The Thursday Quiz is an "Is It or Isn't It" game. From the list of twelve items, your job is to determine whether each IS or ISN'T a true example of the week's category.
Remember always, the rules are the same no matter where you're from:
No research, Googling, Wikiing, or use of reference books. The Thursday Quiz is a POP quiz. Violators will have their language confounded.
This Week's Category is very cosmopolitan!
Words in European Languages
Some of the following sets are equivalent common words in seven European languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, and Finnish. In the other sets, things have been twisted and warped in the traditional michael5000 fashion.
Clarification: if a set of words is bogus, it is predominantly bogus. There are no sets, for instance, where only the Finnish word is wrong. Shame on you for even thinking of such a thing.
For the accurate sets, provide the equivalent word in English. For the bogus sets, just mark 'em as "bogus"!
So sometime around the time of the first world war, something happens to classical music. In a way, it dies. In another way, it stays on life support but gets filed away in a museum. In yet another way, it is merely joined by a variety of other competing musical forms. Or, people just catch on that it had been an elitist art form all along, and begin acknowledging more populist forms of musical expression. And what really happened, of course, is all of the above.
So, what was it that knocked classical music off of its throne? Geez, it’s a million things. Take your pick:
Early records, which can only hold a few minutes of music on a side, work better for the short forms of jazz and country music than they do for sprawling symphonies.
The attention that composers had been paying to folk musics lead to people taking folk musics seriously. African American and Jewish American folk music, in particular, start amalgamating into the various forms of jazz, some of which eventually mutate and recombine with the music of the British Isles to spawn the various forms of rock, and here we are.
Saxophones, trap kits, and the electric guitar.
Increasingly professionalization among musicians make fielding an orchestra, never a cheap proposition, simply too expensive to support by ticket sales. Orchestras consequently become charitable institutions.
The accumulation of outstanding, enduring repertory over 250 years leaves very little room for new composers to make a splash.
There are only so many interesting noises you can make with a standard orchestra, and many of them have already been made.
And these are just obvious things that pop into my head. Somebody who actually studied the question could probably come up with a lot more.
Perhaps because Classical Music was losing its mass appeal, but certainly contributing to its decline, were the many 20th Century composers who wrote highly theoretical music intended for the admiration of other musical intellectuals. By ignoring (or, in many cases, oozing contempt for) the tastes of wider audiences, these composers and their supporters pretty much shot down any hopes for ongoing relevance in symphonic music, at least in the second half of the 20th Century.
OK, you already knew all that. What I’m here to tell you is, it ain’t all bad. Even the most abstruse of the academic composers – I’m looking at you, Anton Webern – were making arguably interesting experiments, and some of the experiments paid off. A gleaning is below.
The Usual Problem of Nomenclature
There is, as always, the question of what to call this stuff. I’m going with “post-Romantic,” to indicate “music composed after, and no longer of, the poorly named ‘Romantic Era.’” This beats other labels people use, like “Contemporary” (which is pretty ridiculous for describing, say, The Rite of Spring, written when our great-grandfathers were young) or “Modern” (a label which is so variously used as to have no meaning at all) or “20th Century” (which is becoming ever more tenuous as the 21st Century trudges on).
Listening Selections
1913: Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring. The first time you hear The Rite of Spring, it sounds as crazy and anarchic as it did to the audience at its première, who famously rioted. As you get to know it a little better, it starts to sound more like regular old Romanticism, except more so. Stravinsky throws all of the extreme contrasts, unusual rhythms, and surprising key changes at you that he can think of, and like many early 20th Century composers he stops worrying so much about whether all of the notes are actually IN a key. The result is pretty dissonant in places, but also full of a fierce, fiery energy. Good to work out to.
1944: Copland, Appalachian Spring. Copland’s music is immediately identifiable for an expansive, open aural quality, and since he is the undisputed king of the American composers, his sound has come to sound highly American to us. Copland had a tremendous impact on movie scores, and is worth listening to if only so you can notice when background music is manipulating your emotions by emulating him. Appalachian Spring is a big friendly golden retriever among the Dobermans of mid-century music. It’s evocative, accessible, and frequently inspiring. Goes down smooth.
