Confused in Crimson

Breaths of Genius

(No, that isn’t referring to me or this blog. Even I am not that self-absorbed.)

Ok, so, this is amazing.

As some of you may know, I have this strong interest in different settings that the requiem mass has taken throughout the centuries. The texts are so beautiful and have driven brilliant composers throughout the centuries to create some of the most moving works in Western music. This form is so prevalent, many people know these works and don’t even know it. Most people are probably familiar with the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem, for example.

While I could go on and on about this topic, there is one setting of these texts which outranks the rest in its effect on me. Ironically this is also probably the best known as well: Mozart’s Requiem. Anyone who has seen the movie Amadeus knows the circumstances. Mozart, while sick, is visited by an unknown, wealthy patron and commissioned to write a requiem in a rather short period of time. Working feverishly, he makes himself more ill and dies before the work is finished. Desperate for the money to support herself as Mozart was a legendary squanderer of money, Wolfgang’s wife asked a dear family friend Süßmayr to complete it for her based on the fragments which Mozart had left behind. This blending of Mozart’s draftings with Süßmayr’s additions is what we know today as Mozart’s Requiem.

While Süßmayr’s completion is the best-known version of the requiem, it isn’t the only one. Many esteemed Mozart scholars have taken a bite at the apple, thinking that they could do better thank Süßmayr in capturing Mozart’s true style and voice had he lived. (My favorite of these, incidentally, is by a Harvard composer named Robert Levin who gave that talk back in December which inspired the post on Haydn. His redrafting includes this amazing Amen fugue based on newly-discovered parchments found in Mozart’s papers. It sounds so Mozart, I am shocked that Süßmayr never thought of it.)

The video below is something, despite my love of this work, I had never heard before and just needed to share. It is a performance which consists ONLY of those fragments of the Sequence (the text from which most of the work is taken) which Mozart actually composed. The singing isn’t perfect and the performance art interludes I do not understand. However, beneath all these things lies something amazing: the final breaths of a genius. There is something disturbing about the performance if you are familiar with the requiem as usually heard. It is rough and unfinished in so many ways. Yet, like a diamond in the rough, you are hearing the final pen-strokes of one of the greatest musicians the world has ever seen. The first time I heard it, it actually gave me chills.

If you have time, I recommend that before you watch the video below, you find a copy of Mozart’s Requiem and listen to it. If you can’t, however, let me describe what is going on in the video so it makes a bit more sense. The performance begins at the Dies Irae which was almost completed by the time of Mozart’s death. This sounds, with a few exceptions, as it should. Then, the next movement, a mellow movement, is gone; it moves directly into two later parts of the Sequence with are both equally intense and desperate-sounding. This says to me that this sense of imminent demise and the frenzy of his work had started to get to him. They also sound pretty well-put together but noticeably lacking in full orchestration in a few parts. Then, the wheels begin to fall off as we move to the Lacrimosa, my favorite movement of the entire piece. The movement is an eerie one but this version sounds even eerier because much of the orchestration was never written. It is voices with some basic string but none of the usual power behind the movement. After the first long phrase, it suddenly breaks off and never starts again. It just falls into the darkness. Finally, all we are left with is a few sketches of an amen that he would never write. While the completed amen is triumphant and intricate, this just sounds sad and set adrift, perhaps like Mozart himself on those final days.

I’m sorry. I’ve gone on for too long. This just is an amazing work that means a lot to me and I’m so excited to be sharing it with everyone. I hope everyone enjoys it.

“This is the New Year and I don’t feel any different…”

Hey all,

I can’t believe that I forgot to post my traditional New Year’s song here! Yes, I know that January is almost over, but I thought it is still a good song and deserving of posting. The song is “The New Year” by Death Cab for Cutie. (Death Cab is a proud Washington band, might I add. It’s nice to know I can still represent the western Washington music scene out here!)

Ask yourself the following question while listening to this song. Do you feel any different? The new year is already almost 1/12 over. Have you made progress on those resolutions or on any general goals you have for this year. If not, get on it; time’s a wastin’!

Two Buses

I have two thoughts today which are completely unrelated except for the fact that they were both brought about by thinking about buses. For those of you who have been going through “how I think” withdrawals, I hope this post does not disappoint.

BUS #1

So, I was on my way back from my weekly sojourn to the the South End today and was spending my time as I usually do on public transportation: by people watching. It’s hard to describe, but you can tell who is used to riding around on mass transit and who isn’t. I don’t really know how to describe it, but it is rather noticeable. Because I have an incessant need to make numbered lists of things, I decided to make a list of some of the biggest give-aways that a person isn’t used to riding around in things other than cars, as someone who is currently making that transition.

