I recall that Charles Rosen wrote somewhere that one of the reasons the string quartet took off in the classical period was that it allowed the playing of all the notes in a dominant seventh chord without double stops. Although this was probably a better explanation for the relative paucity of string trios in the output of Mozart (1) and Beethoven (0). The establishment of four parts as the "standard" scoring for vocal ensembles can be traced back to the 15th century.
On the other hand the second and more famous dining (and conversation) club founded by Dr Johnson had originally 9 members, and gradually grew from that to dozens. Although many including Johnson may have not been entirely happy with the expansion.
> Unless you’re doing some fairly exotic things where you’re finding yourself saying things like
>> Oh yeah the OCR on Japanese driving licenses pops out things like “平成 8”, that’s just how they sometimes say 1996 over there. That’s why we have this in the parser: eras = { "大正": 1912, "昭和": 1926, "平成": 1989 }
>> One of these days we’ll need to add "令和": 2019, but it hasn’t come up yet.
Taiwan also uses the ROC calendar[1] which is directly descended from the regnal calendars of imperial china.
But it's quaint that the Japanese name their year after one person, while us enlightened westerners simply use a calendar where it's simply the 2024th year of the, erm, hmmmph...
Yes, although they are either juvenilia or relatively small pieces that would not greatly change our understanding of the composer in question.
On the other hand there is another piece of music "recovered" this year not by rediscovery but by recomposition/restoration, and it's quite a substantial piece that should provide quite a useful new perspective on the composer[1][2].
>Shakespeare plays were made for broad appeal (he was a professional playwright, after all). Mozart's music was made for the broad appeal.
This statement is misleading because the broad appeal of both Shakespeare and Mozart today is the culmination of centuries of attempts to understand (and misunderstand) them. Calculus can be taught to high schoolers nowadays, but how many scientists in Newton's days could understand the Principia in its entirety?
Not to mention that Shakespeare and Mozart were both able to produce works of the highest sophistication that leaves most of their contemporaries (and many today) baffled. Harold Bloom wrote that the sophisticated word play in Love's Labour's Lost was not surpassed until Joyce, and Mozart's contemporaries complained endlessly about the complex textures in his opera finales. When Mozart wrote piano trios for the public, his publisher cancelled the series after two pieces because they were judged far too difficult for the masses, and when Mozart intended to write some easy piano sonatas at the end of his life, the first (the only one he completed) turned out to be the most difficult he ever wrote.
Invoking the popularity of Shakespeare or Mozart as analogues to Mr Beast reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the longevity of both Shakespeare or Mozart, and leaves unmentioned the extensive body of difficult works on which their reputation rests today.
>In the end, maybe the crucial difference between those who read once and those who reread is an attitude toward time, or more precisely, death. The most obvious argument against rereading is, of course, that there just isn’t enough time. It makes no sense to luxuriate in Flaubert’s physiognomic details over and over again, unless you think you’re going to live forever.
This is a curious argument. Does the author never listen to a song more than once?
> Does the author never listen to a song more than once?
Listening to a 4 minute song isn't much of a time investment compared to reading a book.
Also, songs are entirely different beasts. They're designed to be repetitve — e.g, the chorus — and generally aren't plot-based, so there are no spoilers. And music is often more of a background activity than a foreground activity.
Reading a book isn't much of time investment, either, depending on how quickly you read. I read most novels in just a few evenings (sometimes just a single evening if I'm really into it), and then I'm out of books I'm interested in reading for a while. Even though I re-read all the books that I like multiple times, I still have more reading time than reading material.
When I'm out of books I want to read (which is most of the time), I just switch to some other activity — like watching YouTube or reading my phone — in the hour or two before bed. But these are a lot more disruptive to my sleep than books are.
If I had a policy of never re-reading books, this situation would be a lot worse.
It's not at all surprising since Benjamin's tract was notoriously impenetrable, even to his original examiners, which resulted in his habilitation being rejected. Not to mention that the Origins of the German Trauerspiel only received an english translation in the 70s (and also in the past few years, as your link shows). I would expect someone of uncommon erudition to have read and understood that book, so it's not surprising that the author of the article doesn't mention it. Teaching Benjamin to the HN crowd is like teaching algebraic topology to MFA students, I applaud your effort but I don't think it will have much effect.
Melancholy was quite fashionable in early 17th century England, and many songs of John Dowland were heavily melancholic. This wasn't mentioned in the article, but since it is an extract from a longer book, maybe it appears elsewhere in the book.
All true, yet, I had a whole seminar on it (in English) last century, so, not entirely impenetrable! Few in the class were bilingual but did try to keep the original text up and my instructor was a passionate student and gave us enough context (and a lot of parallel reading) that it did not seem any harder than other opaque "continental" texts I read around the same time, e.g. Bakhtin on dialogism, Habermas, etc.
Looking for a relevant reference definitely confirms your point, I was surprised to find it remains relatively obscure. A tragedy in its own right!
