February 2012
6 posts
Making math my bitch since '92.
5 tags
January 2012
12 posts
Watch
December 2011
25 posts
a catskills christmas...
happy holidays, tumblrs!
2 tags
“Boogaard had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, commonly known as C.T.E., a close...”
– Everyone should read this.
Derek Boogaard - A Brain ‘Going Bad’ - NYTimes.com
November 2011
13 posts
music at the turn of the 20th century: a different...
Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1911-13) 369
"It must have been a wild scene at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on May 29, 1913, when the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring caused the most notorious scandal in music. The playing was nearly inaudible, what with the catcalls and booing. Stravinsky stormed out of the hall and went backstage. “I stood in the wings behind Nijinsky [the choreographer], holding on to the tails of his coat, while he stood on a chair, beating out the rhythm with his fist and shouting numbers to the dancers like a coxswain,” even though there had been more than 120 rehearsals. Stravinsky also described the conductor of the complex, iconoclastic score, Pierre Monteux: “He stood there apparently impervious and as nerveless as a crocodile. It is still almost incredible to me that he actually brought the orchestra through to the end.” The French writer, Jean Cocteau, reported: “The public…laughed, spat, hissed, imitated animal cries. They might have eventually tired themselves of that had it not been for the crowd of aesthetes and a few musicians who, carried by excess of zeal, insulted and even pushed the occupants of the loges. The riot degenerated into a fight.” Stravinsky’s music was based on an imagined scene, in which he saw “a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” The violent Russian spring “seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking.” Wild abandon, pulsing rhythms, and primitive rituals proclaim the veneration of spring and climax in the sacrificial dance of the victim. “I had only my ear to help me. I heard, and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which The Rite passed.”"