This is the second half of my discussion of Wang Wei’s Wheel Rim River Cycle, a set of 20 poems idealizing his newly bought estate in the country near the capital Ch’ang-An on the location of modern Xi’An (formerly Hsi An, formerly, obviously, Ch’ang-An). Since this website has shut me out several times, resulting in many hours of work gone down the drain, I decided to print the Chinese characters in the modern way from left to right. Sentence this like something get you then but left to right from them read can you.
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Classical music, Sigiswald Kuijken once said, is one of the top achievements in the history of mankind, equal to the Homeric epics, Athenian theater, Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance panting, Shakespeare and the Russian novel (those are my specific examples, but I’m sure his wouldn’t be too different). I agree, and it is an ominous sign for today’s western culture that so few people seem to be aware of that. Chinese landscape painting and *Tang poetry belong on that choice list as well. The spacial depth of the Chinese 山水 Shan-Shui, ‘mountains and rivers’ landscape style is stunning for a style that’s not based on the technique of perspective, developed in the European Renaissance. The mystery of these images is unmatched. Likewise, the imagery of the poetry is condensed and captivating. Many Chinese words have multiple grammatical possibilities, like a particular Hungarian word that according to Finnish linguist Sakk Laamahängen (PhD) appears in colloquial as noun, adjective, adverb, interjection, conjunction, preposition and other grammatical functions, while it however has yet to be listed in a dictionary.
The first line of the famous poem 鹿柴, Deer Camp, the fifth of Wang’s collection, may suffice:
The first thing that grabs our attention is how much is missing from this story. Why did Cain and Abel suddenly decide to sacrifice to the LORD? God didn’t tell them they should do that. I don’t buy Sarna’s explanation that sacrificing “is an inner need”, except as an inner need to influence the cosmos to our own purposes: magic. Sacrifice comes from the time gods were thought to be blind natural forces. What’s innate is perhaps an idea that if I give something of my earnings to the cosmos, the cosmos will be favorably disposed towards me. Of course there is also the idea that ending the life of an animal requires some form of compensation. But I don’t buy that the need to give something to God is innate, or children would want to do that all the time. The next questions however are more problematic. Where is the land Nod? Where did Cain find a wife? Exactly whom was Cain so afraid of being murdered by? Mom? Dad? One or two unmentioned sisters? No one else was around! We cannot avoid the conclusion that the story originally described an event of a later age, in a populated world, and it got inserted for some purpose, probably to show our nature by presenting “the first murder”. Perhaps the story was akin to Romulus’ murder of Remus at Rome’s beginnings: an archetypal pointer at sin lurking at the center of each young republic, like our own, with Hamilton and Burr.
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There was once a female psychologist who used to be a very good friend of mine until at a party she called Genesis “boring”. Her husband, who had a somewhat more intellectual view of scripture, explained that she meant that Genesis consisted mainly of fairy tales when compared to the redemption through Jesus’ death on the cross and His Resurrection; a clarification which did not really make things that much better. I was dumbfounded Even though I knew (and know) I could have talked for an hour or two about Genesis alone, I had no idea what to say to a crowd of people to whom Genesis obviously meant nothing more than a collection of myths, who did not even know what a myth was. I didn’t know how to begin. Now that I think about it; I am still stunned. How can anyone find Beethoven’s 7th or Rembrandt’s Sacrifice of Isaac or the Wheel Rim River Cycle or War and Peace or a Chinese landscape painting by Dong Yuan or Don Juan by Mozart or the Odyssey or the Grand Canyon or Paris or Ben Hur or Wagner’s Parsifal or an Egyptian mummy or de Tour de France or Grace Kelly’s dresses in To Catch a Thief or the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” boring? Even if those things are new to us, can’t we sense the splendor, the magnificence emanating from them? This series of articles about the Torah, the Five Books of Moses (I don’t like the sound of the word Pentateuch) may be a reaction triggered by the frustrating experiences I had like the above described conversation. Genesis, to me is treasure of condensed, distilled wisdom. This is an attempt to share my fascination with these texts that in themselves consist of centuries of edition, redacting, adding, subtracting, multiplying dividing - and re- (but not de-)constructing…
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About ten years ago, my friend Johann Sebastian Amerbach whom the Czechs call Ṧtrt, gave me a Bible in exchange for a cello lesson. I mention this because every year the honor to have taught him becomes greater, until it will be the only thing I might be remembered for in Wikipedia, if ever I make it in there. This Bible, called the Apologetics Study Bible, published by Ted Cabal at Holman Bible Publishers (“Real questions, straight answers, stronger faith”), has been one of the most invaluable gifts I have ever received in my life. For about a decade now, this Bible has been an ongoing source of fascination, it has challenged my cognitive capacities, confronted me with life’s most complicated mysteries, and it has never ceased to surprise me. The sheer number I found in this well-groomed, well-bound quality book - bible-paper, Rodin’s Thinker featuring on a stylistically well-designed cover - of logical fallacies, factual errors and possibly downright lies, I have never believed possible in this variety and diversity in a respectable publication in the western world. I’m enjoying it every day. The book also makes a great coaster.