Should have mentioned he's the author of the vastly more widely known The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction which justly has had a recurring turn in the spotlight in recent decades...
>What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.
The late and great Richard Taruskin used this incident to frame a book review in the New Republic[1]. Many people have commented on the location of Bell's stunt, which was chosen to deliberately make a point. I think it's more interesting that Taruskin mentioned a contrasting incident discussed in one of the reviewed books.
>With that in mind, consider Kramer's cleverly titled final chapter, "Persephone's Fiddle," which is largely devoted to--guess what?--a violinist Kramer once heard busking unaccompanied Bach in the New York subway. Unlike Joshua Bell at L'Enfant Plaza, this fiddler drew a rapt crowd:
>It was early fall, the start of a new academic semester, and the performer on the platform--Times Square, my usual spot--looked like a music student trying to pick up some extra cash for books or scores. She was young, in her early twenties, blonde, attractive, and well dressed, which may help explain the unusual amount of attention she was getting from a crowd that in normal circumstances wouldn't give a busker a second glance.
>Or maybe it was the music. . . .
>Kramer goes on to speculate about what it was in Bach that so captivated fifteen or twenty listeners in that noisy atmosphere, and moved them at the end to "a moment of complete silence followed by a smattering of applause." My question, rather, is whether you noticed the difference between the scene Kramer describes and the one that the Washington Post reporter engineered for Joshua Bell. It couldn't be simpler, or more crucial.
>Bell was playing at the entrance to the station, where trains cannot be seen and everyone is hurrying to catch one. Kramer's little Persephone was playing down on the platform, where riders are apt to be at (enforced) leisure. Little Persephone knew that she needed an appropriate location to get across her message ("Isn't this beautiful?" or "Can I have some money?" or whatever you like). The Post reporter chose the least appropriate location possible. One of them was trying to make money, the other was trying to make a point. And Bach served them both equally well.
A fine article on the role of timbre which is indeed discussed little compared to the focus on harmony and form for classical music. Charles Rosen gave one possible reason for this neglect in his book "Piano Notes", where he traces it to a philosophical prejudice of composers from Hadyn onwards against variety in tone colour and in favour of more abstract qualities.
> The utility of the piano for composing was its neutral and uniform tone color: in theory (although not in reality) the tone quality of the bass is the same as the treble. In any case, the change in tone color over the whole range of the piano is, or should be, gradual and continuous (there are breaks, of course, when the notes go from one string in the bass to two and then to three in the treble). The monochrome piano might be used therefore just for its arrangements of pitches, and the quality of the sound could-absurdly in many cases-be considered secondary.
> What made it possible for composers to refuse to acknowledge the difference on the piano between treble and bass and leave whatever problems arose to be solved by the performer was the fact that the change in tone color over the span of the keyboard is not like the leap from a bassoon to a flute but continuous and very gradual when the instrument is properly voiced. These imperceptible gradations are the result of a deliberate policy of a unified sonority on the part of musicians and instrument makers. All attempts over the history of piano construction to incorporate anything analogous to the picturesque changes of registration in the organ and the harpsichord had little success, were not exploited by composers, and were finally abandoned. Radical contrasts of tone color were traded for the possibility of making a gradual crescendo or diminuendo. This was a decision that took place at the same time as the preeminence accorded to the string quartet over all other forms of chamber music; that, too, emphasized the importance of a unified tone color. Chamber music with wind instruments, while the occasion for several masterpieces, became the exception, an exotic form. That is why the use of colorful sonorities in the orchestra has so often been considered somewhat vulgar, as if calling attention to the sound were paradoxically to detract from the music. The prestige given to pure string sonority is part of the asceticism of nineteenth-century high culture. Contrasts of tone color were given a significantly lower place in the hierarchy of musical elements. This is one reason that only the piano repertory rivals the string quartet as the most respectable medium for private and semiprivate music-making from Haydn to Brahms.
It should be mentioned that "old" violins that are still used today have all been substantially rebuilt to accommodate later repertories. There is a lot of difference between an early Baroque violin and a late 19th century violin including the fingerboard and the type of strings, and only a few museum strads that have not been played have retained their original configuration. One benefit of the early music movement that took off in the second half of the 20th century was realising that the "old" and "original" instruments weren't actually that old or original after all, and new baroque violins had to be made from scratch to attempt to reproduce what they would have sounded back like in the 17th and 18th centuries.
It's more than that - the bass bar on modern instruments is substantially heavier, because string tension with modern wire wound strings is higher than baroque era gut strings; the older instruments are more lightly built.
The tone you get with gut strings is completely different than with modern strings - more complex, more resonances, but a modern style instrument will deaden that somewhat, you really want a period instrument to take advantage of gut strings.
On the other hand the second and more famous dining (and conversation) club founded by Dr Johnson had originally 9 members, and gradually grew from that to dozens. Although many including Johnson may have not been entirely happy with the expansion.