced by the leading character in a play connected with Scotland,* "[he] should have died hereafter."

*One does never speak the name of the Scottish Play!

If this goes on

(H/t to Robert Heinlein for the post title. I'm not suggesting anything nearly as radical as what he describes in his story of the same name.)

I caught the tail end of a segment on NPR's evening business report tonight as I was driving home from class. It would appear that someone is pulling the RIAA's chain again (or vice-versa) about digital rights management. I'm not sufficiently interested in the details to look them up, but no matter. There must come a day when the RIAA wakes up to and accepts the salient fact that it will never again be able to monopolize the music market in the way that it did 20 or 40 or 60 years ago.

That is, however, unlikely to keep them from trying. Repeatedly.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, another legacy of Bill Clinton's that progressives would do well to forget--but only after erasing it from the statute book--is a godsend to the recording industry. It extends copyright far beyond anything the Framers ever intended, and well beyond the limits necessary to protect intellectual property, and concentrates most of the power in the hands of a very few, very greedy corporate fatcats looking to get fatter still.

It's because of DMCA that when you download something off iTunes, for example, you have a hell of a time copying it to another computer or backing it up in a different format. Once upon a time, when music was produced primarily on vinyl, once you'd bought it, you could do with it whatever you pleased. You could play it on any compatible machine, whether yours or anyone else's. You could resell it when you got tired of it. You could rerecord it on audiotape, either as-is or in combination with a variety of other music, whether for the purpose of enjoying your purchased music in other settings or to create your own compilation.

In the DMCA world, on the other hand, and as far as the recording industry is concerned, when you download an MP3 file from iTunes or Napster or any of the other music repositories online, you're effectively renting or licensing the music, not buying it. They control what you can do with it, and what they're willing to let you do is far less than what we used to be able to do in the bad old days of turntables and cassette decks. Nor are the media companies stopping at music: they're trying to export the same rights-management ideas to the realms of movies and books.

If this keeps up, sometime about 50 years from now, there will be one--and only one--media conglomerate. It will produce, and control, every kind of intellectual property--books, scholarly journals, online databases, music, art, theater, radio, film, television, and any other(s) not yet invented. It will charge users an inordinate fee for access to its materials, which users will gladly pay, lest they be condemned to a colorless life devoid of any means of stimulating the mind. I suspect that, should this unhappy state of affairs come to pass, the profession of "booklegger," first described by Robert Heinlein in, I believe, Between Planets in 1951, will move from fantasy into reality.

La nuit des musées

I'm just back from a lovely dinner by the Lauch in the Petite Venise, where I met an American couple from Cincinnati (they were having dinner at an adjoining table, and their French--and the waitress's English--wasn't quite up to snuff, so I helped out). Afterwards, I meandered back into town for an event the Ministry of Culture was putting on--La nuit des musées ("Museum Night"). All four of the main museums in town were open extra hours tonight, free of charge. There were lectures and expositions in all of them, but I went back to the Musée d'Unterlinden because they were going to have some music.

Harpsichord music, to be exact. They have a 1624 instrument that was recently restored, displayed in a period room, as part of their Alsatian collection. (I believe the instrument was commissioned for a member of the local nobility, but as I foolishly forgot to take my camera with me when I left tonight, I don't have a picture of the instrument or the label to verify that.)

Anyway, they had a student down from the national conservatory in Strasbourg, playing 17th-century pieces on the instrument--and it sounded superb. You'd never guess, at least from the sound, that the thing was 300 years old, though of course the wires and probably the jacks aren't that old. Still, the action seemed quite smooth, the dynamics were good, and both keyboards worked, though she only played one piece that I heard where she used the upper, and never did couple the two of them. Still and all, it was a lovely way to end the evening--an hour of period music, on a period instrument.

More of the same is on the agenda for tomorrow. The Church of St. Matthew, the oldest Protestant church in Colmar, is hosting a "Jour de l'orgue" (Organ Day) tomorrow afternoon. Both the choir and the loft organ will be played, separately and together, beginning at 2 in the afternoon. Guess where I'm going to be then!

Things at the Catholic League must be really dire

Just in time for the start of Holy Week, the self-appointed, self-important blowhard at the head of the so-called "Catholic League" has--yet again--gotten his Opus Dei-approved camel's hair panties in a twist. This time, the object of his outrage is a roughly life-sized sculpture of Jesus done in milk chocolate that was set to be exhibited in a hotel in New York City.