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History is the study of footprints. It is the study that says that if there are footprints in the snow, something must have walked there. History determines, or tries to determine when those footprints were made - from the last snow fall to the moment of observation - and what or who made them (…) This article will inform a little about the footprints we have about the Bible, and when it was written, and by whom. The footprints show that it couldn’t have been Moses, because the particular snow in which we find them had not fallen yet in Moses’ time. We also find more than one set of prints. Some are older than others, and partly stepped over. Some are heavier, some lighter, some more straightforward, others more playful, swerving, running around a bit. The reconstruction - the footprints analogy may show that at least some reconstruction can be made at al times - of who made those footprints, who wrote the Bible, is called the Documentary Hypothesis, and will be discussed in some detail further along in this article. You will learn a little about who these authors were, what their agenda was, and how they can be recognized even in translation, even in an English translation... You will find two versions of the flood, extracted from the final version in Genesis, each version a full story of its own, with its particular features, mood, and agenda. This will be a historical approach to Genesis, the forensic work at this particular crime scene. Its wisdom, the true treasure of philosophical, human, and spiritual dimensions the Torah has to offer, will be discussed in a forthcoming article called Genesis. Just Genesis. Nothing added to it.
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I wrote my Clorinda Sonata from 2014 till 2016, with revisions up till this year. The enormous surge of creative energy behind writing the piece came from a deeply emotional experience I had in June 2014 with the music of … let’s say a female artist, whose identity need not concern us here now; besides, the video on youtube (here accessible on the Media page) pretty much gives it away anyway. Powerful, earth-shattering emotional experiences like this occur when certain images at certain times force a much-needed breakthrough of emotional and spiritual contents that have laid dormant too long in an overly sterilized society. A connection is made with oneself through an image. Such experiences are healing, literally, they reincorporate and integrate dormant needs, they make whole. The human psyche is like an iceberg*, the part above the water is our conscious self, our will, reason, the decisions we make; the other 90% is completely unknown, it makes itself known through emotional stimuli experienced upon exposure to images onto which it projects itself. By accepting these stirrings from the subconscious, we integrate parts of our subconscious into our lives, and become emotionally richer individuals. Sublimating those elements into art, music, or other material activities helps this process, and creates beautiful works in the process, that can be enjoyed by other human beings and ridiculed by critics.
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I love lingerie. I mean, the word. Not the word in itself (though it is much more beautiful than underwear or the hideous word in Dutch for dress that’s pronounced “jerk” with a -y instead of the -j. I love the way lingerie is pronounced in “Merkun”. In an attempt to make it sound French, the American population has actually strayed farther from the original than if the English laws of pronunciation had been followed. Linndzhurry sounds closer to the French than what we now make of the word. I love that. “We almost couldn’t be more wrong”. Delightful. I just learned that the British make the same mistake. I wonder which country started this …
I also love the way we say Bon Appetit with the -t pronounced. In French it is bon nup’TEE. In Coup de Grâce, however, we omit the last -s which in this word is essential: “kood-GRASS”, otherwise it would mean a “stroke of fat”. Why do Americans say the -t when they shouldn’t while not saying the -s when they should? Probably because of the English word appetite.
What I love about these things is that often, not most Americans say it that way, but all Americans.
Perhaps the best example is Van Gogh. I don’t mean the pronunciation Van Go, that’s fine, that’s how Americans say it.
