Tasting the Lees

The 19th century is like a giant duffle bag stuffed with art, literature, music, culture, exploration, science and really big symphonies. Just coming to grips with how rich and deep the cultural soil is, would be itself a daunting task. And they did it all without AI! The century really extends from the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 (amply chronicled in Victor Hugo's great 19th century novel, Les Misèrables) to the onset of The Great War, later known as World War I, in 1914. In between was a century of relative peace under the umbrella of the Pax Britannica. Incidentally, a great narrative that sums up WWI rather well is Robert Graves' Goodby to All That recounting his experience as a line officer in the trenches.

Between those two events, the century glows with prosperity, peace and cultural exuberance mixed with an underlying sadness that perhaps all this will not last--as it did not. Two symphonies from the very beginning of the century sum up both the exuberance and the misgivings and both are by Franz Schubert. First, the Great C Major, is a paean to exuberance:

And for the misgivings, the bittersweet depths of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony:

As a musician, I tend to look to music to illustrate history while others might choose art or literature.

The musical wealth of the 19th century is unsurpassed by any other era. The emotive beauty of Chopin, the brilliance of Liszt, the depth of Brahms, the rustic grace of Dvořák, the magnificence of Bruckner and the host of other talents. And when you consider literature, the harvest is even greater. I'm not qualified to say anything about 19th century painting and sculpture, but I suspect the same is true there.

The obvious causes of this efflorescence would include the unprecedented prosperity brought to Europe by the Industrial Revolution when for the first time in history the masses began to experience true prosperity. The end of the Napoleonic wars were the end of centuries of sectarian violence among a host of religious and cultural divisions. So, peace, a bit of material prosperity and, most important, some leisure to devote to the arts and science.

I'm not sure I can explain why it all came to an end, perhaps we might consult The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler or From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun. In any case, it did come to an end and all that expansive and glorious art and culture was replaced by something smaller, colder and more bitter: modernism. I love modernism in music and art, but I think we have to accept that it is a decline. For a musical illustration we could pick an example from Bruckner:

And for comparison, one from Bartók:

Both great works, but one is a kind of pinnacle and the other is a descent, though a wonderful one.

This is more of a sketch than an argument. I tend to come up with ideas that would really require a full-length book to fully illustrate and defend. But I don't have time for that, so mere hints will have to do.

We can hope that the next stage will be some kind of renaissance...

Let's Have a New Renaissance

Adam Walker is a YouTube figure I have. been following for a while and he has many interesting things to say:

The Music Salon was not founded with any of these things in mind, but actually it functioned for a number of years as a nexus of self-learning. I think Adam is correct that we may be seeing the first faint glints of a renaissance in the humanities and we are certainly in need of one.

Lost and Found

I just started re-reading the Iliad by Homer. I don't re-read it as often as the Odyssey, but every few years. I have the translation by Robert Fagles which comes with a good introduction, pronunciation guide, maps and so on.

The Iliad is around 600 pages and it is amazing that it likely started out as an oral composition, only later written down when the Greeks adopted a version of the Phoenician alphabet. That means that originally the Iliad (and the Odyssey) were performed from memory. That would be a remarkable feat. Still, there are a few people around who have large chunks of Shakespeare from memory.

The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer and the Old Testament are the foundational documents of Western Civilization and they exist today because they were faithfully copied over and over by generation after generation of scribes for the last three thousand years. We are also pretty lucky in that a selection of Greek tragedy and comedy were also copied along with pretty well everything Plato wrote and a good selection of Aristotle. Individual works by Herodotus and Thucydides also survived. But, the sad truth is that it is estimated that ninety percent of classical literature is lost. For good, unless some of it turns up in the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls.

One particularly keenly felt loss is ninety percent of the poetry of Sappho. But we can be grateful for the survival of a very large chunk of the poetry of Catullus which I just started re-reading in this edition:

Catullus is the lyric poet of Roman sexuality and the closer you look at that mosaic the more troubling it becomes! But what I want to recount is just how fortuitous the survival of much if not most of his poetry was. He was born around 84 BC in Verona and died around 54 BC. He was a friend of Cicero and other leading figures and widely renowned as a poet. After his death he was admired by later Roman poets but then disappeared from history for a thousand years. All that we now have, enough to fill two hundred pages, comes from a manuscript that had lain in the Cathedral Library of Verona since at least the tenth century. It was discovered in the 14th century and the story goes that it had been used to wedge a barrel of wine which was responsible for frequent lacunae in the text. This manuscript went missing, but not before two manuscript copies were made. They are the only sources of Catullus' poetry except for a few quotes in other writers. Poem 18 is an illustration of both Catullus' humor and his bawdy:

18

I dedicate, I consecrate this grove to thee,

Priapus, whose home & woodlands are at Lampsacus;

there, among the coastal cities of the Hellespont,

they chiefly worship thee:

their shores are rich in oysters!

