A Portuguese Synchronicity

This is the 4002nd post at The Music Salon and I have enjoyed the project enormously. Though I'm not posting much these days, I don't think the journey is quite over.

This is going to be one of those utterly uncategorizable posts I put up every now and then. Synchronicity is one of those odd ideas that one only runs into with Carl Jung, The Police and. well, me this week.

First of all, I've been looking for some light reading to take to bed at night. I'm sleepy so I wanted something that didn't require following a plot or characters or anything. Then I remembered the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888 - 1935), who was a very gifted and very strange writer who wrote, among many other things The Book of Disquiet a "factless autobiography." Here is a sample:

I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. To me, anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness. I only ever desired what was beyond my imaginings. All I ever asked of life was that it should pass me by without my even noticing it. Of love I demanded only that it never be anything more than a distant dream. In my own inner landscapes, all of them unreal, it was always the faraway that attracted me, and the blurred outlines of aqueducts, almost lost in the distance of my dream landscapes, imposed a dreamy sweetness on other parts of the landscape, a sweetness that enabled me to love them.

I find that the perfect thing to read in bed at night.

Another synchronicity is that I have been reading Spinoza (1632 - 1677) lately. He was of Portuguese Jewish descent and his family moved to Holland in the 16th century. His views were so unorthodox that he was banished from the Jewish community when he was twenty-four. He believed that Nature and God were the same thing. God comprises in himself all reality. Last year I read his Ethics, using a geometrical method, and I just finished the chapters on him in Copleston's History of Philosophy. Another very strange fellow.

Finally, I stumbled across a Portuguese song. I put it up a few days ago, but I want to put it up again. It seems to me that all Portuguese music is sad, but this song seems like an islet of sadness floating on a great, deep ocean of sadness.

And here are the lyrics in English:

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/ao-longe-o-mar-far-away-sea.html

It's been a strange week...

Today's Listening

 A really lovely Portuguese song:

Some unassuming Buxtehude on clavichord:

Guitarists will know this as the gigue to the 4th Lute Suite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRk3THXxeHk

Sokolov and a Schubert Impromptu:

I guess all my regular readers realize that whenever I put up a musical performance there is a socio-politico-logico subtext. Absent any actual words of course. The subtext here, as it often is, is that posturing, pretentious, pandering, pseudo enthusiasm is both awful and seemingly the norm these days. Please, not!

Healthcare in Mexico

As you can tell from the paucity of postings, it has been One Hell of a Month! It rained heavily and was overcast for nearly all of the past month. This is bad for doing photoshoots and for showing houses. Then, a week ago, I came down with a nasty bug: sore throat, very bad cough, headache, body aches and difficulty sleeping. I couldn't take any days off because I had clients. Yesterday morning I got up and it was worse than ever. At 8:30 I emailed my doctor with the symptoms. Fifteen minutes later (!) she emailed back saying that we needed to test for COVID and Flu. By noon a male nurse was at my house doing the tests. The results were available in just a few minutes: negative for both. So what I had was a bacterial infection of the throat. He had with him the appropriate antibiotic and I immediately took the first one. It is now the next morning and I am about to take the second pill (one pill a day for seven days). Already there is a real improvement. I mentioned to the nurse that I wished this kind of service was available in Canada. He just looked at me quizzically: "Why not?" Ah yes, why not indeed!

The cost of this extremely prompt service including the home visit, tests and antibiotic? $1,590 MXN or $86 US.

I don't know what the psychic cost of the long waiting lists in Canada comes to--about forty weeks for an MRI, even longer to see a specialist--but I'm sure it is significant. As soon as my doctor emailed back I started to feel better.