1) You stand on the subway with your feet close together.
Try something for me. Stand a magic marker up on one end and try to knock it over. Then, write down on a scale of 1-10 how tired you feel after that exercise. Next, go outside and try to knock over a car. When you give up, go inside and scratch out on that same slip of paper how tired you feel, from 1-10. I guarantee you that the second number will be higher than the first. Besides the car being heavier than a magic marker (shocking as that may be), the base of the car is much wider than the base of the magic marker. The wide base lowers the center of gravity of the object, thus making it harder to knock over.

Don’t ever tell me this blog isn’t educational.

Anyway, the same goes with people. If you keep your feet far apart, it will lower your center of gravity and improve your balance. This will make it easier to keep standing in case of a turn or jerk from the subway and make it less likely in case of a bump that you will step on the foot of the suave and well-mannered guy standing near you with a blog and an axe to grind. (The resemblance between me and this hypothetical guy is purely coincidental, I assure you…) People who travel around a lot in subways around the world seem to sense this implicitly. I’m not saying that everyone in Paris or New York is standing around like John Wayne. However, if you look, they do have their feet slightly more apart than usual.

2) No matter how crowded it is, you sit in the seat closest to the aisle.
Seats on buses are close together. It’s just a fact of life. Sitting in the seat closest to the aisle will invariably make it inconvenient to access the seats closer to the window. If you sit in that aisle seat and it is crowded, it makes it hard for people to sit in those other seats, especially when it is busy. Now, we all like sitting by the aisle and reveling in the extra leg room. That being said, I think that those who ride the bus a lot and begin to recognize people who ride at the same time of them begin to fear social scorn and move towards the window out of courtesy.

3) You have a habit of leaning on doors which frequently open and close.
This sounds like it should be common sense. However, you would be surprised how many people I have seen who are caught off-guard when they are leaning on a subway or bus door and it opens. Do these people lean on doors in restaurants? Do they lean on elevator doors? It just sounds dangerous to me. Granted, I would feel badly if someone fell and hurt themselves while doing this but, I have to admit, only the tiniest of bits.

4) You like talking loudly to others about how “exciting” the experience is.
In interest of full disclosure, I did not grow up taking a great deal of public transportation so I can only conject about the following statement. That being said, I would imagine it being very annoying and borderline rude to someone who has taken a bus to work all their lives to see someone get on with a Gucci handbag and tell her friend very loudly how “exciting” this experience is. It just seem privileged and is not likely to make you friends. Other words to avoid in this context is “neat,” “cute,” and, my favorite, “authentic.”

BUS #2

The next scenario I feel merits a strong preface. I do not think it likely that this will happen nor do I in any way hope this happens to myself or anyone else. Yet, if you stick with me to the end of this post, you’ll see what I’m getting at.

It is lunchtime and you decide to walk to the bagel store and treat yourself to a bagel sandwich. You love the sauce that they use; it’s delicious. Anyway, you start walking and, after stepping onto the snowbank to get out of the way of the jogger whose mere presence makes you feel badly that you are about to indulge in the caloric feast that is a cheese and whatever bagel sandwich, you make it to the corner. As you cross, your phone buzzes. You look down and see that it’s your annoying friend who is always sending you text messages reminding you to check his asinine blog. What was it again? Confused in something? You can’t believe that anyone wou–

***

You can’t finish that thought because you are now underneath a bus with a broken sternum. I won’t go into the gory details but it’s safe to say you aren’t going to make it. You should have paid more attention to the crossing signal and the bus full of tourists and not as much attention to your phone.

Why did I tell you this sad story out of left field? Not because it is remotely likely that it happens, my readership is too smart to forget the cardinal rule to look both ways before you cross. Nor do I in any way want it to happen. I want everyone who reads this (and even those who don’t) to have wonderful and fulfilling lives. The point is simply to get across that, while keeping an eye on the future, never forget that you live in the present.

Over Winter Break, I wrestled back and forth with putting up a post mortem of last semester and some sort of explanation of why it was so hard for me. Despite many drafts and almost-postings, I decided against it for many reasons. 1) I couldn’t make it sound not preachy which 2) no one wants to read. 3) I don’t know how much it would resonate in people whose lives aren’t mine so i didn’t know how helpful it would be. And, 4) to be honest, even in the era of blogs and 24-hour news stations, I’d like to think there are at least some things we can keep private. (See, I wasn’t kidding about the numbered lists.) However, there is one take-away from the experience I’d like to share.

You never know what is going to happen tomorrow. You could be hit by a bus for all we know and what then? No one will eulogize at your funeral about how many cases you read or how truly you internalized res judicata. However, they will remember how you made time for people, how you laughed, and how you cried. There are no transcripts or performance evaluations on headstones.

