symphonyno2ineminor:

Approaching a City, 1946

Edward Hopper

piquant:

From “100 days in Glacier National Park”, a series by Chris Peterson commemorating the the park’s centennial. (via The Big Picture)

excerpted:

Years ago, the path to academia was one in which you traded some of your income potential and prestige for the ability to lead a life of the mind. There are few spaces in our society in which your main focus does not have to be selling something to someone else.

…

But the current problems go deeper than this. In his forthcoming book, The Marketplace of Ideas, Louis Menand, an English professor and staff writer for The New Yorker, argues that the current system of training and employing professors narrows the “intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field,” and produces a large “philosophical and attitudinal gap” that separates academics from others. Paradoxically enough, he believes, this results in “less ferment from the bottom than is healthy in a field of intellectual inquiry. … “The most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge,” he writes. “It is the reproduction of the system.”

musicophilia:

kathrynbegins:

grace-notes:

rillawafers:

musicophilia:

mhsteger:

Johannes Brahms, Intermezzo in B-flat minor, op.117, played by Ignace Tiegerman, on Tiegerman: The Lost Legend of Cairo: Radio and Private Recordings (Arbiter Records, 1999)

Bruno Schulz (born 12 July, 1892; died 19 November, 1942), in a photograph from 1938 (owned by Schulz’s biographer, Jerzy Ficowski)

‘Above the autumnal opacity of the park the night is flushed by a vague reddish glow. In the ravaged upholstery of the treetops crows wake with caws of mindless alarm, and, deceived by the false dawn, take off in noisy squads; their yawping, wheeling disarray throws tumult and vibrations into the murky redness tartly redolent of herbage and fallen leaves. Eventually the great flurry of loops and turns all over the sky subsides; calming gradually, it descends, lighting in the combed-out tangle of trees in a ravaged, provisional file that still shows signs of unrest, rife with misgivings, chatter falling silent, plaintive queries. At last the swarm settles down for good and becomes part of the sibilant stillness of surrounding languor. And night, deep and late, resumes its sway. Hours pass. Hot forehead pressed against the pane, I sense and know: from now on no harm can come to me. I have found a peaceful heaven. A long succession of years heavy with happiness and fulfillment now lies ahead, an unending mathematical progression of joyful good times. The last few sighs, shallow and sweet, fill my breast utterly with happiness. I stop breathing. I know death will one day take me into her open arms, as she does all life, bountiful and benign. I will lie, eternally sated, among the green undergrowth of the beautifully manicured local cemetery. My wife—how beautiful she will look in her widow’s veil—will bring me flowers on those bright, calm mid-mornings we enjoy here. Out of the depths of this boundless plenitude a ponderous full-throated music, the solemn, mournful, resonant bars of a majestic overture, seems to rise. I sense the powerful pulsing of its rhythms as it thrusts upward from the deep.’

-Bruno Schulz, from “Autumn,” a short story included in The Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, 1986 (edited and translated from the Polish by Jerzy Ficowski)

Bruno Schulz (rendered in a self-portrait, above) was murdered by a Gestapo officer, Karl Gunther, during what the Gestapo called a ‘wild action,’ during which a number of Jews were shot in the Drohobycz ghetto.

Schulz loved dearly the town of Drohobycz, where he had spent most his life, and he was reluctant to leave it.  In a terrible stroke of fate, Schulz was killed on the day he and his friends had planned his escape from the ghetto and out of Drohobycz.

A friend of Schulz, Izydor Friedman, witnessed Schulz’s death, and gave an account of it that was included Jerzy Ficowski’s biography of Schulz:

‘When we heard the shots and saw the fleeing Jews, we too rushed to escape.  The Gestapo officer Gunther caught the physically weak Schulz and held him, then he placed a revolver to his head and shot twice.  At night I returned for Schulz’s body […] Toward morning I buried him in the Jewish cemetery.’

No trace remains of Schulz’s burial place, nor even of the old Jewish cemetery where his body rested near the graves of his mother and father, for which Schulz himself had designed the headstones years earlier.  A new housing district stands today on the site of the former Jewish cemetery.’