1959: Malcolm Arnold, Guitar Concerto. More angular and dissonant than Appalachian Spring, Arnold’s Guitar Concerto has enough rhythmic and tonal challenges to make you feel like a real musical brainiac. At it’s heart, though, it’s a gentle, upbeat piece with good intentions and some heartbreakingly lyrical melodies. Can be hard to find, but is worth the hunt.
1957: Shostakovich, Piano Concerto #2. Soviet officials insisted that all compositions must be accessible to The Worker, and the results included a lot of stirring patriotic dreck. A handful of Soviet composers pushed the envelope hard enough, however, that we can get a sense of what the twentieth century might have sounded like if composers in the West had remembered that people were listening. The Second Piano Concerto is the classical music equivalent of one of those parties where you are already kind of tipsy before the guests start arriving. By the rollicking finale, you are up on the kitchen table, dancing like a crazy person. But in a good way.
1954: Liebermann, Concerto for Jazz Band and Orchestra. Twelve-Tone composition is a fine example of how bluntly obtuse the musical establishment got in the early 20th Century. What happened was this: composers noticed a trend away from “tonality” as Classicism morphed into the early Romantic era morphed into the late Romantic era. In other words, composers were less and less concerned with keeping all of the notes inside a given key, and were more and more content with greater and greater dissonance. Determined to liberate music from key altogether, Twelve-Tone theorists elaborated a system where every note in the harmonic scale had to be used in a given order, throughout a piece. It’s very systematic, and as a theory it has a tidiness, a completeness, that is very seductive. That it necessarily sounds like shit is entirely beside the point.
Liebermann's Concerto for Jazz Band and Orchestra, to my knowledge the only listenable piece in the genre, proves that compelling pop rhythms and sheer energy can overcome even Twelve-Tone composition.
1987: Glass, Violin Concerto. A lot of people really dislike Phillip Glass, and I’m really not sure why. He is not my favorite composer, but the style of minimalism that he represents is really quite approachable. Minimalism can mean a lot of different things, but in this case it means the development of complex musical texture through the repetition and slow evolution of simple melodies and rhythms. In the Violin Concerto, Glass is at his most lyrical and evocative.
Advanced students may wish to check out John Adams’ minimalist opera “Nixon in China” (also 1987) or Terry Riley’s quasi-improvisational “In C” (1964). Extremely advanced students might seek out Branca’s Symphony #6 (“Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven”) (1989), scored for a growling ensemble of electric guitars.
1976: Gorecki, Symphony #3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”). In this piece, Gorecki represents another kind of minimalism, a typically slow-moving, stripped down music with spare melodies in austere settings. Often called “mystic minimalism,” this style never gets better than in Gorecki’s Third, a setting of three tragic poems for symphony and soprano soloist. Starting so quietly that it is almost inaudible, the piece takes around ten minutes to build up any kind of power, but once it gets there it packs a cumulative wallop. It is in parts almost painfully beautiful.
If you like mystic minimalism, you will want to check out the music of its leading practitioner, the Estonian Arvo Part. But please, not around me. To my ears, Part is new age music minus the breathtaking excitement.
2006: Jóhann Jóhannsson: IBM1401, A User’s Manual. Johannsson samples reel-to-reel tapes of musical noises created by his father on an early electronic computer, plus recorded passages from the user's manual for the same machine, and integrates them with a string orchestra in a piece of surprising depth, beauty, and emotional power. Accessible, thought-provoking, moving, and more than a little quirky, it is modern symphonic music at its best. Worth having just for the smug sensation of being smart and sophisticated enough to own some 21st Century classical music.
That's It
And that pretty much wraps it up for Classical Wednesdays. Hope you liked the series. Listen to classical music sometimes! It's cool.
Leftists in Europe in the early 20th Century widely expected that when war broke out, the working class soldiers of the various national armies would ignore the orders of their officers, rising up together to overthrow the old order and institute a socialist paradise. A pipe dream? Sure. But it is also well known that soldiers in World War I frequently cooperated to minimize the number of casualties on both sides, and occasionally had to be disciplined back into a proper killing spirit after pernicious outbreaks of peace and international brotherhood.