Here are three contemporary settings of Catullus sung in Latin:

Historical Note

I'm doing research for a follow-up post on Music, War, and Philosophy and I stumbled across something quite remarkable. In 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War Bertrand Russell, one of the most prominent English philosophers of the first half of the 20th century, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, probably the most important philosopher of the 20th century, exchanged some correspondence. Russell had sent to Wittgenstein a copy of his newly-published Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and Wittgenstein had sent his newly-completed and corrected text of the Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus to Russell asking him to contribute an introduction and help him to find a publisher.

Now what is worth noting here is that the work of Russell and Wittgenstein on logic and the foundations of mathematics (along with the earlier work of Gottlob Frege) was the first advance on the logical treatises of Aristotle, written 2,300 years before. Another important fact is that Russell was a pacifist while Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian Army as soon as the war broke out. In fact, he wrote much of his book while serving as a lieutenant in an artillery regiment. Despite being on opposite sides of a global conflict they were not only close friends but Russell had chosen Wittgenstein to carry on his work of fixing the misunderstandings of philosophy.

But what is really mind-boggling is that they had both written their foundational works while in prison! Russell wrote the Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy while in Brixton Prison for publicly lecturing against the war and Wittgenstein sent him the Tractatus while in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp.

Incidentally, the Tractatus, one of the most bizarre books of philosophy ever written, consists of seven numbered propositions starting with 1 The world is everything that is the case. It ends with 7 Of what one cannot speak, about that one must be silent. Except for a note on page one about the numbering system, there are no footnotes. There is also no other editorial matter apart from a brief preface. No bibliography. Each proposition has numbered sub-propositions:

2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state-of-things then the possibility of the state-of-things must already be prefigured in the thing.

When it was first published no-one, not Frege, not even Russell, really understood it, but after a few years, in June 1929, Cambridge awarded him a PhD, based on the Tractatus as his dissertation.

Times have certainly changed... 

For anyone interested, there is an excellent new translation out last year.

Speaking of History

Where I live in Mexico is one of the "colonial silver cities" which means one of the cities in Central Mexico that were established by the Spanish in order to mine the extensive silver deposits. By the way, the sending of enormous amounts of gold and silver from South and Central America during the 16th and 17th centuries was one of the main factors that destroyed the Spanish economy and led to its impoverishment right up until, well, a couple of decades ago. Beware easily gotten wealth.

The small city where I live was not a major site during the Spanish colonial times and it was very much neglected after the Mexican War of Independence of 1810 and nearly abandoned after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Since the 1950s it has seen a rebirth and is now a city of around one hundred thousand and home to around ten thousand American and Canadian expatriates. But the historic center is preserved by law and one still sees historic echoes like this:

That ceramic plaque, which likely dates from the first half of the 19th century, states that this building was one of the sites of the Inquisition when this was part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, an enormous entity stretching from northern South America through Central America to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida and even parts of Wyoming. The buildings in the historic Centro are from two to four hundred years old. My office, which is about twenty yards from that plaque about the Inquisition, is around three hundred years old. We still have nuns and even a nunnery and I saw a procession of Franciscan monks a while back. But don't think we are backward--the whole town was recently connected with fiber optic cable.

Living here it is difficult to be unaware of history. Here is some Baroque guitar music from a 1772 manuscript from New Spain. In 1772 in Europe, of course, Haydn had already been composing in the Classical Style for quite a while.

The "Flowery Wars"

I spent the weekend in a neighboring city, just for a change, and the hotel I stayed in was quite unusual. It had a pool, but the defining feature was a library that extended over three levels:

The first photo was the basement level, the second the ground floor level (with glass floor so you can see into the basement level) and there was a second floor level that I didn't take a photo of. The books were in no particular order and many of them were of little interest, but on a special shelf in the basement I found this:

This was a privately published very large format book, in Spanish and English, reproducing a mid-16th century pictograph book. Tlaxcala was a city-state before the Spanish Conquest and is a small state in present-day Mexico. This book was fascinating. Here are some sample pages:

And a close-up:

There were three originals of this book, all lost so we only have copies, which told the story of the Conquest, but from the point of view of the Tlaxcalans, who were allies of Cortés. Tlaxcala was a loose federation of cities, with four principal capitals, established around the end of the 14th century. In the 1450s there were a series of wars between the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City), Tetzcoco and Tlalcopan against the independent city-states of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley. These wars were often ritualistic with their prime motivation being to produce sacrificial victims for ceremonies honoring the god Huitzilopochtli. Don't you love the names? My favorite is "Tliliuhquitepec." The elites of both sides pretended to be antagonistic, but the reality was that this was mainly to deceive the commoners. The elite of Tlaxcala were often invited to attend festivities in Tenochtitlan, for example.

These wars were called the "Flowery Wars" or "las guerras floridas" in Spanish. I'm telling you all this because I find that it is inspiring me to compose something suitable, a March for the Flowery Wars or something. It would be suitably sardonic as it tried to capture both the ritualistic staged battle and the hypocrisy that surrounded it. One wonders how many current conflicts in the world are just as deceptive as these were.