I made a decent amount of New Years resolutions this year, for the first time in my life. Some I will keep in pectore. However, one that I will reveal and will hold myself accountable to is to try and not let the little things bother me this semester. There is a lot of work to do and a lot of pages to read. However, I don’t need to know every word or every term in my casebooks. Rather, I would rather focus this term on meeting new people, discovering new neighborhoods with friends, and building on the relationships I already have. We’ll see what happens when grades are released but right now I’m feeling a sort of blissful fatalism that everything, in the end, will be ok because, if its not, I only have myself to blame. Focus on what’s truly important in life and the rest will come.

I hope that this is enough to ensure that this semester is not a repeat of last. As class starts tomorrow, we shall see very soon. Stay tuned, I suppose!

As a reward for reading this REALLY long post, I wanted to share a song which came to mind when I was writing the part just above. It’s a song called “Would You Be Impressed” by an odd little band called Streetlight Manifesto. If you listen to the words, the song should be very depressing. The person speaking in the song has an incurable disease and is talking about accepting this fact. However, its probably one of the more up-tempo and musically upbeat songs I’ve posted thus far. In fact, with the trumpets it sounds almost like a fun party song if you don’t listen to the words. I think it makes in its own weirdly silly way a powerful statement about living for today and focusing on what is truly important in life. I hope y’all enjoy it as I do!

Checking In

So, I’m really sorry that it has been so long since I’ve posted but it seems that my personal happiness is inversely proportional to how happy I am and it has been a pretty good few weeks. This term has been much better than the last for me. I’ve spent more time with friends and I just generally have more things figured out.

I don’t really have anything that profound to say. I just wanted to let everyone know that this blog is not dead; it is just sleeping. It will be back as the winter continues, I’m sure. I just hope everyone had a great New Years and is gearing up for what I hope is a much better year!

As compensation for my lack of anything to say, I’m posting a poem for everyone to chew on for a few days. The poem is by a contemporary poet named Dana Gioia and is called “The Litany.” If he happens to stumble across this, I hope he does not mind me posting. All the way back in seventh grade, I had to learn a poem to give at our local speech meet. This is the poem I picked. It had such a profound impact on me and my own writing, I still remember most of it by heart. It is a tour de force on the emotion of experience, a poignant piece on everything yet nothing at all. As the author says on his website, “A reader will either understand The Litany intuitively or not at all.” Enjoy.

Litany
-Dana Gioia

This is a litany of lost things,
a canon of possessions dispossessed,
a photograph, an old address, a key.
It is a list of words to memorize
or to forget–of amo, amas, amat,
the conjugations of a dead tongue
in which the final sentence has been spoken.

This is the liturgy of rain,
falling on mountain, field, and ocean–
indifferent, anonymous, complete–
of water infinitesimally slow,
sifting through rock, pooling in darkness,
gathering in springs, then rising without our agency,
only to dissolve in mist or cloud or dew.

This is a prayer to unbelief,
to candles guttering and darkness undivided,
to incense drifting into emptiness.
It is the smile of a stone Madonna
and the silent fury of the consecrated wine,
a benediction on the death of a young god,
brave and beautiful, rotting on a tree.

This is a litany to earth and ashes,
to the dust of roads and vacant rooms,
to the fine silt circling in a shaft of sun,
settling indifferently on books and beds.
This is a prayer to praise what we become,
“Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.”
Savor its taste–the bitterness of earth and ashes.

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished,
for you, my love, my loss, my lesion,
a rosary of words to count out time’s
illusions, all the minutes, hours, days
the calendar compounds as if the past
existed somewhere–like an inheritance
still waiting to be claimed.

Until at last it is our litany, mon vieux,
my reader, my voyeur, as if the mist
steaming from the gorge, this pure paradox,
the shattered river rising as it falls–
splintering the light, swirling it skyward,
neither transparent nor opaque but luminous,
even as it vanishes–were not our life.

Bye Bye ’09!

I hope everyone out there who reads this had a good holiday and is looking forward to 2010 as I am. I have been wanting to write a final 2009 post for a few days now and couldn’t think of a good way to wrap things up. Finally, my friend Ben sent me the following video and I realized its the perfect way to say goodbye to this year. It is a mashup (which, for those of you who don’t know, consists of taking a series of songs and mixing them together in bits and pieces to make one new song) of the top 25 Billboard hits of 2009. I’m usually not a fan of these things, but this one’s pretty cool.

Ladies and Gentlemen, for one last time in concert, I bring to you the hits of 2009.

Alright, I hope everyone has a safe night tomorrow and see y’all on the other side!