The idea that class unity trumps national unity when left to its own devices is what Renoir is getting at in The Grand Illusion. In this odd and episodic film, which is -- believe it or not -- basically a screwball comedy about the WWI Prisoner of War experience, upper-class officers fraternize with their social peers on the other side while casting dismissive asides about the worthless enlisted men and commoners. Among the working and merchant classes, relationships between erstwhile combatants range from mock-belligerent to cordial, and late in the film we get a discrete but indisputable French/German love affair. Filmed in 1937, with war gathering again in Europe, the film can be read as a plea not to subject natural human connections to the unnatural severing of war a second time.
It is hard to judge The Grand Illusion fairly from today's vantage point. It was an influential film, for one thing, and many of its scenes have been quoted and replicated in a hundred movies since. A sequence about an attempt to tunnel out of a POW camp, for instance, seems kind of cliched and tired now but was a fresh and presumably pretty exciting idea at the time. The greatest unkindness that was wrought on The Grand Illusion, really, is "Hogan's Heroes." Once you've seen the screwball comedy of that old sitcom's wacky Stalag 13, it is much harder to watch Renoir's infinitely more ambitious screwball comedy with an open mind. Or, in my case, without periodically launching noisily into the "Hogan's Heroes" march. Mrs.5000 is a very patient woman.
Plot: Captured French officers conspire to break out of POW camps in order to rejoin the fight. This in itself is an act of almost delusional patriotism, as the camps are more comfortable and laid back than most hotels in peacetime. Hijinx don't ensue so much as abound; filmed a couple of decades before the birth of the TV sitcom, Grand Illusion proceeds through two hours of what are essentially short skits, most culminating in some sort of gag.
Visuals: Did you know that Renoir, the famous director, was the son of Renoir, the famous painter? Neither did I! They were a visual family, and Grand Illusion is certainly a good-looking and well-framed moving picture. In several scenes, moving objects in the foreground pass off the screen, revealing interesting things behind them. It's a neat visual trick.
Dialogue: In French, German, and occasional English, with subtitles. The dialogue seems carefully crafted to reveal the class identities of the various characters.
Prognosis: Quite watchable, but only of particular interest to those with an enthusiasm for films of the era or genre.
This week marked the publication of the long-awaited (in certain circles) 500 Handmade Books, from Lark Books. It's reasonably priced, it offers a vast number of lovely and amazing things to look at, and it is a great introduction to the current creative ferment in the book arts.
And, perhaps more to the point, it features:
two (2) pieces by the lovely, erudite, and frighteningly talented Mrs.5000!
two (2) pieces by the (if I may) lovely, erudite, and frighteningly talented L&TM5K blog vice-dork, Fingerstothebone!
one (1) series (Pamela Paulrud's Book Stones), a piece from which I happen to own!
If you were to purchase 500 Handmade Books, or to obtain it from your local library, you would be feasting your eyes on such work as Mrs.5000's The Winter Palace.
Note, of course, that both Mrs.5000 and Fingertothebone go by their alternative "street" names in the bookarts world.
Speaking of Books
The Reading List project never sleeps, of course. With My Name is Red crossed off the list, I decided to mix things up by selecting two (2) new titles to work on more or less simultaneously. Using random numbers offered up by L&TM5K blog Dork G and others, the two titles selected were Dominion, a treatise on human-animal relations nominated by Rex Parker in the non-fiction category, and Beowulf.
Feeling that Beowulf is in its true essence a text that one studies in school (it was probably written specifically with that role in mind by prescient medieval pedants) I tried to enlist an English-lit type from among the readership to ASSIGN me Beowulf -- to set deadlines, make me answer specific essay questions, and so on -- but she declined on the basis that she had never herself read the poem. Idealistic of her, I thought. If any of you other English-lit types want to leap into the breach, I'm sure you will find me an attentive and motivated student, more than capable of adequately paraphrasing all that I glean from the Wiki. Otherwise, I'll assign myself the damn thing.
Note: while searching for this Beowulf image, I stumbled onto the small but enthusiastic realm of Beowulf porn. The famous Rule 34, which states that "if you can think of it, there is already internet porn about it," is truly as close as we can come to an axiom of human behavior.
