Log24

This is a continuation of the “just seventeen” posts.

“For the Renaissance musician, a sharp multiplied a musical frequency
by the fraction 25/24 – and so does it in Ben’s music.”

— “Regarding Ben: A Keynote Address for the Microtonal Conference
[2010] at Wright State University,” by Kyle Gann

See too my own note from 2001:  Harmony, Schoenberg, and The Last Samurai .

“Mazur introduced the topic of prime numbers with a story from Don Quixote in which Quixote asked a poet to write a poem with 17 lines. Because 17 is prime, the poet couldn’t find a length for the poem’s stanzas and was thus stymied.”

— Undated American Mathematical Society news item about a Nov. 1, 2007, event

Durga

In honor of a memorable date: “… a spectacular seventh-century figure of the Hindu goddess Durga, whose hip-slung pose and     voluptuous torso, as plush and taut as ripe fruit, combine the naturalism and idealism of the very finest Indian work.” —The New York Times “The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than ‘discovering the endless diversity of nature.’ They are dancing with Kali [or Durga], the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology.” –Gary Zukav, Harvard ’64

Veronica

“I think transformation becomes the main word in my life, transformation.

Because you don’t want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see?

You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says, you didn’t know you could see the back of your head. You didn’t know that you could… almost cubistic, see all aspects at the same time.

And what that does for human beings is it allows them to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it.” —Julie Taymor

Related material:

The previous two entries and
readings for the Feast of
the Triumph of the Cross
in 2006 and in 2003.

For the Dark Lady

On this midnight in the garden of good and evil, our new site music is “Nica’s Dream.”

From a website on composer Horace Silver:

“Horace Silver apparently composed Nica’s Dream (1956) for Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter-Rothschild, an English aristocrat and a very dear friend of his. She was known to the New York press as the Jazz Baroness and to the black musicians for whom she was something of a patron, simply as Nica. Her apartment in the fashionable Hotel Stanhope on Fifth Avenue became a ‘hospitality suite for some of the greatest jazz players of the day, whom she treated generously.’ (Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, University of Toronto Press, 1985, 1:248)

This music is not unrelated to the work of Thomas Pynchon.  From an essay by Charles Hollander:  

“There are some notable parallels between Nica and the woman Stencil knows as V., who started her career with ‘…a young crude Mata Hari act.’ (V.; 386)….  Not that V. is Nica in any roman a clef sense: she is not. But the resonances are powerful at the level of the subtext. Nica is a Rothschild whose life reflects the issues Pynchon wants us to attend in V.: disinheritance, old dynasty vs. new dynasty, secret agents and couriers, plots and counter-plots, ‘The Big One, the century’s master cabal,’ and ‘the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name’ (V.; 226)….” 

See also my journal entry for the December 16-17 midnight, “Just Seventeen.”

Durga

Today's site music* is in honor of a memorable date.   *© 1963 Northern Songs. Quiet may be restored by using the midi control box at the top right of this page.  Please let me know if your browser is not showing this control box.

Veronica

From a June/July 1997
Hadassah Magazine article:

"Plato is obviously Jewish."

— Rebecca Goldstein

Readings on the Dark Lady  

From a July 27, 1997
New York Times article
by Holland Cotter:

"The single most important and sustained model for Khmer culture was India, from which Cambodia inherited two religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and an immensely sophisticated art. This influence announces itself early in this exhibition in a spectacular seventh-century figure of the Hindu goddess Durga, whose hip-slung pose and voluptuous torso, as plush and taut as ripe fruit, combine the naturalism and idealism of the very finest Indian work."

From The Dancing Wu Li Masters,
by Gary Zukav, Harvard '64:

"The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than 'discovering the endless diversity of nature.' They are dancing with Kali [or Durga], the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology."

"Eastern religions have nothing to say about physics, but they have a great deal to say about human experience. In Hindu mythology, Kali, the Divine Mother, is the symbol for the infinite diversity of experience. Kali represents the entire physical plane. She is the drama, tragedy, humor, and sorrow of life. She is the brother, father, sister, mother, lover, and friend. She is the fiend, monster, beast, and brute. She is the sun and the ocean. She is the grass and the dew. She is our sense of accomplishment and our sense of doing worthwhile. Our thrill of discovery is a pendant on her bracelet. Our gratification is a spot of color on her cheek. Our sense of importance is the bell on her toe.

This full and seductive, terrible and wonderful earth mother always has something to offer. Hindus know the impossibility of seducing her or conquering her and the futility of loving her or hating her; so they do the only thing that they can do. They simply honor her."

How could I dance with another….?

— John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 1962-1963