It’s That Time of Year…

It is 4:30am and before I finish packing and head off to the airport, I just wanted to wish everyone who is not at their holiday destination (like me) safe travels and, in case I don’t post until then, a wonderful holiday season!

I’ve included three of my favorite songs of the season that aren’t part of the standard canon of “Frosty the Snowman” et. al. Without further ado, I bring you Peggy Lee, the Carpenters, and Kathy Mattea.

“Love is all; love is new. Love is all; love is you.”

Try something for me.

Listen to the song in the posted video while reading the poem below. The song is the Across the Universe (yes, I listen to it a lot) cover of “Because” and it was on my iTunes while I was doing some poetry reading and I happened to read the following poem for the probably dozenth time, as it is one of my favorite poems. The poem is “God’s Grandeur” by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. I can’t explain it, but the two fit together in a really cool way. Let me know if you kind of feel the same thing.

GOD’S GRANDEUR

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

I’m Ticking Like a Time Bomb…

Hey everyone,

Sorry for the lack of real, substantive updates recently. I promise, they will be back once finals are over on Thursday. In the mean time, I wanted everyone to hear this song (surprise….). I first heard it last year on the season finale of the show “Burn Notice” and have loved it ever since. It’s called “Time Bomb” by an artist names Jessie Greene. She has an amazing voice but not one of those stereotypical “good voices;” her voice has something darker to it that I was immediately drawn to. Also, this song would make a phenomenal tango. (I SO wish I weren’t so rusty on tango! That is one of my New Year’s Resolutions: brush up on dancing. I’ve gotten rusty over the past few months.) The video itself is annoying (it’s just a picture of the main actor panning up and down) so I would recommend not even watching the video as you listen but it was the video with the best quality sound. Enjoy!

Study Break Post #4

Three things:

1) Here is a link to guy in my section here at HLS who was featured in the Boston Globe style section this past weekend. Yes, he usually does dress this snappy. I wonder what awesome thing I could do to get in the newspaper…

2) It’s amazing what you discover when you pay attention. I have a CD by this UK band called Radiohead which has two songs I really like that happen to occur in the first half. While I’ve obviously listened to the whole album, I never paid attention to the second half until today. There is a great song at the very end of the album I’d never heard! I posted the music video below. Different, yes, but it is haunting.

3) I’m really glad everyone I talked to (especially my family) liked the Dream Theater song. While I am pleased because it is a very good song, I’m bemused by the fact that so many of my family members liked Dream Theater. Indeed, the song right before “The Answer Lies Within” called “The Root of All Evil” is much more their quintessential sound and a sound that is very different from “The Answer Lies Within.” For comparison’s sake, I’ve included it below as well. Just to warn you, the volume picks up pretty quickly in the first few minutes so be prepared.

I doubt this one will be to as many people’s tastes so, while I love it, I don’t blame you if you don’t get through it. However, while you may not believe me, this song is also a prayer of sorts (while being a much more earthy one). If you pay attention to the words, the song is about someone who acknowledges his many faults as a person and, despite this, wants to overcome them and improve his life. Indeed, one of the recurring refrains is one of my favorite short verses to recite when things get hard in my life.

“Take all of me, the desires that keep burning deep inside.
Cast them all away and help to give me strength to face another day.
I am ready; help me be what I can be.”

See? Beautiful, isn’t it? And you didn’t believe me.

The entire album actually is about the cyclic nature of life. (The album is called Octavarium and an octave is something that has a special cyclic quality in music.) Each song is about a different aspect of human life, from mental pressure/illness to dysfunctional relationships to despair and hope. The whole thing ends with an epic over 21 minute song (also called “Octavarium”) which textually and thematically sums up a lot of the rhetorical loose ends in the album, concluding with a “movement” (for lack of a better term) which has a textual and musical snippet from each of the other seven songs moving up the musical scale. (There are thus eight songs total on the album and an octave as many of you know has eight notes.) Finally, the last song ends with the same quiet, low pitched piano chord that “The Root of All Evil” starts with above, thus musically completing the full circle. There are more cool things to this song and the album in general, but I think I’ve wearied you all enough with my love of thematic albums and musical nerdiness in general. (See why I don’t buy single songs that often, Mom? Concepts of albums are important!) If you’d like to read more about the song “Octavarium,” you can do so here.

Needless to say, it’s a really cool album from a pretty cool band overall. If you can stomach the metal, I highly recommend it.

PS: As someone who was taking a timed and word-limited exam all day, it feels kind of odd being able to type as much as I want and not having to look at a word count.

The Answer Lies Within

Dream Theater is one of my often-neglected but always satisfying bands. I was shuffling through my iPod today and stumbled across this song. I believe it says it all.