The Looming Content Crisis
Yesterday, while you were out celebrating national independence, I killed off the Forgotten Lands project. Plus, we're running out of Classical Wednesdays. Guess I better get to watching some Great Movies...
This is the final installment of the Forgotten Lands project.
All sixteen of the Forgotten Lands -- their entries here on L&TM5K, Cartophiliac's maps, and anything else that might happen to them in the future -- are now indexed here.
If your own Remembered Land is having its national holiday today, I hope you have a great one!!
Economy: Zagria is an agricultural exporter, especially of grains, apples, grapes, and cheese. A coal/steel based heavy industrial sector suffers from aging and obsolete factories and facilities and from international competition. Oil fields underlying the southern plains of Svisla province provide Zagria’s most important source of foreign exchange.
Zagria is an anomaly in Eastern Europe. In this region of the Earth, as in no other, countries represent the territorial aspirations of cultures. The Poles have their Poland, the Slovaks their Slovakia, the Magyars their Hungary, and the half-dozen former Yugoslavs their half-dozen former Yugoslav republics. Yet within this mosaic of nation-states sits heterogeneous Zagria. Polyglot (Hungarian, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian), religiously inclusive (Catholic, Orthodox, Islamic, and, surprisingly, Lutheran), Zagria is easily as culturally diverse as any other similarly sized piece of land on Earth.
For all of this, many observers find Zagrian society is disappointingly prosaic. Its many ethnic groups have neither walled themselves off into discrete enclaves, nor exhibited an unusual degree of mingling or intermarriage. There is little sense of animosity or contention between the people of this land, but neither is there any widespread sense of patriotism or national unity (Menillini, The New Nationalism).
Since independence, Zagria has gone through prime ministers at a rate of more than one per year, with parliamentary coalitions in constant flux and no political party able to maintain a stable majority. Post-communist economic stagnation and a widespread culture of corruption and bribery have created fertile grounds for a shadow oligarchy of ostentatious gangster-businessmen and their well-dressed thugs. To the average Zagrian of any culture, such things have long since ceased to excite much anger. “In Zagria,” wrote Brevograd’s great novelist Gnadyy Zvorić, “public life is as constant as weather, and as fruitfully cursed.”
Flag: Based on the shields of the medieval dukes of Zagria, the flag is a simple black diagonal through a field of dark green.
Economy: Major exports include Meditteranian agricultural products (grapes, dates, wheat), fish, and some oil. There is a growing industrial sector, of which leading products are glass, machine parts, and sporting equipment.
A fertile coastal land nestled against the mountains of Asia Minor, Bahar has always been, as Woodrow Wilson once observed, “too rich to be free. She is forever coveted by her mighty neighbors” (Greenberg, American Mediterranean Policy and Practice, 1900-1940). Throughout recorded history, Bahar has been subject to a parade of empires: Greek, Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, British, French, Italian (during the Second World War), and finally, until 1971, the British again.
Because of this “Colonial Tradition,” neither the world at large nor the native inhabitants are accustomed to thinking of Bahar as an independent country. Still absent on most modern maps, Bahar is one of only four countries not to host a U.S. diplomatic mission in 2008. Even within the capital, Djiranda, one sees few national flags or symbols, and “arguments in the tobacco bars and town plazas are more likely to be about the relative merits of football teams or fishing grounds than about national politics” (Fisher, Bahar and the Colonial Tradition).
Djiranda is one of a string of walled, white-washedk towns built along the Mediterranean shore. Although modern stores and factories have been built inland, the streets and buildings within town walls look much as they have for centuries. Few tourists know to look for Bahar, but those who have visited typically rhapsodize over the beauty and charm of these ancient but vibrant ports.
Wine pressed from the grapes grown on the south facing slopes of Bahar’s coastal hills has been declared among the world’s best by many leading authorities. Unfortunately, because production is still small-scale and largely structured to supply the domestic market, few enthusiasts have had a chance to sample these vintages.
Flag: he three colors of Bahar’s flag are green, white, and black. The green and white represent, respectively, Islam and purity. The black field, according to government literature, represents “our national mourning for four millennia of imperialist oppression.” When informed of this symbolism by this writer, one typical Baharian shrugged and replied “independent or not, it matters little.”