I suspect a suitable envoi would be the Symphony No. 9 by Shostakovich, one of his most sardonic works. This is Valery Gergiev conducting the Orchestra of the Mariinstky Theater.

Historical Fiction

I tend to alternate between worrying whether I am not focused enough on music in this blog and whether I am too focused on some music in particular! It does say in the frontispiece that the topics include "popular culture ... and whatever else catches my fancy..." So this will be a post with almost no music in it.

For much of my life I have been an avid reader of historical fiction, by which I mean fiction, usually though not always light fiction, that is set in historical times and involves recreating long-lost worlds and characters. Incidentally, music too can be a gateway into the atmosphere and character of times long ago. Take the organum of Léonin and Pérotin for example:

One of the first historical novelists I discovered was Mary Renault whose book The Mask of Apollo was assigned reading in some course or another:

This book is set in Ancient Greece and is written from the point of view of an actor so we get a lot of interesting details about Greek tragedy (not comedy if you are wearing the mask of Apollo). One of the people befriended by the actor was Plato. Renault also wrote a number of other books set in classical times including a trilogy about Alexander as well as a couple of books about Theseus and one with the poet Simonides as the focus. Good stuff, if a tad romanticized.

Another writer I encountered early on was C. S. Forester who wrote an extensive series of books about a Royal Navy captain during the Napoleonic Wars named Horatio Hornblower. Also good stuff, but again a tad romanticized. Later on another writer, Patrick O'Brian, covered the same ground but much more authentically in his series of novels with Jack Aubrey, RN captain and Stephen Maturin, surgeon and spy. No romanticizing here, and an incredible wealth of historic detail. There was a wonderful film by Peter Weir based on these novels. The film ends with a great musical scene. Both Maturin and Aubrey are amateur musicians, playing the violin and cello, and in fact they met at a quartet concert. Music is a recurring theme in the books.

A more serious book by French writer Marguerite Yourcenar moves from light fiction, no matter how well done, to more serious fiction. One sentence from the English translation (she wrote in French) has stayed with me ever since I read the book some forty years ago: "I begin to discern the profile of my death." Hadrian actually wrote an autobiography which was lost to history so Yourcenar tried to re-create it.

Another writer of serious historical fiction was Robert Graves (even though he didn't regard it as serious). His two books on the emperor Claudius, I, Claudius and Claudius the God were also attempts to recreate Claudius' own memoirs, also lost.

It is distressing how much we have lost of ancient literature. Did you know that we have seven plays (roughly) by each of the great Athenian tragedians simply because the Byzantine copyists decided that that was how much they should preserve? The BBC did a quite successful television series based on the Graves books with Derek Jacobi in the eponymous role. Graves also wrote a number of other historical novels from Homeric times to the 17th century, but I have not read them. It doesn't count as historic fiction, but his memoir of his own experiences as an officer in the trenches in WWI, Goodbye to All That, is a very powerful book indeed. In one of my favorite passages, Graves, who had T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) as roommate at Oxford after the war, introduces him to Ezra Pound, who was passing through: "Lawrence, this is Pound. You won't like one another."

One of my very favorite historical novels is Imperial Governor by George Shipway which is a memoir of Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, governor of the Roman province of Britain at the time of the rebellion of Boudicca. It is a brilliant evocation of the atmosphere and logistics of the time down to the exact range of ballistas and legion battle tactics.

I just discovered that he wrote other historical novels and right now I am reading the first book of a two book series focused on Agamemnon and Mycenaean Greece. He also wrote another set in Medieval France. Be prepared for a lot of historic vocabulary!

So there you go, a whole bunch of books that you will either love or that will bore you to tears depending on your personal preferences.

For our envoi, here is that ending scene from the Peter Weir film of Master and Commander:

Clip updated.

Common Time

As we all learned from our music teachers, that funny 'C' symbol after the clef means "common time". Sssuuuurrre it does! Actually, the symbol 'C' is not the letter 'c' at all, but a half circle. In the 14th century the predecessors of our time signatures were invented. In the beginning there was only triple or perfect time, indicated by a circle, the perfect geometric shape. "Imperfect" or duple time, was indicated with a half circle. This indicated the number of beats, either three or two, in the measure. But they also had the ability to indicate whether these beats themselves divided into three or two subdivisions. This was indicated with a dot. A circle with a dot indicated three beats and each beat had three parts. In our metric notation we would show this as 9/8.  A half circle with a dot indicated two beats and each beat had three parts. We would show this as 6/8. But a simple half-circle with no dot indicated two beats, each of which divides into two parts. They called this tempus imperfectum cum prolatione imperfecta. "Common time" takes a lot less time to say, though. Here is an example from an old manuscript. You can see the time signature as a little 'c' on the second space from the top, right at the beginning after the clef--a C-clef on the bottom line:

From the Chansonnier Laborde