Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Glenn Gould – Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor op. 31/2 “The Tempest”
Good music is really extraordinarily good.
And if that doesn’t convince you, how about this:
Twelve Tones, by Vi Hart
So far as I’m concerned, this is a must-watch.
Some thoughts I had as I watched:
One thing about learning a new language is that it requires the acquisition and understanding of new patterns because two lanauages don’t really fully match up any more than the lives of people in the same line of work in the same village match up: there are commonalities, but there are also differences difficult to match.
A mild example from this morning: Esperanto has the word kuri, to run, which matches the English verb quite well: replacing to run with kuri works well: “He runs” and “Li kuras” mean the same thing..
But I could not think of a simple Esperanto verb that would match to walk. There is marŝi, but that definitely includes the idea of walking in step — it matches “to march,” not “to walk.” And there’s promeni, to walk to see sights or for exercise, but it has for me overtones of “to promenade,” “to stroll,” and “to amble.” I wanted a neutral word, in the same way that “to run” is neutral.
I posted a question in the Lernu forum, asking for an Esperanto verb that means “iri per piedoj” (to go by foot) or “iri piede” (to go footwise). An immediate response: piediri. And that does seem to match, and it also illustrates how in Esperanto (as in Forth) one constructs new words to do the exact job you want, whereas in English one must dig through the drawer of words to find the closest match and perhaps be satisfied with a phrase — though it should be pointed out that the poet’s role is to take current words and, through context, stretch them to take new shapes and do new jobs. By putting a word in a new context, the poet fills it with a different color and charges it with a different energy. And not only poets: writers of fiction and drama do the same — think of some of the significant words in (say) “Death of a Salesman,” or “Macbeth,” or some stories of Raymond Carver, and how the impact of those words in that context differs from their workaday use.
A second thought was how the real numbers, being a continuum, contain many numbers and properties that we can never know — very interesting numbers and very interesting properties, if we could only know them. I suppose one of the reasons mathematicians are constantly generalizing is that moving to a more general level you can get a kind of overarching “knowing” of a class and its structure that frees you of having to know the individual elements.
At any rate, I found it a fascinating video, and as I write this I’m listing to Schoenberg (via YouTube), and his music — at least this piece — is indeed very nice.
Enjoy.
Online exhibits from Stanford University Libraries
It turns out that there are many online exhibits to peruse.
Social-distanced symphony
Here is the first few minutes (most famously used in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’) played by musicians from 40 different homes under the UK lockdown, conducted from Sweden by Tobias Ringborg.