Looking for a visual for this post, it's been so rainy that I hardly have any. Here is one taken from my terrace of a fullish moon just after dawn:

 This might be a suitable piece of music:

Nothing Funner than Vivaldi

Just to round things out today, here is a delightful concerto movement by Vivaldi:

 

What I read this year, part 2

•  Handbook of Poetic Forms ed. Ron Padgett 208 pp
• Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky 580 pp
• The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness Husserl 126 pp (I didn't read the appendices)
• From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life Jacques Barzun 802 pp
• From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays G. E. M. Anscombe 246 pp (only read 2/3)
• Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo Plato 154 pp
• The Bacchae Euripides (Kindle)
• The Iliad Homer trans. Fagles 614 pp
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke (abridged) 133 pp
• Anatomy of Criticism Northrop Frye 354 pp
• Explaining Postmodernism Stephen Hicks 266 pp
• A History of Philosophy volume V Modern Philosophy: The British Philosophers from Hobbes to Hume Frederick Copleston S. J. 394 pp
• The Divine Comedy: Inferno and Purgatorio Dante 581 pp
• The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years Bernard Lewis 408 pp

The last I am just finishing now. Not counting Kindle, a total of 4,866 pages. Total for the year: 13,513 pages. Take that, W. H. Auden! From the age of eleven when I discovered my first, tiny, municipal library, I have read several books a week--at a guess, between three and five. Nowadays I read more serious and longer books, so I might be down to one or two a week. Even less in the case of challenging reading such as The Iliad or Crime and Punishment. Philosophy is a special case as it has to be read much slower and often, several times.

Over the last year I have read, not counting light fiction, thirty-six books from 126 pages to over 1,200 pages. That's 260 pages a week or perhaps the equivalent of one book. Mind you, I'm not counting light fiction. I probably read a couple of those in a week.

What about comprehension? In the case of Sappho or Catullus it is probably around 90 to 100%. In the case of Anscombe, a leading pupil of Wittgenstein, around 20%.

Of the books above, the most difficult reads were certainly Anscombe and Husserl. Dante and Dostoevsky were no walk in the park and Copleston was pretty dense. The moderate reads were Homer, Lewis, Barzun and Frye. No what you might categorize as easy reads. The Platonic dialogues were not difficult, but I have read them several times.

Depending on your interests, I could recommend all of them with the exception of the book on poetic forms by Padgett. This was written as a handbook for teachers in the public education system which likely accounts for its lo-cal, thin gruel content. If you want to know stuff, read Frye.

Did AI Just Nuke Popular Music?

Rick Beato certainly has the evidence:

Yes, a complete neophyte can sit down with some AI programs and in a couple of minutes "create" a new, superficially plausible pop song. What can we draw from this? As Rick says, this is no substitute from actually learning how to play an instrument and, probably more important, learning how to create, invent, discover (whatever the appropriate verb is) music. I've been ranting against computer derived music for years, but this is a kind of nadir. My view for a long time is that much pop music, at least the commercially successful stuff, is little more than an industrial product. As Rick comments in a different video, no, pop stars do not even write the lyrics to their songs, so they are in no way a personal expression. I rather doubt that most pop music could even be considered an aesthetic object. It's more of an acoustic equivalent to valium or, in the case of heavy metal, amphetamines.

Let's get that stuff out of our ears by listening to some Bach.

Professor Timothy Jackson Vindicated

The dispute between Professor Philip Ewell and Professor Timothy Jackson has come to a conclusion with a massive out of court settlement in favor of Jackson.

More than four years after suing the University of North Texas for punishing him in a spat over alleged racism in classical music, distinguished research professor Timothy Jackson accepted a $725,000 settlement with the taxpayer-funded school in a legal fight that pitted embattled state Attorney General Ken Paxton against former state Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell.

The parties filed a joint stipulation of dismissal earlier this month, signed by Paxton's office as counsel to UNT and Mitchell as co-counsel to Jackson. The settlement also gives back Jackson the music theory journal he founded and edited and even reduces his teaching load.

We have certainly discussed this case and these scholars before on the blog. And now, presumably, we are even able to discuss the work of Heinrich Schenker without being banished as supporters of racism!