Bach's Minuet in G
From the website http://www.history-of-rock.com/toys.htm --
Other sites giving further details on Bach's Minuet in G: Search for the sheet music and a rendition of the work at codamusic.com's Finale Showcase Search Page. Seeing and hearing the music on this site requires that you download Coda's SmartMusic Viewer, and possibly requires that you adjust your browser settings, depending on the operating system you use. For another look at Bach's music, along with a midi rendition, you can download Music MasterWorks composing software from the Aspire Software site... http://www.musicmasterworks.com/. Then download the midi file of the Minuet in G itself, "Minuet in G, BWV841" (M.Lombardi), from the website http://www.classicalarchives.com/bach.html. (To do this, right-click on the minuet link and use the "Save Target As" option, if you, like me, are using Internet Explorer with Windows.) After you have downloaded the midi file of the minuet, use the "File" and "Open" options in Music MasterWorks to display and play the music. A comparison of these two versions of Bach is instructive for anyone planning to purchase music composition software. The MasterWorks creates sheet music from its midi file that is quite sophisticated and rather hard to follow, but this music accurately reflects the superior musical performance in the downloaded midi file versus the rendition in the online Finale Showcase file. The Showcase file is much simpler and easier to read, as the rendition it describes is also quite simple. The Gentle Rain For an even simpler version, those of us who were in our salad days in 1965 can consult our memories of The Toys:
Those of the younger generation with neither the patience nor the taste to seek out the original by Bach may be content with the following site -- To a more mature audience, the picture of a Venetian sunset at the above site (similar to the photo below, from Shunya's Italy) will, together with the lyrics of The Toys, suggest that
This line, addressed to Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice," contradicts, to some extent, the statement by Igor Stravinsky in The Poetics of Music (1942, English version 1947) that music does not express anything at all. Stravinsky is buried in Venice. From Famous Graves: Venice Posted 7/31/2002 at 11:29 PM |
Aesthetics of Madness Admirers of the film "A Beautiful Mind" may be interested in the thoughts of psychotherapist Eric Olson on what he calls the "collage method" of therapy. The fictional protagonist of "A Beautiful Mind," very loosely based on the real-life mathematician John Nash, displays his madness in a visually striking manner (as required by cinematic art). He makes enormous collages of published matter in which he believes he has found hidden patterns. This fictional character is in some ways more like the real-life therapist Olson than like the real-life schizophrenic Nash. For an excellent introduction to Olson's world, see the New York Times Magazine article of April 1, 2001, on Olson and on the mysterious death of Olson's father Frank, who worked for the CIA. Here the plot thickens... the title of the article is "What Did the C.I.A. Do to Eric Olson's Father?" For Olson's own website, see The Frank Olson Legacy Project, which has links to Olson's work on collage therapy. Viewed in the context of this website, the resemblance of Olson's collages to the collages of "A Beautiful Mind" is, to borrow Freud's expression, uncanny. Olson's own introduction to his collage method is found on the web page "Theory and therapy." All of the above resulted from a Google search to see if Arlene Croce's 1993 New Yorker article on Balanchine and Stravinsky, "The Spelling of Agon," could be found online. I did not find Arlene, but I did find the following, from a collage of quotations assembled by Eric Olson --
The aesthetics of collage is, of course, not without its relevance to the creation (or assembly) of weblogs. Posted 7/30/2002 at 12:12 AM |
At Random Today's birthday: poet Stanley Kunitz --
Posted 7/29/2002 at 8:34 PM |
Keats and the Web From a letter of John Keats on the Web: "There is the passage in a famous letter of John Keats, 19th February, 1818:
This seems not unrelated to the observations below on commonplace books and Web logs. Posted 7/28/2002 at 3:07 PM |
Memories, Dreams, Reflections Saul Steinberg in The New York Review of Books issue dated August 15, 2002, page 32:
Pascal's observation is that humans, animals, and plants have bilateral symmetry, but in nature at large there is only symmetry about a horizontal axis... reflections in water, nature's mirror. This seems related to the puzzling question of why a mirror reverses left and right, but not up and down. The Steinberg quote is from the book Reflections and Shadows, reviewed here. Bibliographic data on Auden's commonplace book: AUTHOR Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh), 1907-1973. TITLE A Certain World; a Commonplace Book A couple of websites on commonplace books: A classic: The Practical Cogitator - The Thinker's Anthology, Posted 7/28/2002 at 2:16 PM |
A Commonplace Blog William Safire blogs the word "blog" in his On Language column today. He specifically mentions xanga.com --
Posted 7/28/2002 at 1:56 PM |
Today's birthdays: Another opening of another show.... Kevin, Kate, and Carl.
Posted 7/26/2002 at 1:59 PM |
I've been looking for a weblog editor, and Xanga seems like it's the best. Too bad they can't host pre-existing domain names.... I registered the URL log24.com some time ago, and want to use it. But I also want to use Xanga's neat entry software. My solution: Use Xanga for day-to-day entries, with the new URL log24.net (just purchased), and use my log24.com site as an archive. Posted 7/25/2002 at 9:18 PM |
Posted 7/20/2002 at 10:13 PM |
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