Now I have to admit, as a friend of mine in Left Blogistan has already said, I'm always just a tiny bit suspicious whenever I hear about an artist producing something controversial. It's certainly within the realm of possibility that the artist failed to consider fully the implications of creating a life-sized, anatomically correct nude rendering of Jesus and planning to exhibit it during the holiest week of the Christian church year. It is equally within the realm of possibility (and considerably more likely, in my estimation) that the artist was counting on exactly the reaction he got.

Be that as it may. No less predictable was the outrage of William DonoWho, professional apoplectic where all things Catholic are concerned. (Or at least all things Catholic of which Mr. DonoWho approves, anyway. Funny how he never seems to be all that concerned about people exploiting the poor, stealing from widows and orphans--you know, all that liberal, sentimental, bleeding-heart shit that Jesus Christ actually cared about.) Like a bad penny, DonoWho is the gift that just keeps on giving--even when you wish more than anything else that he'd just shut his hateful piehole and slink away into the obscurity he so richly deserves.

Just as with the artist, though, I am always cynical about the ulterior motives behind any move DonoWho makes. Whenever he pops up on Faux News to spew his venom masquerading as the Gospel truth, I'm sure he gets a surge of donations and subscriptions. The cynic in me cannot help but see a necessary connection between the financial situation at the Catholic League and DonoWho's need to stir the pot a little at the start of a new fiscal quarter.

Justifiably banned in Boston

A huge brouhaha has begun to rage in the media, and also around Left Blogistan, over the perceived terrorist threat in Boston yesterday that turned out to be no more than a "guerrilla marketing" campaign for some bizarre cartoon show I've never even heard of and far less likely to ever watch. Nearly 40 of the devices were recovered from under bridges, affixed to the sides of buildings, and one was found near Fenway Park. The devices were small, but featured circuit boards and protruding wires. The man who installed the devices around Boston claims they are works of art. The Boston authorities beg to differ, and I come down on their side.

For all the howling I've heard about freedom of expression and the First Amendment, I have to say that I think this must have been one of the most ill-conceived and ill-timed stunts in the history of, well, everything. Yes, in retrospect, the authorities in Boston over-reacted to a harmless marketing ploy. But they had no way of knowing it was a marketing ploy when the first calls started coming in!

Moreover, I'd be willing to bet that many of the same people who are now scoffing at Boston mayor Thomas Menino's promise to throw the book at those responsible for tying up one of America's larger cities for most of the day yesterday would have been howling for his head if, as they suggest should have happened yesterday, the police had just ignored the devices and one or more of them turned out to be actual bombs. Americans are probably overly sensitive (thank you, G. W. Bush, et aliae) to the threat of terror attacks on our home soil. But no one in her right mind decides to challenge that sensitivity by planting things that look like they could be explosive devices in the middle of a major city. Not at this time, not in this place. That's just plain stupid.

Tut-ing

I'm taking the day off to go to Chicago (again!) with my mom and my sister. We're going to see the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum, and we have tickets for the first show of the morning. I wanted to get in before the crowds got too thick, but unfortunately that means that I have to be up well before the butt-crack of dawn, so mom and I can catch a train right now that will get us to Chicago in time to meet up with my sister for our 9 a.m. entrance.

Blogging will therefore be light and probably disjointed/distracted when I get back home this afternoon. Unfortunately, photography is not permitted in this exhibit, so I won't even have pictures to share.

Why PBS matters

She goes a bit via the mulberry bush, but she gets there in the end. Here's what Lorraine had to say on the matter over at Culture Kitchen:

I have frequently said to anyone willing to listen to me, that I think the cutting of educational funding since the 1980's is deliberate. An uneducated public is a docile public. A public that runs on video games, t.v., and celebrity magazines is not likely to consider the ramifications of torture.

Why are vast portions of the public discussing missing teens in Aruba and Tom Cruise's latest love interest? Why are we not having public discussions about torture, foreign policy, and what the hell is happening here at home?

Cutting PBS and making prisoners piss in their pants are related phenomena. (Emphasis added)

Go read the rest. It's worth it.