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Fantastic cellist Ṧtrt Zmrzlina (as he is called in Bohemia, I’m sure you know him from the picture) told me a story that is typical, not only for today’s intellectual climate, but for the human condition tout court, with its biases, unobserved elephants in the room and all that sort of shortcomings. Every culture has its hangups, and examples such as this one will help us see the particular fallacies we believe in. I don’t know why generally accepted opinions are so suggestive, but they are: everyone says so, it must be so. That is how we allow an 18-year old boy, for instance, to die for our country but not to have alcohol. Every culture incorporates such basic inconsistencies, as I have pointed out elsewhere, for instance that while it was absolutely unacceptable around 1700 to have women on stage, castrating little boys so they would be mature sopranos as men was considered "“appropriate”.
This is my checkmate to the “real people” hypothesis. If an actual event were treated here, why do two studies depict a scene from a Goethe play? If I wanted to make a picture of the Browns’ perfect 2017 season in which they didn’t win a single game, would I start out with studies depicting Kirsten Dunst in Bring It On? If I wanted to glorify chess legend Judith Polgár making minced meat of some or other male champion, would I start out sketching Cranach's Judith with the head of Holofernes? Everything we know about this painting proves it is fictional, that Danhauser used people as models, and that the picture, with its Lady in dazzling colors, with its statue of Omphale, with the adoring elegant romantic, the stunned old man, even with the position on the board, where she plays black*******, tells a made-up story and tells it in an artistic, symbolic way, with everything pointing at the lady’s victory; and that even if the pensive Lady was painted after Josephine Danhauser or the romantic dreamer after Liszt, the characters are entirely fictional and have no bearing to the models used to create them.
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In my last article Pedigree 2, I introduced the four categories of cello playing which against which I compared my four musical ancestors: endpin, strings, vibrato and portamento. We saw that from about 1860 to 1960, cello playing had developed from no endpin to high endpin, from gut to steel, from a relatively sparse use of vibrato to continuous vibrato, and from plenty of portamentos to no portamentos. Now I would like to explore the history of cello playing with a closer, historical look at those four aspects, beginning with the endpin.
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In the first part of this little triptych I have introduced my dad, his cello teacher, his “grandteacher” and his “great-grand-teacher”. I will now compare their playing style to show how music performance imperceptibly changed over the period in which these four players were active. I have broken down cello playing in four categories: endpin, strings, vibrato and portamento. Portamento is the slide you hear when your hand changes position on the fingerboard. If you hear a slide, that’s the portamento. Violists don’t have portamento, because they only know one position and that’s how you can tell them apart from prostitutes. I’m allowed a joke or two here, right?
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This time I like to discuss my musical predifree, my lineage, not from father to son, but from teacher to student, though in my case it’s both, when I follow my dad back in time to his teacher Antal Friss (pronounced “freesh”) to his teacher Adolf - wait for it! - Schiffer, and his teacher, the famed David Popper - and from there to the great string players of all time. Every musician has such a pedigree, mine is in no way more impressive than others, but isn’t it great that we all partake of such a rich cultural history? Here I am taking a closer look at the four cellists mentioned, to map out how the performance of music has surreptitiously but substantially changed during a period of about a century, while the music itself didn’t get changed any more: all four cellists, from Popper, born in 1843, to my dad, born in 1933, played Dvorák, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Wagner, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Bach. And cards. Poker has always been big in my Hungarian family. that’s right, all four were connected with Budapest and thus directly or indirectly with the Austria-Hungarian Empire, that authoritarian, aristocratic, ultra-conservative bulwark of internationalism, inclusiveness and diversity.
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Bach sent his Brandenburg concertos to the Margrave of Brandenburg.
That’s how it is said. That is what most musicians, even many musicologists, still seem to think. I find it in scholarly publications. I find it on line (1). I hear it announced at concerts. I asked two respected musicologists at renowned universities, if they saw anything wrong with this statement, and they did not.
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When you were to google classicism and you go to Wikipedia’s article with that name, this picture is what pops up first: Jacques Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii. In Holland that’s pronounced horUHtsee-ee, when saying it in English I encounter more than anywhere else the awkwardness of the English language to say anything in foreign tongues except Chinese, but that’s beside the point (lingerie is more attractive to me because of its deliciously wrong American pronunciation than for what it is, but that is also beside the point). Here’s the point: this picture has nothing, but then absolutely nothing in common with Mozart’s music. So why do we call Mozart classicism?
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