-Jerzy Ficowski, Regions of the Great Heresy, 2003 (transl. from the Polish by Theodosia Robertson)

The legendary pianist, Ignace Tiegerman (1893-1968), was also born in Drohobycz.  Allan Evans, a scholar of Tiegerman’s life and recordings, was struck by what he felt to be an aesthetic affinity between Tiegerman and Schulz.  In his idiosyncratic (and highly enjoyable) biography of Ignaz Friedman, Evans describes, in diary fashion, his discovery of this affinity:

The aesthetics hinted at by Tiegerman’s Brahms bring someone entirely unrelated to mind: Bruno Schulz, whose short stories embody layered imagery and overwhelming expression, bearing the same urgency, beauty, and sense of completion heard in Tiegerman’s Brahms.  There seems to be some unusual affinity between Tiegerman and Schulz.  And this furthers my obsessive need to uncover where Tiegerman came from [i.e., Drohobycz], a detail that somehow seems crucial.

-Allan Evans, Ignaz Friedman: Romantic Master Pianist, 2009

musicophilia:

mhsteger:

Niccolo Paganini, Capriccio No. 4 in c minor, Maestoso

Thomas Zehetmair, violin. From Paganini: 24 Capricci, ECM 2124 (2009)

Niccolo Paganini (born 27 October, 1782 ; died 27 May, 1840), drawn by J.-A.-D. Ingres, c. 1819

The extraordinary dexterity of his playing was sustained by his concert appearances entirely.  George Harrys—an attache at the Hanoverian court, who acted as the virtuoso’s secretary for a year—asserts that Paganini never touched his violin in private save to test or tune it.  ‘I have labored enough to acquire my talent,’ was the violinist’s remark when questioned; ‘it is time I should rest myself.’  Sleep was a never-failing source of delight to him, but in eating and drinking he was extremely frugal.  The state of his health required the strictest diet, and if he started on a journey early in the morning he frequently fasted nearly the whole day.  Ordinarily a basin of soup or a cup of chocolate constituted his breakfast, and a cup of camomile tea his supper.

-The Grove Dictionary of Music, Third Edition (1953)

Chopin went to most of the ten concerts [Paganini] gave [in Warsaw, in 1829] and, like Liszt and Schumann, was bowled over by the sheer virtuosity of the man’s playing.  Paganini was the first great musician to elevate his instrument from its traditional role within the orchestra or quartet and to make it actively ‘speak’ to the audience.  He achieved this by drawing an unprecedented degree of sound and expression from his violin, and after hearing him Liszt, and to a lesser degree Schumann, set out to to do the same for the piano.  Chopin had been moving in this very direction long before he heard Paganini, but the latter’s achievement acted as tonic and a confirmation of his own conviction that music was made by one instrument, and that orchestration was essentially a garnishing.

-Adam Zamoyski, Chopin (1979)

spaceships:

New Hampshire (via picturenewengland)

maristella:

Late Fall in VT or “why exercising in a Gym is so damn hard”

frost-at-midnight:

Concerto Grosso in G Minor, RV 156- I. Allegro

Composer:Vivaldi/Performed by:Akademie für Alte Musik

Maybe the best way to explain how babies are made, if you can overlook the fact that sperm do not actually have lasers that blow up walls and cannot express joy at finding the egg.  The depiction of sex as floating up in the air and exploding into a ball of bright light and fireworks tickles my fancy as well.  Yes, Omi ist ja sehr toll haha.

This was originally a French cartoon for children dubbed into German, I believe.  In any case, it’s something uniquely European, as the kiddos get to see evolution, a woman’s nipples, and meiosis.

onlycupcakes:

Via Rachel from Cupcake Takes the Cake

This is worthy of a Cake Wrecks post…what is this, a turd of chocolate icing on a mound of dirty rice or mulch?  Not to mention the creepy eyes with their mold-infested pupils.

macmankev:

christielouwho:

Samson and Delilah (Air et Danse Bacchanale) by Camille Saint-Saens

One of my personal favorites of Saint-Saens’. Though, Danse Macabre is always my all time favorite.

Also one of my favorites. Love it. Good taste, Christie.