Log24

Music critic Bernard Holland in The New York Times on Monday, May 20, 1996:

The Juilliard’s
Half-Century Ripening

Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday regardless of what might have changed in the interim. Medical science tells us that the body’s cells replace themselves wholesale within every seven years, yet we tell ourselves that we are what we were….

Schubert at the end of his life had already passed on to another level of spirit. Beethoven went back and forth between the temporal world and the world beyond right up to his dying day.

Exercise

Part I:
Apply Holland’s Monday-to-Friday “idea of identity” to the lives and deaths during the week of Monday, Nov. 10 (“Frame Tales“), through Friday, Nov. 14, of a musician and a maker of music documentaries– Mitch Mitchell (d. Nov. 12) and Baird Bryant (d. Nov. 13).

Part II:
Apply Holland’s “idea of identity” to last week (Monday, Nov. 17, through Friday, Nov. 21), combining it with Wigner’s remarks on invariance (discussed here on Monday) and with the “red dragon” (Log24, Nov. 15) concept of flight over “the Hump”– the Himalayas– and the 1991 documentary filmed by Bryant, “Heart of Tibet.”

Part III:
Discuss Parts I and II in the context of Eliot’s Four Quartets. (See Time Fold, The Field of Reason, and Balance.)